Lawsuit against wind energy project near Steens Mountain pits green groups against green project (3 May 2012)
BURNS -- In a green vs. green federal lawsuit, two environmental groups are challenging what they call an "industrial-scale" wind project on the north end of ruggedly beautiful Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon.

"Of all the places in Oregon's high desert, this is perhaps the worst place for wind development," said Brent Fenty, executive director of the 1,200-member Oregon Natural Desert Association based in Bend.

His group has mapped out numerous areas on eastern Oregon's high desert where wind development could occur without the negative social and environmental consequences of the Steens Mountain site, Fenty said.

Bob Sallinger, conservation director for Portland Audubon, concedes going against the project in court puts his group in a new and uncomfortable role.

Portland Audubon supports "responsible renewable energy development, but this is the antithesis," he said. "If you can go into Steens Mountain, what is next? Mount Hood? Crater Lake?" [Read more...]



TransCanada expected to reapply for Keystone pipeline permit as soon as Friday (3 May 2012)
The Canadian firm behind the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will reapply as early as Friday for a federal permit to ship carbon-intense crude oil from Alberta to the United States, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

In January, the Obama administration denied a permit for TransCanada, the firm hoping to build the project, on the grounds that a congressionally-mandated deadline of Feb. 21 did not give officials enough time to evaluate the pipeline's impact. Since then TransCanada has said it would proceed with plans to construct the segment running from Cushing, Okla., to Port Arthur, Texas, and unveiled a new route for in Nebraska.

President Obama, environmentalists and many Nebraskans--including the state's Republican governor Dave Heineman--had raised concerns that the project's original Nebraska route could imperil the ecologically-sensitive Sandhills region, as well as the Ogallala aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the state's residents.

The move will revive one of the year's most contentious political issues--which has divided the Democratic base between environmentalists and some unions, and has unified Republicans in support of what they view as a critical source of energy supply for the U.S.--just months before the November elections. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Actually, the pipeline providing a "critical source of energy supply for the U.S." is a complete lie. The pipeline will carry the oil to a warm water port, where it'll most likely be shipped to Asia. Pipelines already exist to carry tarsands oil into the United States, just not to a place where it's easily shipped abroad.



Life-saving defibrillators can fail unexpectedly (3 May 2012)
Automated external defibrillators can save a life after cardiac arrest, but documents obtained by CBC News show there have been hundreds of cases of the devices failing, with sometimes deadly results.

During the past five years, there have been 562 reports to Health Canada of defibrillators failing when a patient was involved.

Nine patients died when a defibrillator did not work, the documents show.

In 102 cases, the devices wouldn't power on or turned off unexpectedly. [Read more...]



Boeing shows radical design for 737 MAX winglets (3 May 2012)
Boeing gave a new twist Wednesday to its design for the forthcoming 737 MAX jet: a raked, "dual feather" winglet it says will provide an extra 1.5 percent gain in fuel efficiency.

That's on top of the 10 to 12 percent fuel-burn improvement over the current 737 that Boeing already has claimed for the MAX with new engines and small aerodynamic improvements.

Renderings provided by Boeing show the wingtip swept slightly backward and with a tip that splits in two, one longer end pointing up and the other shorter one down.

In a conference call with journalists, Michael Teal, chief project engineer for the 737 MAX, called the concept "the most advanced wingtip technology in the single-aisle market." [Read more...]



The Scream sells for record $120m at auction (3 May 2012)
This version is the only one whose frame was hand-painted by the artist to include his poem explaining the work's inspiration. Munch described himself "shivering with anxiety" and feeling "the great scream in nature".

It was sold by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, whose father was a friend and patron of the artist. Proceeds of the sale will fund a new museum, art centre and hotel in Hvitsten, Norway, where Olsen's father and Munch were neighbours.

"It is a unique chance for someone to acquire this version. It is the crown jewel of the four but you really need a national budget to buy it. And not the budget of a small country either," said Winter.

The Scream will join a select group of works that have sold for more than $100m, including Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, which sold in 2010 for $106.5m. [Read more...]



Major GOP donor arrested in $100 million veteran charity scam (2 May 2012)
The U.S. Marshal Service announced Tuesday that it had captured one of America's Most Wanted fugitives who is accused of creating a fake charity for Navy veterans that funneled some of the $100 million collected to Republican candidates.

Between the early 2000s and 2010, a man using the alias "Bobby Thompson" collected millions from unsuspecting donors for the charity U.S. Navy Veterans Association (USNVA), which claimed to provide support for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Officials believe that very little, if any, of the money was ever used as intended, according to the U.S. Marshal Service.

To help legitimize his charity, Thompson allegedly donated part of the ill-gotten funds to Republican candidates like former President George W. Bush, former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner.

Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli reportedly personally pleaded with Thompson for donations and received $55,000 for his effort, making Thompson Cuccinelli's second-largest donor. Cuccinelli was eventually forced to turn over the tainted money to veterans support groups. [Read more...]



Report: Virginia roads are busier, but expansion lags (3 May 2012)
Virginia ranks next-to-last in the country for percentage of state transportation money used to build new highways.

Oh, and we're driving a lot more, even though construction of more roads has not kept pace.

These and other numbers were revealed in a report Wednesday by the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization.

Virginia ranks behind only California for new construction, spending about 30 percent of available funding on new roads while the bulk of the money goes toward maintaining what's already in place. Louisiana is No. 1. [Read more...]



China steel mills too big to fail - or succeed (3 May 2012)
(Reuters) - In a ramshackle township in northwest China's Shaanxi province, red Communist Party banners call on a nearby steel mill's workers to seek "progress" and avoid making "backward steps".

The slogans demonstrate the hybrid nature of China's floundering steel sector, which as it tries to serve the twin masters of the state and the market has seen margins plummet and racked up a mountain of debt.

Beijing's attempts to tackle the problems by forcing lumbering state-owned mills to consolidate or push up the value chain look likely to aggravate rather than solve the problems of a sector that accounts for 3-4 percent of China's GDP.

An obvious solution - to allow the worst performers to go out of business - seems unlikely in an industry identified by Chairman Mao Zedong nearly half a decade ago as a key symbol of the country's economic and political prowess. [Read more...]



Lost parakeet tells Tokyo police its address (3 May 2012)
A lost pet parakeet has been returned safely to its owner in the Japanese capital Tokyo after it told the police its home address.

The bird's owner, a 64-year-old woman, said she taught the address to her pet after she bought him two years ago.

She had lost another parakeet previously and wanted to ensure that did not happen again, police said.

The male bird was handed to local authorities on Sunday, and took two days to tell the police its address. [Read more...]



Just before the recall primaries, Walker hits the poor again (2 May 2012)
The Walker Administration is moving forward with a revamp of BadgerCare - the state's healthcare program for the poor. The changes could leave 17,000 adults without insurance. Late Friday, the federal government notified Gov. Walker that he could enact new rules, if he deems them necessary to keep the program viable. As Erin Toner reports, opponents are asking state leaders to take another look at ways to cut costs, without cutting enrollment.

Initially, Gov. Walker sought sweeping cuts in state health programs that would have affected coverage for nearly 65,000 people, including children. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services struck down the plan, but last week told Wisconsin it could proceed with some changes.

State Health Services Secretary Dennis Smith was not available for comment Tuesday. His spokesperson, Stephanie Smiley, said Wisconsin must cut costs to keep its Medicaid program solvent.

"The Department of Health Services faced a budgetary shortfall of approximately $1.8 billion for this biennial budget. And most of that shortfall could be attributed to the loss of federal funding, and we had projected that there would be a decline in enrollment in Medicaid, but that projection had been proven to be unrealistic," Smiley says. [Read more...]



As Students Revolt over Cutbacks and Debt, NYC Occupy Stages May Day "Free University" for the 99% (2 May 2012) [DN]
AMIN HUSAIN: My name is Amin Husain, and I'm with the direct action working group. And I'm on Occupy Theory, too, and Tidal, the magazine that gets issued, and other stuff. But I'm here because, you know, it's a free university. I think this movement is all about building community and sharing and coming up with alternatives to the economic system that's so pervasive in our lives in everything that we do. These are cracks in capitalism, where we can actually give and take on our terms. And it's in a way where we--where people generally could be loving and sharing. And you don't have to, you know--if you don't have a cent, and you're at the store, you feel like you can't buy stuff. Here you can get the type of education that costs thousands and thousands of dollars. And I think that exposes the valuation thing in our society. Everything is commodified. Education, knowledge is commodified. And I love the fact that this is free and not that way, and people can learn from each other on a horizontal level.

RUTHIE WILSON GILMORE: My name is Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. I'm a professor at the Grad Center at CUNY. I'm also the co-founder of a number of prison abolitionist organizations, most famously, I guess, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.

MIKE BURKE: And why are you out today here on May Day?

RUTHIE WILSON GILMORE: Well, I support the strike, power to the people. And also, I brought my class down here, my grad seminar, to conduct our discussion today. We're studying "Policed," with a capital P, the condition of being policed, the history of policing in the modern world, its relationship to things like slavery, inequality, migration, jobs, labor, you name it. [Read more...]



Chomsky: U.S. and Europe 'committing suicide in different ways' (2 May 2012)
In an interview with GritTV's Laura Flanders, author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky discussed the potentially bleak future facing both the United States and the European Union. Both, he said, are facing historic crises and are going about trying to resolve them in exactly the wrong ways.

According to Chomsky, we are currently living in a period of "pretty close to global stagnation" but that the world's great powers are reacting to the lack of growth in exactly the wrong manner. "The United States and Europe are committing suicide in different ways, but both doing it."

He called European austerity measures "a disaster" and indicated that he expects them to fail, the question being more about how long it will take. The spending cuts and slashing of benefits to workers are ultimately part of a plan designed to dismantle the social contract, he said, although some governmental leaders are more willing than others to call it that.

The U.S., Chomsky believes, has failed in that our electoral system has been "shredded" by the introduction of private money. Our nation has shipped production and manufacturing offshore and concentrated on the "financialization" of our economy. The social safety net has essentially been replaced by the prison system, he said, with the U.S. "getting rid of the superfluous population through incarceration." [Read more...]



Human genes engineered into experimental GMO rice being grown in Kansas (2 May 2012)
(NaturalNews) Unless the rice you buy is certified organic, or comes specifically from a farm that tests its rice crops for genetically modified (GM) traits, you could be eating rice tainted with actual human genes. The only known GMO with inbred human traits in cultivation today, a GM rice product made by biotechnology company Ventria Bioscience is currently being grown on 3,200 acres in Junction City, Kansas -- and possibly elsewhere -- and most people have no idea about it.

Since about 2006, Ventria has been quietly cultivating rice that has been genetically modified (GM) with genes from the human liver for the purpose of taking the artificial proteins produced by this "Frankenrice" and using them in pharmaceuticals. With approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Ventria has taken one of the most widely cultivated grain crops in the world today, and essentially turned it into a catalyst for producing new drugs.

Originally, the cultivation of this GM rice, which comes in three approved varieties (http://www.aphis.usda.gov/brs/biotech_ea_permits.html), was limited to the laboratory setting. But in 2007, Ventria decided to bring the rice outdoors. The company initially tried to plant the crops in Missouri, but met resistance from Anheuser-Busch and others, which threatened to boycott all rice from the state in the event that Ventria began planting its rice within state borders (http://todayyesterdayandtomorrow.wordpress.com).

So Ventria's GM rice eventually ended up in Kansas, where it is presumably still being grown for the purpose of manufacturing drugs on 3,200 acres in Junction City. And while this GM rice with added human traits has never been approved for human consumption, it is now being cultivated in open fields where the potential for unrestrained contamination and spread of its unwanted, dangerous GM traits is virtually a given. [Read more...]



Dolphins that help humans to catch fish form tighter social networks (2 May 2012)
In the coastal waters of Laguna, Brazil, a shoal of mullet is in serious trouble. Two of the most intelligent species on the planet -- humans and bottlenose dolphins -- are conspiring to kill them. The dolphins drive the mullet towards the fishermen, who stand waist-deep in water holding nets. The humans cannot see the fish through the turbid water. They must wait for their accomplices.

As the fish approach, the dolphins signal to the humans by rolling at the surface, or slapping the water with their heads or tails. The nets are cast, and the mullet are snared. Some manage to escape, but in breaking formation, they are easy prey for the dolphins.

http://youtu.be/sVinWYmu5lQ

According to town records, this alliance began in 1847, and involves at least three generations of both humans and dolphins. Today, there are around 55 dolphins in the neighbourhood, and around 45 per cent of them interact with the fishermen.

Now, Fabio Daura-Jorge from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil studied Laguna's dolphins to learn how their unusual collaboration has shaped their social networks. He spent two years taking photographs of the local dolphins, and noting where they travelled and who they were associated with. As is typical for bottlenose dolphins, the Laguna individuals formed a 'fission-fusion' society -- they all belonged to the same large group, but they had specific 'friends' whom they would spend more time with. [Read more...]



Following controversy, UW researcher's findings on bird flu virus published (2 May 2012)
Four mutations in a bird flu virus enabled the virus to spread among ferrets in a lab, UW-Madison researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The study, which identifies the mutations, was published after months of international controversy that delayed public release of the findings.

Critics said the potentially deadly altered virus could be accidentally released from the lab or replicated by terrorists. Kawaoka and his supporters said the study shows how H5N1 bird flu, frequently fatal in people but rarely spread among them, could cause a human pandemic -- or massive outbreak of disease.

Identifying mutations that could make the virus more transmissible in people should help health authorities better monitor bird flu and prepare drugs and vaccines, Kawaoka said. The H5N1 virus has been circulating in Asia and the Middle East since 2003. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: The Guardian also mentioned swine flu on its article about the study.



Slackers' brains 'are wired to under-achieve' (2 May 2012)
People prepared to work hard for rewards had more of the nerve signalling chemical dopamine in two brain regions called the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Both are known to play an important role in behaviour-changing reward sensations and motivation.

But ''slackers'', who were less willing to work hard for reward, had higher dopamine levels in the anterior insula. This is a brain region involved in emotion and risk perception.

Dopamine is a ''neurotransmitter'' that helps nerves ''talk'' to each other by sending chemical signals across connection points called synapses.

Psychologist Michael Treadway, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, US, who co-led the research, said: ''Past studies in rats have shown that dopamine is crucial for reward motivation. But this study provides new information about how dopamine determines individual differences in the behaviour of human reward-seekers.'' [Read more...]



Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to take part in scheme to make research freely available online (2 May 2012)
British Government initiative to make all taxpayer-funded research in Britain freely available online.

The scheme is set to be announced in a speech to the Publishers Association today by universities and science minister David Willetts.

It comes in the wake of a growing campaign for open access in academic publishing, as cash-strapped universities face millions of pounds' costs each year to subscribe to research journals.

Mr Willetts wrote in a newspaper: "Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Maybe that'll help 'em find the next grad student's paper to plagiarize...



Israel closes inquiry into Palestinian family killed during Gaza war (2 May 2012)
The Israeli military has closed its file on the killing of 21 members of a Palestinian family during the Gaza war in 2009, saying there were no grounds for criminal or disciplinary action against those responsible for the shelling of the house in which civilians were sheltering.

"None of the persons involved ... acted negligently in a manner giving rise to criminal responsibility," concluded the military advocate general following an internal investigation. The decisions of the brigade commander "did not deviate from the boundaries of discretion that a 'reasonable military commander' operating in similar circumstances possesses".

The investigation "comprehensively refuted" claims that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had intentionally targeted civilians or had acted in a reckless manner, it said.

Twenty-one members of the extended Samouni family were killed on 5 January 2009, nine days after Israel's onslaught on Gaza began. About 100 members of the family, including women, children, babies and the elderly, had been ordered by the IDF to crowd into a house amid fierce fighting. [Read more...]



Shale causes rise in waste gas pollution (2 May 2012)
(Reuters) - The shale energy boom is fuelling a rise in the burning of waste gas after years of decline, a World Bank source told Reuters ahead of the release of new data, giving environmentalists more ammunition against the industry.

Global gas flaring crept up by 4.5 percent in 2011, the first rise since 2008 and equivalent to the annual gas use of Denmark, preliminary data from the World Bank shows.

The increase is mostly due to the rise in shale oil exploration in North Dakota, propelling the United States into the top 10 gas flaring countries along with Russia, Nigeria and Iraq.

The preliminary data - which will be released in detail later in May - shows that global gas flaring crept up to around 140 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2011, up from 134 bcm the previous year.

Flaring is used to eliminate gas at mineral exploration sites, and is released via pressure relief valves to ease the strain on equipment. [Read more...]



Oil Spill Reported in the Great Bear Rainforest, BC (2 May 2012)
HARTLEY BAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA, May 02, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- The Gitga'at Nation of Hartley Bay is reporting an oil spill, between two and five miles long and 200 feet wide inside the Grenville Channel, not far from the proposed tanker route for the Enbridge Gateway pipeline. The spill was spotted by a commercial pilot and reported to the Gitga'at Nation and the Canadian Coast Guard yesterday evening.

A Coast Guard landing craft from Prince Rupert is on its way to the spill, and expected to arrive by 12pm. The Gitga'at are sending their own Guardians to take samples and have chartered a plane to take aerial photos of the spill.

"If this spill is as big as the pilots are reporting, then we're looking at serious environmental impacts, including threats to our traditional shellfish harvesting areas," says Arnold Clifton, Chief Councillor of the Gitga'at Nation. "We need an immediate and full clean-up response from the federal government ASAP."

Heavy oil, known as "bunker c" is thought to be upwelling from the USAT Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, a U.S. army transport ship that sank in 1946 with 700 tonnes of bunker fuel on board. The Canadian government has been saying it would remove the oil and munitions from the ship since 2006, but with no results. [Read more...]



80,000 gal. oil spill cleanup continues in Louisiana (2 May 2012)
TORBERT, LA (WAFB) - Exxon Mobil Corp. says it is cleaning up about 80,000 gallons of oil that spilled from a pipeline in rural Louisiana on April 28, 2012.

The company says the pipeline was shut down Saturday night after a loss of pressure. The spilled oil was discovered on Sunday near Torbert in Pointe Coupee Parish, northwest of Baton Rouge.

Officials with Exxon Mobil say responders are making significant progress as cleanup operations continue.

No injuries were reported. The company doesn't yet know what caused the pipeline to break.

Exxon Mobil says vacuum trucks are cleaning up the site, and air is being monitored for quality. For the purposes of the response, the area surrounding the site of the spill has been organized into three zones. They are assessing the data on a daily basis and sending responders where they can safely recover oil. [Read more...]



Fukushima still spewing massive radiation plumes; America in 'huge trouble,' says nuclear expert (2 May 2012)
(NaturalNews) During a recent Congressional delegation trip to Japan, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden witnessed with his own eyes the horrific aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which we have heard very little about from the media in recent months. The damage situation was apparently so severe, according to his account, that he has now written a letter to Ichiro Fujisaki, Ambassador of Japan, petitioning for more to be done, and offering any additional support and assistance that might help contain and resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

The letter, which many experts see as the ominous writing on the wall for the grave severity of the circumstances, offers a disturbing glimpse into what is really going on across the Pacific Ocean that the mainstream media is apparently ignoring. While referencing the fact that all four of the affected reactors are still "badly damaged," Sen. Wyden seems to hint in his letter that Reactor 4, which has reportedly been on the verge of collapse for many months now, could be nearing catastrophic implosion.

Imminent collapse of Reactor 4 could create a mass extinction event of both humans and animals
According to Christina Consolo, an award-winning biomedical photographer and host of Nuked Radio, Reactor 4 has remained in such bad shape that even a very small earthquake could quickly level the building, sending the fuel from more than 1,500 unused fuel rods into the environment. And with Reactor 4 still filled with the highest levels of radioactive MOX and other fuels, the consequences of this potential collapse could be far worse than anything that has happened thus far as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.

"[S]itting at the top of [Reactor 4], in a pool that is cracked, leaking, and precarious even without an earthquake, are 1,565 fuel rods (give or take a few), some of them 'fresh fuel' that was ready to go into the reactor on the morning of March 11 when the earthquake and tsunami hit," writes Consolo. "If they are MOX fuel, containing six percent plutonium, one fuel rod has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people." [Read more...]



BP Oil Spill Judge Tentatively Approves $7.8 Billion Pact (2 May 2012)
BP Plc (BP/) and lawyers suing the company over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill won preliminary approval of their proposed settlement from the federal judge in New Orleans overseeing the litigation.

BP in March agreed to pay an estimated $7.8 billion to resolve most private plaintiffs' claims for economic loss, property damage and spill and cleanup-related injuries. The settlement establishes two separate classes, one for economic loss and the other for any physical injuries related to the spill or the cleanup.

The proposed settlement is "fair, reasonable, adequate, entered in good faith, free of collusion, and within the range of possible judicial approval," U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier said in granting preliminary approval of the agreement today.

Barbier set a fairness hearing where he will consider final settlement approval for Nov. 8. He didn't act on a BP request to postpone any trial on liability for the incident until after the fairness hearing. [Read more...]



Indictment returned in NYC computer hacking case (2 May 2012)
The name of a Chicago man already charged in a computer hacking case aimed at taking out key players in the worldwide group Anonymous was added to an indictment Wednesday, boosting the accusations against him by including him in much of the wider conspiracy to hack into corporations and government agencies worldwide.

Jeremy Hammond, 27, joined four other defendants named in the indictment in federal court in Manhattan in a prosecution revealed in March. Hammond is being held at a lower Manhattan lockup after initially appearing in a Chicago court.

Authorities said the prosecution marks the first time core members of the loosely organized worldwide hacking group Anonymous have been identified and charged in the U.S.

Prosecutors said the defendants and others hacked into companies and government agencies worldwide, including the U.S. Senate. They say they also stole confidential information, defaced websites and temporarily put some victims out of business. Authorities say their crimes affected more than 1 million people. [Read more...]



"No Work, No Shopping, Occupy Everywhere": May Day Special on OWS, Immigration, Labor Protests (1 May 2012) [DN]
AMY GOODMAN: Marina Sitrin, the last decade has been major on this day.

MARINA SITRIN: It has been the kind of--what we see now happening in New York today, you can actually go back for the last decade and see the roots of it. But I do want to say just--not just "Happy May Day," but that today is already a success--I mean, that people all over the country are talking about May Day as our day, whether you want to call it workers' holiday or immigrant rights or the 99 percent, but that it's already part of our vocabulary again, that we've taken this really important holiday.

But going back to what Teresa was saying, in 2006 millions of the immigrant workers organizing in the streets throughout the entire country, demanding and then continuing to organize for rights--and then that also goes back even earlier in Europe, and coming out of the globalization movement, the kind of post-Seattle-1999 movements where people began to organize Euro May Day. I mean, Euro May Day was a linking of immigrant rights with precarious workers. So, as more and more jobs are not unionized, and workers face uneven, precarious situations of work, people started to talk about precarious work and organizing workers not just in the formal, traditional trade unions. And then also injecting some of what we saw in the global justice movement, of theater and play as a part of protests. So now what we're seeing planned for today is a combination of the immigrant rights movement working with the traditional labor movement, which is a part of May Day today--and, in fact, in some places there are strikes organized around the country called by unions--and then there are radical caucuses of unions that are participating, and then Occupy organizing direct actions and using theater. So we kind of see the play and the immigrant rights and precarious labor kind of redefining what May Day is, particularly over these last 10 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, you'll be speaking today on the issue of war?

CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, I mean, I look at what's happened since September 17th, when Zuccotti Park was taken, as the launching of a process that's probably quite long. I think of where we're headed as a revolution. And all revolutions begin long before their ostensible date. The stamp Act of 1765 was sort of the dress rehearsal for the uprising against the British a decade later. The uprising in 1905 in Russia was the precursor, sort of created the system by which eventually the czar would be overthrown. And I think that it's unfair to sort of pin this movement on a particular day or a particular action. I think it's begun. I think it's going forward. I think it could be years in the process. But I think that the power elite, the oligarchic corporate class, is as corrupt, as fragile, and as decayed as bankrupt regimes in the past. 1789 in France was ungovernable. You know, the elite had retreated into Versailles as our elites have retreated into their gated compounds, utterly out of touch with the suffering of the ordinary American. And so, I think that what's today is momentous, not because of the numbers they may get or not get, but because this isn't going away. [Read more...]



May Day Occupy protests - live coverage (1 May 2012)
1.14pm: A quick overview of the Occupy protests in NYC at the moment. Observers report large crowds of protesters, numbering in the hundreds, on Fifth Ave. in Midtown and on Houston Street.

A large number of protesters remains in Bryant Park. The protesters also have a permit to gather at 4pm in Union Square, which may bring together the largest crowd of the day as rallies uptown and downtown converge. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Click on the original article's link for the latest updates.



LAPD will be out in force during May Day protests (1 May 2012)
The Los Angeles Police Department will be out in force Tuesday as four May Day marches are planned for downtown L.A., with more around the area.

Cmdr. Andy Smith said hundreds of officers have been deployed to maintain the peace during the marches, which will jam traffic in downtown for much of the day.

He said he didn't expect problems and described the police presence as heavy but comparable with some previous events.

The main May Day march will move along Broadway, but many other streets will be affected, officials said. [Read more...]



Protesters trash Mission District businesses, cars (1 May 2012)
(05-01) 06:46 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Broken glass littered several streets in San Francisco's Mission District after protesters vandalized cars and buildings Monday night, including a police station.

The vandals were in a group that marched from Dolores Park shortly after 9 p.m., following a rally in advance of Tuesday's planned Occupy general strike, police said. Traveling down 18th Street and onto Valencia Street, the black-clad, masked protesters smashed windows with crowbars and signs, threw paint on buildings and spray-painted anarchy symbols on the hoods of parked cars.

"All I heard was, 'bang, bang, bang,' and some dude had the valet sign, trying to break our window," said Adam Koskoff, manager of the Locanda restaurant on Valencia. "I didn't even see the crowd, and I ran outside and got egged."

The vandals threw paint and eggs and smashed windows at more than 30 businesses, including Tartine Bakery at 18th and Guerrero streets and clothing store Weston Wear on Valencia. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: They do like throwing eggs in San Francisco. My car caught an egg during a drive through the city in the 90s, and for no apparent reason. I didn't know anyone there, and they didn't know me -- they just wanted to throw an egg at my car for some reason.



Judge rejects immunity for Strauss-Kahn in civil suit (1 May 2012)
(Reuters) - A New York judge rejected former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn's claim of diplomatic immunity on Tuesday, ruling a lawsuit filed by the hotel maid who accused him of sexual assault can move forward.

Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon's decision ensures accuser Nafissatou Diallo can continue to press claims for monetary damages and prevents Strauss-Kahn from putting the May 14 incident fully behind him, even as he attempts to relaunch his career by giving speeches on the world conference circuit.

Diallo, a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan, accused Strauss-Kahn of forcing her to perform oral sex in his luxury suit. Strauss-Kahn has said the incident was consensual.

Prosecutors dropped the criminal case against Strauss-Kahn in August because they had concerns about Diallo's credibility as a witness. [Read more...]



Fewer Americans form households after recession, hampering economic recovery (30 April 2012)
It had been a long road, but when Sabrina Torres received her master's degree in 2010, she was sure it would eventually pay off in a good job that would allow her to afford an apartment.

She is still waiting. The American University graduate's financial struggles have prevented her from living on her own, making her part of a dramatic slowdown in household formation that is both a consequence of the economic downturn and a continued obstacle to overcoming it.

The recession reduced the rate at which Americans set up new homes or apartments by at least half. Although the number of new households has begun to recover over the past year, its growth rate continues to lag behind its historic pace, according to Census Bureau statistics.

More than one in five adults between ages 25 and 34 live with their parents or in other "multi-generational" living arrangements, the highest level since the 1950s, according to the Pew Research Center. [Read more...]



Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years (30 April 2012)
In the tech world, we've really had 3 generations:

Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 -- 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),

Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 -- 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),

and now Mobile (from 2010 -- present, including Instagram).

With each succeeding generation in tech, it seems the prior generation can't quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: If the author makes a good case, it's worth consideration, but I don't necessarily believe all of the predictions that I link to here.



Occupy May Day protesters sense chance to regain autumn momentum (30 April 2012)
About 80 Occupy Wall Street organisers are gathered in the stuffy basement of a lower Manhattan office building to discuss the final stages of the movement's most anticipated action this year.

On a pair of tables in the corner of the room sit stacks of Occupy literature -- magazines and newspapers produced by protesters -- as well as stickers, posters and fliers: all propaganda for May Day, a nationwide day of action calling on the public to abstain from work, school, shopping, banking and household chores.

Large strips of paper are tacked to the walls, listing tasks to be done, needs to be met, along with an hour-by-hour schedule of the events taking place on Tuesday. "College walkout", "picnic" and "wildcat march" are just some activities corresponding to times on the schedule. At the bottom of the lengthy page, in all capital letters, are the words: "SHIT HAS GOT TO GO".

The May 1 "general strike", the result of months of planning and coordination between groups across the US, is Occupy's big chance to regain the momentum lost when a combination of police crackdowns and the harsh winter weather shut down the protest at the end of last year. [Read more...]



Report: Laws needed to protect Great Lakes from oil spills such as 2010 release in Michigan (30 April 2012)
DETROIT - A report written in response to a massive oil spill from an Enbridge pipeline into a Michigan river concludes U.S. federal laws are inadequate to protect the Great Lakes basin from oil pollution and states should fill the gaps.

The report released Monday by the National Wildlife Federation and University of Michigan Law School finds there's no review of long-term risks related to oil-pipeline routing decisions. It says states have a "critical opportunity" to minimize impact before construction.

The authors say stronger rules are needed to prevent spills such as the July 2010 accident near Marshall that released more than 800,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek. Cleanup continues and the pipeline rupture's cause isn't known.

The pipeline is operated by Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) of Calgary. It runs from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ont. [Read more...]



Breakthrough wind turbine produces drinking water (30 April 2012)
What if your source of electricity also gave you clean drinking water?

That's the promise of new technology developed by the French engineering firm Eole Water, first conceived in the late 90s by a man who collected water from his air conditioner. He reasoned that if an air conditioner could help him accumulate water, so could other types of machines, so he set about merging the production of electricity and water.

Today, that dream is alive and well. Eole's turbines are currently undergoing rigorous tests in Abu Dhabi following months of development and fine tuning in France. The company says that each turbine is capable of producing up to 1,000 liters of clean drinking water per day, or about 62 per hour, simply by filtering moisture out of the air and funneling it to a storage tank below.

Thibault Janin, Eole's director of marketing, told CNN reporter Eoghan Macguire that the turbines can cost up to $790,000, and that the company is targeting poor, water-starved regions like Africa, South America and Indonesia first. [Read more...]



This time-lapse video of Yosemite is beyond beautiful (30 April 2012)
Stars stream across the night sky, shadows fall across the mountains, and water waves endlessly through lakes. It's a wonderful reminder of how awesome -- in the proper sense of the word -- the world is and what's out there that's worth protecting. [Read more...]



RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter (30 April 2012)
Los Angeles (CNN) -- As a federal court prepares to rule on a challenge to Sirhan Sirhan's conviction in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, a long overlooked witness to the murder is telling her story: She heard two guns firing during the 1968 shooting and authorities altered her account of the crime.

Nina Rhodes-Hughes wants the world to know that, despite what history says, Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel.

"What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes said in an exclusive interview with CNN. "The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups."

Her voice at times becoming emotional, Rhodes-Hughes described for CNN various details of the assassination, her long frustration with the official reporting of her account and her reasons for speaking out: "I think to assist me in healing -- although you're never 100% healed from that. But more important to bring justice." [Read more...]



Barnes & Noble Surges After Microsoft Invests $300 Million (30 April 2012)
April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Barnes & Noble Inc. surged in New York after saying that Microsoft Corp. will invest $300 million in a new subsidiary that combines the bookseller's Nook digital reader and college businesses.

The shares almost doubled to $27.20 at 8:24 a.m. Barnes & Noble had declined 5.5 percent this year before today.

The investment will give Microsoft about 18 percent of the unit, which has yet to be named, New York-based Barnes & Noble said today in a statement. The bookseller will own the remainder of the business, which has a valuation of $1.7 billion.

Barnes & Noble is working to bolster its Nook unit to focus on the growing demand for digital books and compete with Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., whose Kindle device is the best- selling e-reader in the U.S. The venture will develop a Nook application for Windows 8, the newest version of Microsoft's operating system that's scheduled for release this year, expanding Barnes & Noble's digital bookstore to hundreds of millions of customers. [Read more...]



U.S. military's war with drugs: Drugs issued by military led to assaults, murders, doctors say (29 April 2012)
SEATTLE--U.S. Air Force pilot Patrick Burke's day started in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber near the Persian Gulf and proceeded across nine time zones as he ferried the aircraft home to South Dakota.

Every four hours during the 19-hour flight, Burke swallowed a tablet of Dexedrine, the prescribed amphetamine known as "go pills." After landing, he went out for dinner and drinks with a fellow crewman. They were driving back to Ellsworth Air Force Base when Burke began striking his friend about the head.

"Jack Bauer told me this was going to happen! You guys are trying to kidnap me!" he yelled, as if he were a character in the TV drama 24.

When the woman giving them a lift pulled the car over, Burke leapt on her and wrestled her to the ground.

"Me and my platoon are looking for terrorists," he told her before grabbing her keys, driving away and crashing into a guardrail. [Read more...]



Slaughter of rhinos at record high (29 April 2012)
Rhinos are being killed in such unprecedented numbers that there are realistic fears they could be wiped from the face of the planet within a generation. If this happens, it will be the first major extinction of an animal in the wild since the worldwide conservation movement began.

The bare statistics are horrifying. In South Africa, more rhinos are being slaughtered for their horns in a single week than were killed in a whole year a decade ago. And the death toll is fast accelerating. In 2007, a mere 13 were killed. In 2008, it was 83, and, a year later, 122. Last year it was 448, and this year, by 19 April, it was 181. That is equivalent to 600 a year in a country which is home to 93 per cent of all white rhinos. One expert thinks that at this rate the species could be wiped out by 2025. Others think it could take longer. Patrick Bergin, chief executive of African Wildlife Foundation, said: "If the poaching of rhino continues at current rates, we could see their extinction within our lifetime. The situation is absolutely at crisis levels."

This attrition is being driven by the astonishing street value for rhino horn, which fetches £40,000 a kilo, more even than gold. Chinese medicine and jewellery are the main markets, but, in recent years, widespread rumours in Vietnam that rhino horn can cure cancer has seen demand there rocket. As a result, the Javan rhino became extinct in that country in November, the last known animal being found dead with its horn hacked off.

There has also been a huge and sharp rise in elephants being killed for their ivory. Mozambique reports that in just one reserve the number of elephant carcasses found in 2011 is nearly 25 times greater than 10 years before. And the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic said that 2011 was by far the worst year for ivory seizures since the group's records began more than 20 years ago. The amount of ivory seized last year probably equates to some 2,500 dead elephants, according to Traffic. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: If the horns actually do help with cancer, I'd suspect that keratin and calcium supplements would help just as much -- and without the high cost of procuring those substances in the form of endangered animal tissues. Calcium is already known as somewhat effective against cancer, as calcium helps to fight the acidity that encourages cancer growth.



Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists (20 April 2012)
New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause. [Read more...]



Plastic garbage in oceans 'vastly' underestimated (27 April 2012)
For years scientists have been trying to figure out how much plastic trash may be adrift in the planet's oceans, but new research suggests their estimates may have drastically underestimated the problem.

Oceanographer Giora Proskurowski ventured into the North Atlantic with a group of researchers last year, and took water samples from the surface and from depths as far as 33 metres.

The results were unexpected.

"Almost every tow we did contained plastic regardless of the depth," Proskurowski said in a press release.

Their data, published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that tiny bits of plastic suspended across large tracts of the North Atlantic have "emerged as a major open ocean pollutant." [Read more...]



Storage wars: Google, Dropbox and Microsoft fight for your files (28 April 2012)
In the same way that people rarely change banks or e-mail accounts -- mainly because it is too much trouble -- we may soon see lock-in loyalty for the scurry of cloud storage services now appearing. That may be the idea: you deposit files and the storage provider hopes to interest you in its other services.

Google Drive, launched on Tuesday, is a long-awaited service from the company that stores all types of files in its cloud as well as copying them to all your devices. If you already use Google Docs for creating and editing documents in the cloud, the conversion to Drive is fairly painless. The Docs label is replaced in the top menu bar in Google by Drive, and all your files are stored under MyDrive.

Google also prompts you to install a program on your laptop or desktop PC. This creates a local Google Drive folder where sub-folders can be created and any type of file dragged in. They are automatically synced with the cloud and other devices. This is the approach used by the start-up Dropbox (see below). I tried dragging a photo on my desktop into the folder and saw it in MyDrive in my browser within seconds, either in full size or with other images in a new grid view. [Read more...]



Police who lie: For hollering at police, a man was beaten and Tasered (29 April 2012)
Judge Harris said two of the officers "lost recollection" of certain events that night "for their own convenience." He again used the words "pure fiction" to characterize Tallevi's testimony that he felt threatened by an object concealed in Parsons' hand.

After reviewing all of the evidence, Judge Harris found the officers had no reason to stop the Jeep. The judge also found Tallevi put a choke-hold on Parsons. Judge Harris found Woodfine used is Taser without justification and shocked Parsons after he was handcuffed.

"None of those officers was threatened by him, nor were any of them in any danger from him," Judge Harris wrote in his ruling. "It was in fact Mr. Parsons who was in danger from them."

Their "troubling and offensive" conduct, the judge said, should shock and sadden the community.

The court awarded Parsons and Ryckman $70,000 in damages.

None of the officers faced an internal disciplinary investigation into the assault, false arrest, false prosecution or courtroom conduct found by the civil court. The force said the officers underwent ethics re-training. [Read more...]



Researchers break record for deep-sea drill depth (29 April 2012)
A Japanese research institute says its deep-sea drilling probe has set a new record for depth, reaching 25,400ft -- almost five miles -- below the Pacific Ocean's surface.

The Chikyu, operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, was digging the seabed off Japan's north coast to take fault samples to study last year's earthquake and tsunami.

Maritime organisations say the US vessel Glomar Challenger set the previous record of 23,130ft below sea surface in the Mariana Trench in 1978. [Read more...]



Colombia's prison turned paradise (27 April 2012)
But before it was a wildlife mecca, this 24sqkm volcanic island served as a formidable fortress that housed Colombia's most violent criminals, with stone walls, barbed wire and prison guards acting as only the first line of defence. The 56km of rough, shark-infested waters and the venomous snakes for which the island is named usually put an end to any hope of escape.

Like the gorgons -- the demons in Greek mythology whose hair of venomous snakes turned witnesses to stone -- the serpents that slither on land and sea can be deadly (it is still forbidden to go anywhere on the island alone or after dark, and visitors are given gumboots to walk around). Still, the conditions in this zoo, where the humans were caged and the animals ran wild, were so miserable that there are stories of desperate prisoners seeking poisonous bites just to receive some tender nurse care and a short reprieve from the overcrowded cells and torture chambers.

The nurses, along with scuba divers who long ago discovered the island's world-class marine life, helped transform the penal colony into a national park by spreading word of its atrocious conditions.

Only 30 years after the prison's closing in 1982, verdant foliage twists itself around the crumbling ruins that have become one with the jungle. And since becoming a national park in 1985, wildlife enthusiasts have enjoyed greater access to the 147 species of birds, 100--plus species of insects and hundreds of species of terrestrial and marine fauna and flora. [Read more...]



U.S. anti-cocaine push embitters Peru chocolate makers (25 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Connoisseurs who take chocolate as seriously as sommeliers study wine are challenging the widespread use of an inferior cocoa pushed by the U.S. government in its war against drugs in Peru, considered by many to be the birthplace of cocoa.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, introduced the high-yielding but acidic tasting CCN-51 cocoa hybrid to Peru in 2002 to offer farmers an alternative to planting coca - the key ingredient in cocaine.

The program has had some success but chocolate makers are encouraging farmers to instead cultivate smaller amounts of rare, native cocoa that fetches higher prices from buyers who value complex and subtle flavors and judge chocolate by the personality of its cocoa, like the nose of a fine wine.

"I don't understand why USAID is here, in a country so rich in diversity, where everything is virgin. What need is there to introduce new varieties?" said Mariella Balbi, owner of the tiny firm Guanni Chocolates, which sells in California and in Lima.

She sells boxes of 12 dark chocolate truffles made from Peru's native white cocoa and filled with local ingredients like pisco brandy and Amazonian fruits for $40. [Read more...]



News from the Week of 22nd to 28th of April 2012

To effect change, should the 99% should go vegan? (27 April 2012)
"Fact: Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today," said Jamie Oliver in his 2010 "TedTalks" presentation. "Your child will live a life 10 years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them."

Is it child abuse? Oliver argues that it is, and that in addition to nourishing our children, we should also educate them on how and what to eat. His critics accuse him of overstepping and say he should pack up and go back to Britain. Who is he to tell us what's right for our children? "All I can say is: I care. I'm a father, and I love this country, and I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, I believe other people will follow."

Author Ruby Roth shares Oliver's spirit of activism, and she too has dealt with her fair share of backlash. Her new children's book, "Vegan Is Love," advocates for more than just a plant-based diet; it's a call to action to inspire young people into a vegan lifestyle at an early age. "In my near decade of research, it is absolutely clear to me that some of America's most insidious health problems -- from pharmaceutical addiction to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, ADHD and obesity -- are caused by or exacerbated by eating animals and their products," she says.

Beyond health, Roth wants to educate children about animal cruelty, from the slaughterhouse to the circus, and the environmental consequences. [Read more...]



Policeman looks back on LA riots with shame (28 April 2012)
"It was like (going) through a war zone."

At the command post, Neiman found paralysis had set in among the department's leaders.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was out of the city, and his assistants were afraid to take decisions on their own.

Hundreds of police officers were massed at the command post awaiting orders, but as the city burned no instructions were forthcoming.

"I assume they were afraid, but for some reason they would not allow the officers to go out into the street and stop the looting, the violence and the buildings on fire.

"In my opinion, I think they were afraid that we were going to make it worse," he said. [Read more...]



Trayvon Martin shooter's bail under fire after website makes $200K (28 April 2012)
About $5,000 of the donor money was used to post Zimmerman's bond, O'Mara said.

At the bond hearing, Zimmerman had access to the funds and heard his wife say they had no savings.

O'Mara said he believed it was an oversight -- not intentional deception -- that his client didn't disclose the money during the bond hearing.

O'Mara said he found out about the money four days after the bond hearing when he asked his client to shut down his website. Zimmerman then asked him then what to do with all the PayPal donations.

O'Mara said there was about $150,000 left when he took control. The family also used the money on living expenses and on setting up somewhere secure for him to stay. [Read more...]



Tropical diseases surfacing more in Texas (28 April 2012)
Houston scientists have launched an attack against little-known tropical diseases, scourges of the developing world, increasingly showing up in poor areas of Texas.

The diseases, spread by all manner of blood-sucking insects, cyst-forming tapeworms and tissue-invading bacteria and viruses, typically don't kill, but they cause chronic disabilities that trap sufferers in lasting poverty.

"They may have been here all along, but now that we're looking we're seeing these diseases more and more," says Dr. Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine infectious disease professor leading the effort. "They have a huge impact - heart disease, epilepsy, mental retardation -- even though they fly beneath most everyone's radar."

Hotez calls it "a national disgrace that these diseases are not higher on the public health agenda." He says the reason is that they afflict "forgotten people, not wealthy people living in the suburbs."

The discovery of more cases in the United States, however, is starting to get attention. In Texas, those include an outbreak of dengue fever in Brownsville; common occurrences in Houston of a tapeworm that invades the brain; and a parasitic disease, transmitted by "the kissing bug" and affecting the heart and digestive system, that scientists now estimate afflicts more than a quarter of a million people living in Texas. [Read more...]



Presidential race ad war begins in earnest (28 April 2012)
The presidential campaign ignited Friday after a super PAC linked to Republican strategist Karl Rove launched the season's first major brushback pitch - a 30-second ad mocking President Obama as "a celebrity president," a preview of one of the GOP's top attack lines.

Analysts said comparing the pop-culture-conversant Obama and the more publicly stiff Mitt Romney, the presumed GOP nominee, may not produce the result Rove intended. But the Obama campaign's response inspired a new question: How should it handle the killing of Osama bin Laden?

The first major ad salvo of the campaign began Thursday with a new 30-second online ad produced by Rove's American Crossroads group, which is not affiliated with Romney's campaign. It shows a montage of Obama's top pop-culture turns, singing part of an Al Green song at a fundraiser and hamming it up this week on Jimmy Fallon's NBC late night show.

Then it asks: "After four years of a celebrity president, is your life any better?" After that, in a direct attack on the youth-vote constituency that Obama dominates, statistics on the high unemployment rate and student loan debt among young Americans flash on-screen. [Read more...]



Google releases FCC report on Street View probe (28 April 2012)
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google has released the full report of the Federal Communications Commission's investigation into the data it collected and stored from millions of unknowing households across the nation while operating specially equipped cars for its Street View service.

The search giant released the report, which had had heavily redacted passages, after wrangling with the FCC over which details could be publicly revealed. The report now blacks out only the names of individuals. It reveals new details and raises new questions about how Google captured personal information over a two-year period. Google has said that it was mapping wireless networks but that collecting personal data was "inadvertent."

The report points the finger at a rogue engineer who, it says, intentionally wrote software code that captured payload data information -- communication over the Internet including emails, passwords and search history -- from unprotected wireless networks, going beyond what Google says it intended. The engineer invoked his 5th Amendment right and declined to speak to the FCC.

But the FCC raises the question of whether engineers and managers on the Street View project did know -- or should have known -- that the data was being collected. [Read more...]



Google guru says whole world will be on web by end of this decade (28 April 2012)
ALMOST everybody on the planet will be connected to the web by the end of this decade, according to the so-called "father of the internet".

But Vincent Cerf, Google's vice-president, also warned that more must be done to eradicate problems such as child pornography and credit card fraud.

Speaking at the company's European headquarters in Dublin, Mr Cerf (68) gave the inside track on future trends in new technologies.

"There is an annual 15pc growth of the internet in terms of people and machines. That's enough to make everybody on the planet connected by the end of the decade," he said. [Read more...]



Quebec student protesters reject tuition concessions (28 April 2012)
Thousands of Quebec students took the streets of Montreal once again on Friday night to voice their rejection of Premier Jean Charest's offer to stretch the planned increase in tuition fees over a longer period of time.

Police declared the march illegal after some protesters threw rocks and bottles at them. There were also some incidents of vandalism, including damaged cars and smashed windows.

Police arrested 35 people, but say most of the protesters were peaceful.

Student Nicolas Dagenais said violence was not encouraged, or welcomed. [Read more...]



Hawaii utility's wind power will provide 16% of its total (28 April 2012)
ULUPALAKUA - When the Auwahi Wind project comes on line late this year, it will be "a building block for the future," Maui Electric Co. President Ed Reinhardt said Friday during the wind farm's Hawaiian blessing and groundbreaking ceremonies.

Because wind-generated power isn't tied to volatile fuel prices, Maui's second wind farm will help move MECO toward the goal of producing energy at a stable price, he said. The project won't immediately bring lower electric bills for consumers.

"It's still a small component of our greater use of oil," he said of wind power alternatives.

Reinhardt said that when Auwahi begins generating power for MECO, the utility will see around 16 percent of its power come from wind energy. [Read more...]



Padilla: Shermantine's Map Still Revealing Clues in Search for Bodies (28 April 2012)
SAN JOAQUIN COUNTY-- In an enormous, incredibly detailed map, Wesley Shermantine says there is another well, now covered by a driveway, sitting just feet from the original flood road dig site where more victims of himself and Loren Herzog are buried.

Grass is now growing over the original speed freak killers dig site on Flood Road in San Joaquin County.

The excavated well yielded three bodies in this decades-old case: Kimberly Billy and Joann Hobson's remains were identified. A third body is still considered a Jane Doe but according to the map, the property in the rolling grass outside Linden isn't done revealing victims.

Shermantine's map includes misspelled road names, tips for Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla and notes about where he and Loren Herzog spent years killing people and dumping their bodies. [Read more...]



'Heart shrinking' trial to combat heart failure to begin (27 April 2012)
As the heart loses its ability to pump, it fills with too much blood and becomes stretched over time. The more the heart enlarges, the worse the symptoms.

Surgeons at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital and The Royal Liverpool University Hospital hope to reverse the damage.

They will fit a device - similar to a pacemaker - to the vagus nerve which runs to the heart. Surgeons said the electrical stimulation should "protect the heart" from the effects of the hormone adrenaline.

Adrenaline makes the heart pump harder and faster; this is one of the body's responses to heart failure - but doctors say it becomes toxic over time and damages the heart further.

The idea is that by shielding the heart, it will stop enlarging and begin to shrink. [Read more...]



Cispa approved by House but critics urge Senate to block 'horrible' bill (27 April 2012)
Free speech advocates are calling for the Senate to block controversial cybersecurity legislation they claim will give the US authorities unprecedented access to online communications.

The House of Representatives on Thursday ignored the threat of a White House veto to pass the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa). The bill aims to make it easier for companies to share information collected on the internet with the federal government in order to help prevent electronic attacks from cybercriminals, foreign governments and terrorists.

Sponsors of the bill have made several amendments to Cispa in the past week, but critics say the bill still threatens to overrule existing privacy protections for citizens, and hands the National Security Agency too much power to access and use people's private information.

The Center for Democracy and Technology said it was "disappointed that Cispa passed the House in such flawed form and under such a flawed process." [Read more...]



Secret Service imposes new rules on agents for foreign trips (27 April 2012)
The U.S. Secret Service imposed new rules Friday aimed at tightening oversight of its employees on international trips in the wake of the Colombia prostitution scandal, banning staff from bringing foreigners into their hotel room, drinking alcohol within 10 hours of duty and visiting "non-reputable establishments."

Senior management distributed the list of ten rules in a memo to employees, codifying what traditionally had been a largely unwritten code of conduct in the agency. The changes were deemed necessary after 12 agents and officers were implicated in a scandal that involved theavy drinking and payments to prostitutes in advance of President Obama's visit to Cartagena, Colombia, two weeks ago.

Next week, the Secret Service will hold an ethics training session for more than 100 employees, and several more mandatory courses will be scheduled through the year, agency officials told members of Congress. The agency said it hoped to put all of its 3,500 agents and 1,400 uniformed officers through the training seminars.

In the memo, the agency said employees "are expected to always conduct yourselves in a manner that reflects credit on you, the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and -- most importantly -- the United States Government and the citizens that we serve." [Read more...]



Mitt Romney warns students about nation's mounting debt (27 April 2012)
WESTERVILLE, Ohio -- Responding to President Obama's assault on Republicans this week over the cost of student loans, Mitt Romney sidestepped the issue on Friday as he urged young voters to think instead about the burden they will face in repaying the national debt.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee met with students at Otterbein University here in this suburb of Columbus as a counterpoint to Obama's visits this week to colleges in three other battleground states -- Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina.

Afterward, Romney told a campus audience that it was time "to get serious about not passing on massive debts to you guys -- to your generation."

"This is not something that you spend a lot of time thinking about," Romney said, with nearly four dozen students on stage as his backdrop. "You look at your student loans. But you should also have, in addition to your student loans, an understanding of the federal loans you've got, that you're going to inherit." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Also known as sticking college kids with the bill for oil wars that nobody wanted...



Group files lawsuit against city to prevent Occupy Madison eviction (27 April 2012)
Three homeless residents of the Occupy Madison encampment, along with a group that organized the camp, filed a lawsuit against city leaders Friday to extend their stay at a city-owned vacant parking lot beyond a deadline that is approaching on Monday.

The group is asking a Dane County judge to issue a temporary restraining order that would bar the city from taking any action to remove Occupy residents from the encampment that has been at 802 E. Washington Ave. since October.

Defendants in the lawsuit include Mayor Paul Soglin, Police Chief Noble Wray, Fire Chief Steven Davis and Janel Heinrich, director of Public Health Madison and Dane County.

Earlier this month the Madison City Council voted not to extend a deadline for the group to abandon the site. After Monday, Occupy Madison will no longer qualify for a state temporary camping permit, and city attorney Michael May said it would be difficult to get an extension. May said Friday that he was not aware of the suit and declined to comment.

State law does not allow temporary dwellings to be occupied for more than four continuous months within a 12-month period. [Read more...]



Reef shark populations in steep decline: Study (27 April 2012)
Reef sharks have dropped sharply near populated islands in the Pacific Ocean, scientists said Friday.

The survey by the University of Hawaii showed that the numbers were drastically lower near populated islands in Hawaii, the Mariana Archipelago and American Samoa, compared to more pristine, remote areas in the ocean.

"We estimate that reef shark numbers have dropped substantially around populated islands, generally by more than 90 percent compared to those at the most untouched reefs," said Marc Nadon, lead author of the study in the journal Conservation Biology.

"In short, people and sharks don't mix," added Nadon, a scientist at the university's Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research. [Read more...]



Conoco, China National to Pay $360 Million for Oil Spill (27 April 2012)
China National Offshore Oil Corp. (883) and ConocoPhillips agreed to pay 2.28 billion yuan ($360 million) to resolve claims and pay for environmental programs in China's Bohai Bay after spilling 3,000 barrels of oil and drilling mud in the area last year.

Under an agreement with the State Oceanic Administration, the two companies will pay 1.683 billion yuan for "possible impacts" on the bay's marine environment, Houston-based ConocoPhillips said in an e-mailed statement today. Conoco, the operator of the well in the Penglai oilfield, will pay 1.09 billion yuan of that as well as 113 million yuan to "support environmental initiatives."

China National Offshore, the nation's largest offshore oil producer, will pay 480 million yuan for programs designed to protect the Bohai Bay, according to a statement from the State Oceanic Administration. State-owned China National Offshore, based in Beijing, owns 51 percent of the well, according to ConocoPhillips. (COP)

The Penglai field, located off the coast of northeast China, produced an average of 60,000 barrels a day in 2011, according to ConocoPhillips. [Read more...]



Radioactive waste dump opens in Texas, environmentalists worried (27 April 2012)
(Reuters) - A 1,300-acre dump to bury low-level radioactive waste has opened in a remote corner of west Texas, the fourth U.S. site to allow such waste, despite concerns about water seepage at the site, which sits above the huge and vital Ogallala aquifer.

In a letter to Waste Control Specialists LLC of Dallas, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality granted approval to the company's dump near Andrews, Texas, about 45 miles northwest of Midland and close to the New Mexico border.

"Initially we will be disposing of Texas waste - medical waste - it is coming in from destinations around the state," Chuck McDonald of dump owner Waste Control Specialists said in an interview.

McDonald said waste from as many as 38 other states will soon be trucked in to the site. [Read more...]



CISPA Critics Warn Cybersecurity Bill Will Increase Domestic Surveillance and Violate Privacy Rights (26 April 2012) [DN]
MICHELLE RICHARDSON: CISPA, the bill that will come up later today and probably be voted on tomorrow, will create an exception to all existing privacy laws so that companies can share very sensitive and personal information directly with the government, including military agencies like the National Security Agency. And then, once the government has it, they can repurpose it and use it for a number of things, including an undefined national security use. The violations of privacy are just amazing under this bill, and it's even invoked a veto threat from the Obama administration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And specifically in terms of the new powers that this grant, what does this do to existing laws that protect the privacy of American citizens and requires the government to get even FISA warrants when it wants to actually do surveillance in particular situations?

MICHELLE RICHARDSON: Right. Current law now creates a presumption of privacy in our phone calls, emails and internet records, and they say that companies have to keep them private unless there's an emergency or the government serves them with a subpoena or warrant. And in one fell swoop, this bill will say that these privacy laws simply no longer apply. So, all of the process afforded under those laws, the protections, the congressional reporting, the role of a judge, all of that is swept away in one bill and will allow companies to decide how much and what type of information they want to turn over to the government. And it can include incredibly sensitive information, like the content of emails or internet use history. There's no obligation on the companies to extract the personally identifiable information. And that's the important thing to remember here, that information sharing may be a good thing. There are ways that it could be done, where companies would share technical data with the government that wouldn't invade privacy. But that's not what we're talking about. This bill is incredibly broad and will allow the companies to turn over even the personally identifiable information. [Read more...]



U.S. comes to agreement with Japan to move 9,000 Marines off Okinawa (27 April 2012)
The U.S. and Japanese governments said Thursday that they will move about 9,000 Marines off Okinawa to other bases in the Western Pacific, in a bid to remove a persistent irritant in the relationship between the two allies.

The Futenma air base on Okinawa has been seen by both sides as essential to deterrring Chinese military aggression in the region. But the noisy air base's location in a crowded urban area has long angered Okinawa residents, and some viewed the Marines as rowdy and potentially violent.

"I am very pleased that, after many years, we have reached this important agreement and plan of action," Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in a statement.

Still unresolved is the issue of establishing a replacement for Futenma. The failure to find a suitable spot for a new air base had held up a previous effort to relocate the Marines to Guam, but the current agreement removes that barrier. U.S. Marines would leave Futenma as soon as suitable facilities on Guam and elsewhere are ready. [Read more...]



KFC must pay $8.3m to poisoned girl in Australia (27 April 2012)
Fast-food giant KFC has been ordered to pay $8.3m (£5.1m) to the family of an Australian girl left severely brain damaged after being poisoned by a chicken meal.

Monika Samaan fell ill with salmonella poisoning after eating a "Twister" wrap at a KFC restaurant near Sydney in 2005.

The poisoning left her wheelchair-bound and unable to speak.

KFC said it was "deeply disappointed" by the decision and would appeal. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: "Disappointed"?



Voter ID Law Will Remain Blocked During Wisconsin Recall Elections (26 April 2012)
The case involves a lawsuit challenging the photo ID requirements for voters that was brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.

The court said that the Attorney General's Office had shown more than a mere possibility of success on the merits of its case. But that alone was not enough to issue the stay, the court said.

The court granted a motion to expedite the appeal, but said elsewhere in its decision that there is no realistic possibility that it would issue a decision before the June 5 recall elections. And even if it did, the decision would not take effect until at least 31 days after it was issued and would be subject to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The court also said another case on the same law, brought by the NAACP and Voces de la Frontera, remains before another Dane County judge, and its post-trial briefing schedule will not finish until after the recall elections. [Read more...]



Bradley Manning judge warns military prosecutors in WikiLeaks case (26 April 2012)
The military judge in the court-martial of the US soldier accused of handing WikiLeaks the biggest trove of unauthorised state secrets in American history has put army prosecutors on notice that they must prove Bradley Manning knew he was helping the enemy or face the possibility that the most serious charge against him be dismissed.

Colonel Denise Lind refused to throw out the charge -- "aiding the enemy" -- as had been requested by Manning's defence lawyers. But she told the military prosecution that during the trial, now scheduled for the end of September, that they would have to prove that the intelligence analyst was fully aware that he was helping the enemy when he allegedly handed hundreds of thousands of secret US documents to WikiLeaks.

Aiding the enemy is the most serious in the list of 22 charges that have been brought against Manning. It carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

The trial will start on 21 September and is expected to last three weeks. It is certain to be closely followed in America and around the world, both by those who see Manning as a traitor to his country and military superiors, and by those who believe he was a hero who is being punished for being a whistleblower. [Read more...]



Under Catholic pressure Paul Ryan backs away from Rand, Objectivism (26 April 2012)
Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), when faced with a letter of condemnation by 90 Catholic faculty members at Georgetown University, has abruptly decided to back away from his famous endorsement of the works of controversial author Ayn Rand and her philosophy of "Objectivism." The congressman, who is scheduled to speak at the Catholic university today, is now emphasizing Christian philosophers and the writings of Pope Benedict XVI as the true exemplars of his world view over Russian émigré and atheist Rand.

A National Review profile from early Thursday said, "'I reject her philosophy,' Ryan says firmly. 'It's an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,' who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. 'Don't give me Ayn Rand,' he says."

Ryan, said the Review, is actually "a practicing Roman Catholic" and that "his faith and moral values shape his politics as much as his belief in freedom and capitalism does."

Ryan went so far as to decry his affinity for the book Atlas Shrugged and its author as an "urban legend," and cites it as proof that he's "arrived in politics" that a false story is out there circulating about him. He says the association of his name to Rand and her brand of capitalism-as-religion is "inaccurate" and "part of an effort on the left to paint him as a cold-hearted Objectivist." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Ryan a Catholic... Cares about his fellow man... Theoretically, in campaign season!



Charles Taylor guilty of aiding Sierra Leone war crimes (26 April 2012)
International judges have found former Liberian leader Charles Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes during the Sierra Leone civil war, at his trial in The Hague.

Taylor has been on trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone for almost five years.

He was accused of backing rebels who killed tens of thousands during Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war.

But he was cleared of ordering their crimes. [Read more...]



37,000 jobs at risk if wind energy tax credits expire, backers say (25 April 2012)
Supporters of a bipartisan effort to protect the American wind energy industry say that 37,000 U.S. jobs will be at risk this year if Congress fails to extend the production tax credits that have been vital to wind power development.

The call for Congress to pass HR 3307, the American Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit Extension Act, was made during a teleconference hosted by three members of Congress, the American Wind Energy Assn. and TPI Composites, a Newton, Iowa-based wind blade manufacturer.

HR 3307 is sponsored by Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.). The bill has 93 co-sponsors.

The AWEA said that production tax credits have helped developers secure vital private financing for wind projects and have also helped bring those projects to completion. [Read more...]



Virginia study makes economic case for renewable energy (25 April 2012)
Pursuing a portfolio of renewable power sources such as solar, biomass and wind power to satisfy Virginia's energy appetite through 2035 would create tens of thousands more jobs than relying on either coal or natural gas, a George Mason University study concludes.

The study released Wednesday was prepared for Virginia Conservation Network, a coalition of environmental groups and proponents of renewable energy sources over fossil fuels.

George Mason's Center For Regional Analysis based the study on the 2010 Virginia Energy Plan, which projected a need for an additional 19,448 megawatts of demand over the next 25 years. Half of that demand can be met through biomass, solar and wind, offshore and onshore, the study concludes.

Nathan Lott, executive director of the Conservation Network, said the study illustrates that renewable energy can be competitive with fossil fuels. "This is important for regulators and utilities that must plan today for a safe, reliable electricity system 20 and 30 years into the future," he said. [Read more...]



Sen. Tom Udall: VAWA 'crucial' for Native American women (25 April 2012)
Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) on Wednesday called on Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, claiming new provisions in the bill were "crucial" to protect Native American women from domestic abuse.

The provision would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Native American individuals for domestic violence crimes committed on tribal land.

The VAWA, originally passed in 1994 and reauthorized twice since, provides funding to local communities to improve their response to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking. The federal grants from the law support police training, victim services, transitional housing, and legal assistance.

"Since its passage in 1994, domestic violence has decreased by over 50 percent," he said on the Senate floor. "And the victims of these crimes have been more willing to come forward. Knowing they are not alone. Knowing they will get the support they need. Knowing that crimes against women will not be tolerated." [Read more...]



George Zimmerman: Prelude to a shooting (25 April 2012)
(Reuters) - A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.

The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law's dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show.

"Don't use pepper spray," he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend. "It'll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second for the dog to jump you," he said.

"Get a gun."

That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December, another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight weapon. [Read more...]



Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks from Prison on Life After Death Row and His Quest for Freedom (25 April 2012) [DN]
AMY GOODMAN: Mumia Abu-Jamal, can you talk about what your reaction is to be taken off of death row, to no longer have death hanging over you, but to be in jail for a life sentence without parole?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, you've kind of answered the question with your question. That is to say--

OPERATOR: This call is from the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy and is subject to monitoring and recording.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: You've probably heard me refer to life as "slow death row." It sounds a little dramatic, but it is really more truth to it than hyperbole. And that's because, you know, in Pennsylvania, it has the highest population, or one of the highest populations, in the state, of lifers--in fact, juveniles with life sentences. And in Pennsylvania, there's no gradation: you know, all lifers are lifers, and that's for their whole life. So, and I guess, in that sense, too, it's bigger. I mean, it's bigger in terms of the time differential, but it's slow death row, to be sure.

And when you see, as I've seen, going to chow or going to a meal and seeing what I call the "million man wheelchair march," it makes an impact on you. You know, you look up in the morning, and there are 30 or 40 guys going through the handicap line, and they're in wheelchairs. And although some are young, most are quite old. And so, you know, life means life in Pennsylvania. [Read more...]



White killer whale adult spotted for first time in wild (22 April 2012)
Scientists have made what they believe to be the first sighting of an adult white orca, or killer whale.

The adult male, which they have nicknamed Iceberg, was spotted off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia.

It appears to be healthy and leading a normal life in its pod.

White whales of various species are occasionally seen; but the only known white orcas have been young, including one with a rare genetic condition that died in a Canadian aquarium in 1972. [Read more...]



Feds make first arrest in BP oil spill; ex-engineer accused of deleting hundreds of messages (24 April 2012)
NEW ORLEANS -- Federal prosecutors brought the first criminal charges Tuesday in the Gulf oil spill, accusing a former BP engineer of deleting more than 300 text messages that indicated the blown-out well was spewing far more crude than the company was telling the public at the time.

Two years and four days after the drilling-rig explosion that set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Kurt Mix, 50, of Katy, Texas, was arrested and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence.

His attorney, Joan McPhee, issued a statement Tuesday evening describing the charges as misguided and that she is confident Mix will be exonerated.

"The government says he intentionally deleted text messages from his phone, but the content of those messages still resides in thousands of emails, text messages and other documents that he saved," she said. "Indeed, the emails that Kurt preserved include the very ones highlighted by the government." [Read more...]



Rep. Hoyer predicts Democrats will regain House (24 April 2012)
And Speaker of the House John Boehner suggested there were cracks in the Republican Party's armor, warning earlier Tuesday on Fox that "there's a one in three chance that we could lose" the House to Democrats.

"I think there's a higher chance than one in three, I think at best from his perspective, it's 50-50," Hoyer told reporters as he laid out the prospects for Democrats to win dozens of districts.

"We're going to pick up a lot of seats, and I think we'll take back the majority."

The 435-member House now has 242 Republicans and 190 Democrats, with three vacancies including the seat held by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who resigned in January to focus on her recovery after being shot in the head by a gunman. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: John Boehner has probably done more than anyone to win the House for Democrats. He's the king of frivolous issues, which isn't exactly what people want when they're out of work and losing their homes.



Hawaii wants GMO foods labeled (opinion) (24 April 2012)
When we go to the market, many of us read labels to make sure that we buy that which we want to eat. There are, of course, many that do not care as evidenced by the obesity epidemic we are in the midst of. Yet, we all have that opportunity. We can check calories, sodium content, fat content, sugar content, etc. The one thing we cannot check is GMO content and that right to check GMO content is presently denied to more than 90% of Americans. And why?

Because our genetically modified government does not require GMOs to be labeled.

As a result, Americans are eating GMO foods without informed consent. What's worse is that the FDA, headed by former Monsanto employees, does not require independent safety testing of these ingredients

In fact, documents uncovered in litigation show that FDA scientists believe that GMO foods could pose serious risks and need stringent testing, but their administrative superiors overruled them. As a result, the FDA has a weak "voluntary consultation" process with biotech crop developers and relies entirely on whatever data the companies choose to disclose. The FDA does not even ascertain that GMO foods are safe, but defers to "industry assurances". [Read more...]



Mad cow disease discovered in California dairy cow (24 April 2012)
John Clifford, the chief veterinary officer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday confirmed that a cow carrying bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, came from a dairy farm in California's Central Valley.

It was discovered as part of a routine inspection after the cow was sent to a rendering facility. It is the fourth reported case in the U.S. The animal tested positive positive for "atypical BSE, a very rare form of the disease not generally associated with an animal consuming infected feed," according to USDA.

USDA said milk is not affected because it does not transmit the disease. Humans may be able to contract a similar form of the fatal brain disease by eating infected parts of an animal. The department has begun notifying trading partners and international health officials. The agency did not release specific information about the cow, other than that it died on the farm. The incident is under investigation.

Futures markets reacted sharply but USDA said it does not expect the incident to affect the nation's beef exports. [Read more...]



Google offers 16TB cloud storage (24 April 2012)
Google is hoping to build the world's largest digital filing cabinet in the latest attempt to deepen people's dependence on its services.

The internet search leader began its pursuit of the audacious goal Tuesday with the much-anticipated debut of Google Drive, a product that stores personal documents, photos, videos and a wide range of other digital content on Google's computers.

By keeping files in massive data centres, users will be able to call up the information on their smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and just about any other internet-connected device. Content can also be more easily shared among friends, family and co-workers by sending links to the information instead of emailing large attachments.

Google Drive is offering the first five gigabytes of storage for free. Monthly prices for additional storage will range from $2.49 for 25 gigabytes to $49.99 for one terabyte, equivalent to five laptops with 200-gigabyte drives.

The service is initially available through a web-based interface or as a software installation on Windows-based computers, Mac computers, laptops running on Google's Chrome operating system and smartphones powered by Google's Android software. A version compatible with Apple Inc.'s hot-selling iPhone and iPad is due in the next few weeks. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Why would this appear right after MegaUpload was shut down?



Why Megaupload's Kim Dotcom Might Walk Free (24 April 2012)
Will Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who's been arrested by New Zealand authorities on racketeering and copyright infringement charges at the request of U.S. authorities, go free?

Questions arose Friday in a U.S. district courtroom in Virginia over whether Dotcom's extradition to the United States might proceed, or the charges against him even stick. "I frankly don't know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter," Judge Liam O'Grady said to Justice Department prosecutor Jay Prabhu at the hearing, reported The New Zealand Herald.

Prosecutors have accused seven Megaupload employees, including Dotcom, of earning $175 million in subscription and advertising revenue from their file-sharing site, thanks to a widespread campaign of copyright infringement. But while previous such cases have been civil matters, the Department of Justice in this case took the unusual route of also filing criminal racketeering charges, which in New Zealand carry a five-year maximum sentence. The move appears to have been pragmatic. "The U.S. government needs to get over the hurdle of a five-year jail sentence to meet the criteria for extradition. Copyright charges in [New Zealand] carry a maximum of four years," reported the Herald.

[ More copyright scuffling: ISPs Agree To Copyright Alerts: What It Means. ]

Judge O'Grady's comments, interestingly, came after the FBI requested that the 1,100 servers that still store Megaupload data be allowed to be deleted. The two hosting providers that own the servers had requested that they either be allowed to return the servers to duty--Megaupload has been unable to pay for their upkeep since the Department of Justice froze its assets--or sell them to one of several groups that are seeking to retain the data they store. [Read more...]



More Secrets on Growing State Surveillance: Exclusive Part 2 with NSA Whistleblower, Targeted Hacker (23 April 2012) [DN]
AMY GOODMAN: "Jitsi" is spelled...?

JACOB APPELBAUM: J-I-T-S-I. So, every time you use proprietary software, you have to ask yourself, "Why is this provided to me for free?" And now that Microsoft is involved with Skype, the question is: Doesn't Microsoft have some sort of government leaning on them, say the U.S. government, to give them so-called lawful interception capabilities? And of course the answer is going to be yes, right? If you log into Skype on a computer you've never used before, you get all your chat history. Well, why is that? Well, that's because Skype has it. And if Skype can give it to you, they can give it to the Feds. And they will. And everybody that has that ability will. Some will fight it, like Twitter. But in the end, if the state asserts it has the right to get your data, sometimes without you even knowing that that's happening, they're going to get it, if they can get it.

So we have to solve these privacy problems with mathematics, because it's pretty hard to solve math problems with a gun or threat of violence, right? No amount of violence is going to solve a math problem. And despite the fact that the NSA has got a lot of people working on those math problems, you know, podunk cops in Seattle, for example, they're not going to be able to do that, and the NSA is not going to help them. Now, they may have surveillance capability. They may have IMSI catchers. They might have automatic license plate readers. They have an incredible surveillance state. They're still not the NSA.

And even if they are sharing information, what we want to do is make whatever information they would share worthless, especially if it's encrypted. So if your browsing is going over Tor, at least if someone is watching your home internet connection, they don't see that you're looking at Democracy Now!'s website. They don't see that you're checking your Riseup email. They see that you're talking to the Tor network. And there's a lot of value in that, especially because your geographic location is hidden. So when you log into Gmail--let's say you still use Gmail--but you don't want Gmail to have a log of every place you've been, you use Tor, and Gmail sees Tor, and anyone watching you sees Tor. And that's really useful, because it means that they don't get your home address, they don't know when you're at work. You make the metadata worthless, essentially, for people that are surveilling you. [Read more...]



Mexican immigration falls for first time in four decades (23 April 2012)
A survey from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that the largest wave of immigration in American history to have taken place from a single country has now been brought to a virtual standstill. In the five years from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4m Mexicans immigrated to the US -- exactly the same number of Mexican immigrants and their US-born children who quit America and moved back or were deported to Mexico.

By contrast, in the previous five years to 2000 some 3m Mexicans came to the US and fewer than 700,000 left it.

The latest figures signify the end of an era. From 1970, the Mexican-born population of the US has risen steeply, reaching a peak of more than 12m in 2010.

Now it is falling, with the decline including undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the US who now number about 6.1m -- 58% of the total unauthorised immigrant population of the country. [Read more...]



Ron Paul: Corporations will 'act as government spies' under CISPA (23 April 2012)
Presidential candidate Ron Paul, a Republican Congressman from Texas, has emerged as the leading opponent of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), widely billed as a follow-up to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial set of Internet regulations killed earlier this year by an online mass work stoppage protest.

In a video released Monday morning, Paul called CISPA "an Internet monitoring bill" that would enable the government and corporations to review citizens' private communications without any judicial oversight.

The bill proposes an information sharing scheme between the National Security Agency (NSA) and corporate networks under the auspice of cyber security, and defines "cyber threat intelligence" to include details pertaining to the "theft or misappropriation" of "intellectual property."

CISPA currently enjoys a broad base of support among some of the same companies that opposed SOPA, including Google and Facebook. The bill is expected to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives later this week despite strong opposition from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Constitution Project, Fight for the Future and others.

Joining the bill's opposition on Monday, Paul warned that CISPA "represents an alarming form of corporatism, as it further intertwines government with companies like Google and Facebook." [Read more...]



Bakken oil booms -- and so does crime on the Plains (23 April 2012)
GLASGOW, Mont. (AP) -- Drug crimes in eastern Montana have more than doubled. Assaults in Dickinson, N.D., have increased fivefold in just two years. And the once-sleepy town of Plentywood, Mont., has seen three assaults with weapons in the past few months -- a prospect previously unheard of in the tiny community tucked against the Canada border.

Booming oil production has brought tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues to communities across a wide expanse of the Northern Plains. But it also has brought more crime, forcing law enforcement from the U.S. and Canada to deal with spiking offenses ranging from drug trafficking and gun crimes to prostitution.

The rural region is emerging as one of the top oil producing areas of North America. Officials say up to 30,000 more workers could descend on the Bakken oil fields of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan in the next few years.

The recent kidnapping and brutal murder of Montana teacher Sherry Arnold tragically underscored the changes brought on by the rapid pace of drilling. Two men are in custody, but the case has left residents shaken and led to a huge rise in applications to carry concealed weapons in Montana and North Dakota. [Read more...]



Investigation: Two Years After the BP Spill, A Hidden Health Crisis Festers (18 April 2012)
March 3 Nicole Maurer learned of the proposed settlement between BP and hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast businesses and residents harmed by its 2010 oil spill, the largest in US history.

In her cramped but immaculate trailer on a muddy back road in the small town of Buras, Louisiana, Nicole tells me that the two years since the tragedy began on April 20, 2010, have been "a total nightmare" for her family. Not only has her husband William's fishing income all but vanished along with the shrimp he used to catch but the entire family is plagued by persistent health problems.

For months following the onset of the disaster, she says, there was an oil smell outside their home and "a constant cloudiness, like a haze, but it wasn't fog." Her 6-year-old daughter Brooklyn's asthma got worse, and she now has constant upper respiratory infections. "Once it goes away, it comes right back," Nicole explains.

Before the spill, Elizabeth, 9, was her "well kid." But now Elizabeth constantly suffers from rashes, allergies, inflamed sinuses, sore throat and an upset stomach. [Read more...]



Drilling raises complex issues (23 April 2012)
The stories coming out of the oil fields in South and West Texas sound like tall tales: overnight wealth, billions in industry investment and an unbuilt hotel in Odessa that's already booked for two years.

But there are also an increasing number of lawsuits and concerns about water use.

Although shale drilling is adding billions of dollars of investment, it raises complex issues, according to speakers at the Outlook for Texas Land Markets conference at The Omni San Antonio Hotel at the Colonnade, an annual two-day event that wrapped up Friday.

Bane Phillippi, an attorney with Austin's Weisbart Springer Hayes LLP, said the first litigation and Texas Supreme Court opinions are out on hydraulic fracturing. So far, the state's Supreme Court has stuck to the so-called "rule of capture" (if you capture oil and gas first, it's yours), but has been careful not to make sweeping decisions in this new drilling arena. [Read more...]



Without reforms, U.S. retirees to face dwindling funds (23 April 2012)
Blahous and fellow trustee Robert Reischauer said lawmakers should be aware that it will become increasingly difficult to "avoid adverse effects" on retirees or those close to retirement if legislative changes are delayed much longer.

For example, Americans' average real earnings are forecast to grow more slowly than previously thought, crimping revenue from the taxes that pay for the benefits, the report noted.

Even when the fund starts to run out of money in 2033, it would be able to pay 75 percent of benefits. An alternative, in order to keep payments at 100 percent, would be to raise the payroll tax on employers and employees to 16.7 percent from its regular 12.4 percent rate.

Members of Congress also have mulled raising the retirement age or cutting some benefits to the wealthy. But no action is expected before the November elections.

Trustees for the fund said a disability insurance program, which is generally lumped in with Social Security, faces the most immediate financing shortfall. It said that fund will likely be depleted in 2016, two years earlier than projected last year. [Read more...]



US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher denied Afghan entry (23 April 2012)
The Congressman was stopped in Dubai on Friday as he was leading a delegation to Kabul. Officials say that while the other members of the delegation had visas for Afghanistan, Mr Rohrabacher did not.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was reported to have conveyed a message from President Karzai to the congressman that he would not be welcome in the country.

Mr Rohrabacher, who is also the chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee, has frequently called for a more decentralised form of government for Afghanistan as well as a US investigation into alleged government corruption.

Afghan officials told the BBC that in addition to his criticisms of the president, Mr Rohrabacher was being shunned because of meetings he had held in Berlin with Afghan politicians about the creation of a decentralised form of government. [Read more...]



Charles Colson's Jails for Jesus (Mother Jones FLASHBACK) (1 November 2003)
And then there is the pizza. When a new class of inmates joins InnerChange, the staff orders 100 large pies, a fact that all 800-plus inmates at Ellsworth appear to be intimately, obsessively, aware of. "We are stretching the local Pizza Hut to its absolute capacity," InnerChange office administrator Gale Soukup told me with a worried look, "and they're the only game in town."

Paid for in part by fees charged to the general population, InnerChange also offers substance-abuse treatment and free computer training, hot commodities in a time of budgetary woes. This year, the GED program Ellsworth offers regular prisoners was cut in half, the substance-abuse program eliminated. General-population inmates are still offered a computer class through the local community college, but as it costs $150, and men who are lucky enough to land a prison job make an average of 60 cents a day, the general population's six computers sit under dust covers most days. As Issac Jarowitz, an Ellsworth inmate who isn't in InnerChange, noted grudgingly, "The Christians do lots of stuff the state used to do, like vocational programs, but now they're only for believers."

"I tell them this is their ticket," Raymond said, gesturing to the InnerChange ID card that inmates wear on a "What Would Jesus Do?" neck chain, "to everything they need."

PRISON FELLOWSHIP MINISTRIES, the group that runs InnerChange, was founded in 1976 by Charles Colson, the "evil genius" of the Nix- on administration; one of his unrealized dirty tricks was a proposal to firebomb the Brookings Institution. For his Watergate crimes, Colson served seven months. After being released, he remade himself as a poster boy for the redemptive power Christ can have on criminals and the government, and has since become one of "America's most powerful Christian conservatives," according to the Weekly Standard. Still chairman of PFM, Colson is also a prolific writer. In his column for Christianity Today or his daily radio address, Colson can be found criticizing PBS for "promoting" evolution, hawking a brochure called "Rick Santorum Is Right," or claiming that the real weapons of mass destruction "are not in Baghdad" but in "the hands of the sexual liberationist lobby." In Colson's first novel, Gideon's Torch, the National Institutes of Health plans to harvest brain tissue from partial-birth abortions to treat AIDS patients, a scheme funded by Hollywood galas. Colson even has his anti-abortionist heroes firebomb the NIH. Gideon's Torch, like much of Colson's writings, ultimately argues that government without faith is doomed to destruction and corruption [Read more...]



Education expected to be a 'major issue' in Walker recall election (22 April 2012)
The organization leading the effort to oust Walker asked 155,000 petition signers in January about the importance of various issues in the recall. Of nearly 40,000 responses, education funding cuts ranked highest in importance, said Lynn Freeman, executive director of United Wisconsin to Recall Walker.

"If this was just about collective bargaining, we would have never gotten" more than 900,000 signatures, Freeman said. "Collective bargaining lit the fire and education and health care poured the gasoline on it."

Walker's first budget cut $792.2 million, or 7.1 percent, in state aid for K-12 schools over the biennium ending June 2013, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

However, school districts faced an even steeper $1.6 billion net reduction in funding because Walker's budget slashed the amount of money school districts could legally raise through property taxes. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: All those cuts to education, but he still passes out pay bonuses like candy.



Obituary: Lord Ashley of Stoke, who campaigned for thalidomide children, vaccine damage victims, rape victims, and others (22 April 2012)
He first raised the issue of vaccine-damaged children in 1977, seeking an inquiry into 300 children allegedly brain-damaged by vaccinations for whooping cough. When Mrs Castle's successor David Ennals resisted, Ashley accused him of a "shabby and squalid speech"; 10 years later he would seek a judicial inquiry.

In 1980 he took up the case of women who had taken Debendox to counter morning sickness in pregnancy and whose babies had been born deformed. He persuaded ministers to warn doctors against prescribing it, helped Debendox parents to organise, and applied pressure when the manufacturers agreed to pay American victims £92 million, but 70 British parents nothing.

He also sought to shame the Eli Lilly company into behaving "more humanely" toward 1,500 people who claimed to have been harmed by its arthritis drug Opren, and pressed for compensation for women damaged after using the Dalkon contraceptive shield.

In 1981 he began a three-year campaign for the re-examination of every case involving the Home Office forensic scientist Dr Alan Clift, after a constituent was freed having served nearly nine years for murdering a woman he had never met. Eventually Willie Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, agreed; 1,500 cases were reviewed after Clift's forced retirement, and of the first 10 convictions taken back to the Court of Appeal, three were overturned.

Ashley again protested over rape sentences in 1982, after a judge fined a rapist £2,000 because the girl was hitch-hiking at night. The Lord Chief Justice issued advice that rapists should be jailed except in "wholly exceptional circumstances". [Read more...]






Work under way on Nevada's 1st wind energy farm (21 April 2012)
The Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity sued last year in an effort to block the $225 million project, claiming the U.S. Bureau of Land Management skirted environmental regulations to fast-track it.

The National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Nevada Department of Wildlife also expressed concerns over the project.

The conservation groups and company entered settlement talks last year after a federal judge refused to stop work at the site to allow more study of how the turbines would affect bats and sage grouse.

Under the settlement approved March 29 in U.S. District Court in Nevada, Pattern agreed to expand its program for tracking bird deaths associated with the project.

The company also will pay for a $50,000 study of nearby Rose Cave, where as many as 3 million Mexican free-tailed bats roost during their fall migration. [Read more...]



'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help (21 April 2012)
The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the Amazon. According to Survival, they are now the world's most threatened tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers.

Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. The EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of 13.6m tons a year for 15 years. The railway cut directly through the Awá's land and with the railway came settlers. A road-building programme quickly followed, opening up the Awá's jungle home to loggers, who moved in from the east.

It was, according to Survival's research director, Fiona Watson, a recipe for disaster. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no natural immunity.

"The Awá and the uncontacted Awá are really on the brink," she said. "It is an extremely small population and the forces against them are massive. They are being invaded by loggers, settlers and cattle ranchers. They rely entirely on the forest. They have said to me: 'If we have no forest, we can't feed our children and we will die'." [Read more...]



Eye-in-sky SPD drones stir privacy concerns (20 April 2012)
The Seattle Police Department's recent federal approval to use drones as an eye-in-the-sky should spark a discussion among city leaders about privacy and the use of technology in law enforcement, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

The department is among dozens of law-enforcement agencies, academic institutions and other agencies that were recently given approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The FAA approval was granted after the president signed a law in February that compelled the agency to plan for safe integration of civilian drones into American airspace by 2015.

Seattle police declined Friday to talk about how the department intends to use drones, saying it was just now training operators. However, the department has earlier said possible uses could include search-and-rescue operations, natural disasters and investigations of unusual crime scenes. [Read more...]



News from the Week of 15th to 21st of April 2012

Wisconsin Planned Parenthood to halt abortion drugs due to controversial new law, becomes recall election issue (20 April 2012)
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin announced Friday that it will stop providing drugs to women for abortions in the first nine weeks of pregnancy - a method used in about a fourth of the provider's abortions - because it says a new state law that criminalizes a physician's failure to follow a legislative-prescribed procedure is vague.

The new law, which went into effect Friday, requires the physician to inform the woman that she must return to the abortion facility for a follow-up visit 12 to 18 days after she takes the medication at home. The physician prescribing the drug also must perform an examination before giving the drug and must be physically present in the room when the woman receives the drug.

The law aims to ensure doctors aren't using Web cameras to consult with women about abortion-inducing drugs, as they do in some states to make abortions more easily available in rural areas. Supporters say the law sets a minimum standard of care for abortion providers.

Doctors who fail to tell women they must return to the clinic for a checkup face a maximum $10,000 fine; physicians who don't give an examination in person and who aren't in the room when the drug is given could face up to 3½ years in prison.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin still will provide surgical abortions. And the new law does not affect emergency contraception medication that women take within five days of intercourse to prevent, rather than terminate pregnancy. [Read more...]



Police arrest dozens of protesters trying to disrupt Montreal conference (21 April 2012)
MONTREAL -- Police moved swiftly to shut down a protest in Montreal on Saturday, a day after a series of violent clashes between demonstrators and officers.

Between 50 and 75 people, some wearing masks and goggles, were arrested after the protest was declared illegal, police said.

Demonstrators had gathered in the rain to denounce a conference on Premier Jean Charest's plan to develop northern Quebec.

Those protesting included a group of hardline Quebec separatists, along with students, environmentalists and First Nations groups. [Read more...]



Secret Service scandal: Rising supervisor set uncovering of misconduct in motion (21 April 2012)
Paula Reid, the new Secret Service boss for the South American region, was in Cartagena, Colombia, preparing for the president's visit when she received an urgent report: A prostitute, upset because she had not been paid by a Secret Service agent, had created a disturbance in a nearby hotel, knocking on doors and yelling in the hallways at daybreak.

With roughly 24 hours left until President Obama was due to arrive in town, the 46-year-old Calvert County native instructed her staff to swoop into the Hotel Caribe at midday April 12 and inspect hotel registration records for all Secret Service employees. Reid, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, swiftly rounded up 11 agents and officers and ordered them out of the country. She alerted her superiors that she found early evidence of "egregious" misconduct involving prostitutes and set in motion the public uncovering of the most wide-reaching scandal at the agency in decades, according to government officials involved in the case.

It fell to Reid, recently promoted to head the prestigious Miami office, to ride herd on a rowdy group of male colleagues, including two who were assigned to supervise the group, the morning after a drunken bender, according to the officials. While the sordid and salacious details of the men taking prostitutes to their rooms are now well documented, less is known about the role played by one of the agency's highest-ranking African Americans in making the clock-ticking decision to replace them on an assignment for which there is no room for error.

For Reid, the moment was not without risk, opening her to a potential internal backlash for ruining the men's careers and, once the news became public, embarrassing an agency that prides itself on maintaining a stoic public face. Officials familiar with the probe said Reid had Director Mark Sullivan's endorsement as she took swift steps to handle the matter, but some agents said another senior manager might have been less aggressive. [Read more...]



Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July (20 April 2012)
For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems. [Read more...]



Two Years After the BP Spill, Gulf Oysters Are Full Of Heavy Metals (20 April 2012)
On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, evidence of the spill's ongoing impacts on Gulf people and ecosystems continues to mount. As if eyeless shrimp, toxic beaches, and dead dolphins weren't bad enough, a new study suggests that Gulf oysters are also in trouble.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences says that oysters in the Gulf contain higher concentrations of the heavy metals found in crude oil now than they did before the spill. Using a method known--awesomely--as "laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry," the scientists vaporized oyster shells and superheated them, causing different elements to radiate light at specific, known frequencies so they could be identified. They measured higher concentrations of vanadium, cobalt, and chromium--three heavy metals present in oil--in the oysters sampled after the spill. Even more worrisome, the team found that 89 percent of post-spill specimens displayed the signs of metaplasia, a condition in which tissues are transformed in response to stress. Oysters suffering from the condition often have trouble reproducing, which could have worrisome implications for oyster populations and the species further up the food chain that depend on them.

Scientists don't yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people. This study is just the start of a broader effort to understand the impacts of heavy metals on Gulf ecosystems: the team is planning to conduct a similar analysis of mussels, and hopes to model the potential impacts of the spill on the Gulf food web. For now, though, the study provides more evidence that the oil spill's effects are still being felt, and are likely to continue long into the future. The findings are particularly troubling in light of past studies indicating that the combination of heavy metal pollution and warmer temperatures is especially deadly for oysters--a fact that doesn't bode well in an age of warming seas.

It's yet another piece of bad news for Louisiana's oystermen, who are still struggling to recover from the double whammy of Katrina and the BP spill, and faced with consumers afraid to eat the oysters they do manage to harvest. For many, particularly in the African-American, Cajun, and Croatian communities, oyster fishing is a tradition stretching back generations; for them, the long-term effects of the spill threaten to put an end to a way of life with a proud heritage. It's also bad news for the state's economy, which reaped around $300 million from oyster sales in good years before the spill. And of course, it's bad news for lovers of the region's iconic sandwich, the oyster po'boy. [Read more...]



Deep water means wave of profit for Schlumberger (20 April 2012)
"Our first-quarter results showed good progress with growth in exploration and deep-water markets," CEO Paal Kibs-gaard said in a conference call with analysts Friday. "Deep- water activity grew in the Gulf of Mexico and was supported by a number of new drilling permits granted during the quarter."

Deep-water exploration internationally also boosted the company's results, particularly in offshore regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, Kibsgaard said. He forecast that global deep- water exploration will help push the international rig count up more than 10 percent this year.

Bill Herbert, Simmons & Company International co-head of research, noted that pricing for certain oil field services is starting to climb along with the price of oil.

"If you look at what's happening in deep-water, day rates have been inflecting hard and moving sharply higher," Herbert said. "The exploration end of the business looks to be very strong, which is Schlumberger's sweet spot." [Read more...]



AT&T wields enormous power in Sacramento (21 April 2012)
SACRAMENTO -- As the sun set behind Monterey Bay on a cool night last year, dozens of the state's top lawmakers and lobbyists ambled onto the 17th fairway at Pebble Beach for a round of glow-in-the-dark golf.

With luminescent balls soaring into the sky, the annual fundraiser known as the Speaker's Cup was in full swing.

Lawmakers, labor-union champions and lobbyists gather each year at the storied course to schmooze, show their skill on the links and rejuvenate at a 22,000-square-foot spa. The affair, which typically raises more than $1 million for California Democrats, has been sponsored for more than a decade by telecommunications giant AT&T.

At the 2010 event, AT&T's president and the state Assembly speaker toured Pebble Beach together in a golf cart, shaking hands with every lawmaker, lobbyist and other VIP in attendance. [Read more...]



Wheels begin to turn in India's farm revolution (21 April 2012)
(Reuters) - As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress.

It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane.

"This machine will harvest my entire field today," says Prashant Kadam, the young owner of the compact two-acre plot. "Had it been harvested by laborers, they would have taken at least a week."

A short drive away in a field where the sun is just getting hot enough to halt work, a team of 12 couples cut cane the way it's been done for centuries -- with machetes. They load the cane into carts each pulled by two white bullocks with gaily painted horns and head for the local mill which dominates this sugar-growing valley some 300 kilometers south of Mumbai. [Read more...]



James Cameron, Google Duo Back Asteroid-Mining Venture (21 April 2012)
A new venture backed by director James Cameron and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt seeks to accomplish something straight out of science fiction--the mining of asteroids for raw materials like iron and nickel.

Planetary Resources Inc.'s plans will be formally announced at an event in Seattle on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Backers of the new company say its goal is to "overlay two critical sectors--space exploration and natural resources--to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and to "help ensure humanity's prosperity."

In addition to Cameron and Page, Google's chief executive, and Schmidt, the search giant's executive chairman, other backers of Planetary Resources include former Microsoft executive and veteran astronaut Charles Simonyi, Google director Ram Shriram, and Ross Perot Jr., the son of IT magnate and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, the Journal reported Friday.

The company's co-chairmen are commercial spaceflight advocates Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson. Chris Lewicki, who was NASA's Mars mission manager, is president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources. [Read more...]



Rare Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' scrolls found in Australian collection (21 April 2012)
A British historian said Saturday he had unearthed a trove of Egyptian Book of the Dead fragments by a top ancient official after chancing upon a scrap on show in an Australian museum.

John Taylor, a world-famous Egyptologist from the British Museum, said his discovery began with a shred of papyrus on display at Queensland Museum's new mummies exhibition bearing the distinctive hieroglyphs of Amenhotep.

The 15th century BC figure, son of Hapu, was Egypt's chief architect and is among those credited with designing and constructing the Great Temple of Amun at Karnak, near Luxor -- one of modern Egypt's most visited landmarks.

Excited and intrigued, Taylor said he asked if there were any more such fragments in the museum's archives and was shown into the conservation lab. [Read more...]



Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance (20 April 2012) [DN]
JUAN GONZALEZ: And that's because the NSA could do surveillance from abroad, but not of U.S. citizens.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, and, you see, the World Wide Web routes things all over, so you never really know where U.S. citizens' communications are going to be routed. So, you--if you were collecting somewhere else on another continent, you could still get U.S. citizens. That's--see, that was a universal problem. So we devised how to do that and protect U.S. citizens. So--and this was all before 9/11. And we devised how to do that, made that effective and operating. So we were actually prepared to deploy about eight months before 9/11 and actually have a system that would run and manage the--what I call 20 terabytes a minute of activity.

So--but after 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to--between the White House and NSA and CIA, they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S. citizens and collect on domestically. So they started collecting from a commercial--the one commercial company that I know of that participated provided over 300--probably, on the average, about 320 million records of communication of a U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen inside this country.

AMY GOODMAN: What company?

WILLIAM BINNEY: AT&T. It was long-distance communications. So they were providing billing data. At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of--plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms. I mean, all those laws were being violated, including the Constitution. And that was a decision made that wasn't going to be reversed, so I could not stay there. I had to leave. [Read more...]



Vietnam seeks foreign help to beat mystery skin disease (21 April 2012)
Vietnam says it will ask for international help to find out what is causing a skin infection that has already killed 19 people.

More than 170 people in the country's central province of Quang Ngai have reported symptoms.

The disease begins with a rash on the hands and feet: it can progress to liver problems and multiple organ failure.

Vietnamese health ministry tests have failed to pinpoint the cause. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Here's where I'd normally say, "Has anyone tried a zapper on that?" But a mystery illness may also be caused by something in the environment (a chemical cause), or a deficiency.



Hacktivists in the frontline battle for the internet (21 April 2012)
If there is a battle over the future shape of the internet -- and society as a whole - then hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, Wikileaks and the file-sharing site Megaupload.com are among the frontline battalions.

While the individual incidents and clashes involving these groups may seem disparate and unconnected, those at the core of online activism say all these organisations, plus relatively mainstream movements such as Occupy and the Pirate Party, are linked.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the well-known advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), says the over-arching motivation of such efforts, whatever tactics are used, was to shift the nature of society.

"What unites these groups is the belief that the future is not about vertical, hierarchical government, but horizontal [peer-to-peer] government," he said. "This pits the forces of the information age against those of the industrial age, as we move from scarcity of information to abundance. The last year has established our ability to have revolutions, but not to govern in their wake -- but that's coming. [Read more...]



WikiLeaks supporters plan US foundation to restore funding (20 April 2012)
High-profile US supporters of WikiLeaks are planning to establish a foundation to break the 500-day "banking blockade" that has disrupted donations to the whistleblowing website.

WikiLeaks was forced to suspend many of its publishing operations in October last year after Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to process supporters' donations to the website, reducing its donation income by about 95%.

The move, which came after the US senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks, was called a blockade by the organisation's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and came without any legal orders or actions against the site.

Supporters based in the US are now in talks with Assange to establish a US-based foundation aimed at funding organisations cut off by private companies in situations with first amendment implications. [Read more...]



Balls on Alaska beach may be first of tsunami debris (21 April 2012)
Two sports balls from Japan may be the first positively identified items from the Japan tsunami of last March to reach Alaska shores. According to an April 19 online notice from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Response and Restoration, a soccer ball and volleyball were found on the beach of Middleton Island by David Baxter, a technician at the radar site on the remote island in the Gulf of Alaska.
Baxter noticed Japanese writing stenciled on the balls. His wife translated the writing on the soccer ball and traced it to the name of a school. NOAA confirmed that the school was in the tsunami zone, though located uphill and not seriously damaged by the disaster.

"We're partly getting things secondhand," said Doug Helton with NOAA offices in Seattle. "We're working with the State Department and the government of Japan."

NOAA thinks this could be one of the first times anything washed away during the tsunami has been sufficiently identified as to make it possible to return it to its owner. It's definitely the first such to be retrieved in Alaska, Helton said. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Unfortunately, this article opens to a video ad that has sound, and starts playing without the viewer taking any action.



Why Canada just pumps out cheap oil (20 April 2012)
"We have more oil moving into the system than the pipeline system in North America was designed to accommodate," as Randy Ollenberger, a managing director at BMO Capital Markets puts it.

Many factors are pushing the price for North American crude lower, but the hit for Canadian oil companies specifically is even worse. The most prevalent Canadian benchmark is called Western Canadian Select. A blend of conventional oil, bitumen and synthetics, WCS is heavier and therefore more difficult to process than some other types of oil like Brent and WTI.

Because of the added transportation and refining costs, the profit margin a refiner can earn from using WCS is less than they would get from WTI. So refiners are paying Canadian producers less per barrel as a result.

Canada exports almost three million barrels of oil per day, and the spread has at times been in excess of $30 per barrel of late, so that's $90 million in lost revenue, every day, for the oil patch. [Read more...]



Investors are the casualties in a booming oil patch (21 April 2012)
Alberta's oil patch is roaring. Oil prices are flying, pipelines are pumping millions of barrels a day, and companies are engaged in a rollicking spending spree.

Every 2½ weeks, companies shovel another billion dollars into oil sands projects. Drilling rigs across the province are tapping big new pools of oil. And firms desperate for skilled workers are scouring the globe to help them get on with ambitious growth plans. Western Canadian oil output is expected to surge by more than a third to 3.6 million barrels a day by 2018.

When Suncor Energy Inc. in February announced record 2011 profit and cash flow of $9.75-billion, chief executive officer Rick George couldn't quite restrain himself: "Internally, we actually thought we had a shot at a $10-billion cash flow number," he said.

"We didn't quite get there. But listen, it's all good, and really has been a great year."

Alberta's energy frenzy has all the makings of a hollering rodeo party. But there's one group conspicuously missing out on the action: investors. [Read more...]



Wisconsin gives $765,000 in bonuses despite budget hole (20 April 2012)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker established a program that has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in merit raises and bonuses to some state workers even as he preached cost-cutting and pushed through a law reducing most public workers' pay and eliminating their union rights.

An analysis of data The Associated Press obtained through an open records request showed Wisconsin agencies have handed out more than $765,000 in bonuses and merit raises this year to nearly 220 employees.

The awards are meant to reward stellar performance. But they come as the state faces a $143 million shortfall and after thousands of state workers took pay cuts through provisions in the collective bargaining law requiring them to contribute more to their pensions and health care.

Walker, who faces a June 5 recall election prompted by anger over the collective bargaining law, prides himself on fiscal restraint. [Read more...]



Violent Montreal student protest nets 10 arrests (20 April 2012)
Riot police used tear gas and concussion grenades on hundreds of students protesting outside Montreal's Palais des congrès Friday, where Premier Jean Charest was speaking at a symposium on northern development.

The mayhem reached deep inside the convention centre, where Charest's keynote speech was delayed after a group of protesters gained access to the building and confronted police guarding the meetings.

Two police officers and two protesters were injured in the standoff, and 10 people were arrested.

Friday's action is the latest in Quebec's escalating student movement against planned tuition-fee increases. [Read more...]



Florida scientist says evidence indicates BP oil spill impacting Gulf marine life (20 April 2012)
Tallahassee, Florida - On the second anniversary of the BP oil spill, a Florida scientist who is studying the Gulf of Mexico says his research indicates marine animals are still being affected by oil contamination.

Florida State Professor of Oceanography Jeff Chanton is using radiocarbon dating to get a better understanding of what happened to the 4.9 million barrels of oil that poured into the Gulf.

His research team has investigated different bays all along the Gulf Coast and found the most serious contamination near Louisiana.

He says Florida bays look pretty good overall. Pensacola Bay has had some oil contamination but appears to be faring fine, while Apalachicola Bay remains pristine.

But Chanton says his radiocarbon tracing techniques offer evidence that petrocarbon chemicals are affecting marine life. [Read more...]



Oiled rookeries look different 2 years after spill (20 April 2012)
CAT ISLAND, La. (AP) -- Before the BP oil spill, this shrubby island along the Louisiana coast was a lush green rookery where noisy brown pelicans and other birds clamored. Two years later, the island is smaller and ragged, full of dead black mangrove stumps and muddy patches.

Cat Island was one of the first places to be hit by thick mats of oil coming from 50 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. Crews hired by BP raced to try to protect the island with boom, skims and dispersant, but a lot of the effort was futile. Some of the most iconic images from spill -- confused, struggling pelicans covered in oil -- were seen near these parts.

There are fewer pelicans now on the island, which is washing away, a process perhaps exacerbated by the oil spill.

"It's eroding like sugar in hot coffee," said P.J. Hahn, coastal zone manager for Plaquemines Parish, as he looked at Cat Island from a boat on a recent morning.

Hahn studied the island and shook his head. He estimated in the past two years the rookery has shrunk from 4 acres to less than 1. [Read more...]



Shocking photos show coral reefs destroyed by fishermen using explosives, cyanide (20 April 2012)
KOMODO ISLAND, INDONESIA--Coral gardens that were among Asia's most spectacular, teeming with colorful sea life just a few months ago, have been transformed into desolate grey moonscapes by illegal fishermen who use explosives or cyanide to kill or stun their prey.

The site is among several to have been hit inside Komodo National Park, a 500,000-acre reserve in eastern Indonesia that spans several dusty, tan-colored volcanic islands. The area is most famous for its Komodo dragons -- the world's largest lizards -- and its remote and hard-to-reach waters also burst with staggering levels of diversity, from corals in fluorescent reds and yellows to octopuses with lime-green banded eyes to black-and-blue sea snakes.

Dive operators and conservationists say Indonesia's government is not doing enough to keep illegal fishermen out of the boundaries of the national park, a UN World Heritage site. They say enforcement declined greatly following the exit two years ago of a U.S.-based environmental group that helped fight destructive fishing practices.

Local officials disagree, pointing to dozens of arrests and several deadly gunbattles with suspects. [Read more...]



Cancer-killing dandelion tea gets $157K research grant (20 April 2012)
Researchers in Windsor, Ont., have received an additional $157,000 grant for a total of $217,000 to study how effective dandelion root extract is in fighting cancer.

Siyaram Pandey, a biochemist at the University of Windsor, has been studying the anti-cancer potential of dandelion root extract for almost two years.

His team's first phase of research showed that dandelion root extract forced a very aggressive and drug-resistant type of blood cancer cell, known as chronic monocytic myeloid leukemia, to essentially commit suicide.

Researchers then discovered that repeated treatment with low dose dandelion root extract was effective in killing most of the cancerous cells. [Read more...]



Birth defects more common in IVF babies: study (20 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Babies conceived through certain fertility treatment techniques are about one-third more likely to have a birth defect than babies conceived without any extra help from technology, according to a review of several dozen studies.

However, the researchers - whose findings were published in the journal Fertility and Sterility - did not determine why fertility treatments are tied to a higher risk of birth defects or whether the technology is even responsible.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) - in which the mother's egg is fertilized outside of her body and then transferred to her womb - has been available to would-be mothers for more than three decades, and numerous studies have looked at the potential hazards of these techniques.

Zhibin Hu at Nanjing Medical University and colleagues collected the results of 46 studies that compared the number of birth defects among children conceived using an IVF technique to children conceived normally. [Read more...]



Starbucks to phase out coloring from crushed beetles (20 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Starbucks said on its blog that it will stop using a natural, government-approved coloring made from crushed beetles in its strawberry flavoring by late June, bowing to pressure from some vegetarian customers.

Starbucks has been using the extract in its strawberry frappuccinos and smoothies, as well as some deserts like raspberry swirl cake.

"After a thorough, yet fastidious, evaluation, I am pleased to report that we are reformulating the affected products to assure the highest quality possible," Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks U.S., wrote in a blog post.

Instead, the coffeehouse chain said it plans to use lycopene, a natural, tomato-based extract. [Read more...]



Being yourself at work is not good for your career, study claims (19 April 2012)
The results showed that participants were more likely to "be themselves" with partners, followed by friends and then parents. However, they were much less likely to show their true self to work colleagues.

Those who opened up to their partners tended to have greater well-being and were more satisfied with life. But the same benefits were not seen from being authentic at work.

Dr Oliver Robinson, from the University of Greenwich in London, said: "You hear self-help gurus say that the secret of happiness is 'being yourself' or 'expressing your true feelings', but that doesn't seem to apply in the workplace.

"So in some circumstances, it may be that a polite smile or tactfully keeping quiet may be more conducive to your well-being than saying what you actually think and feel to work colleagues." [Read more...]



What you eat and how you live can switch on or off ageing genes (20 April 2012)
FOUR "Father Time" genes that help determine how fast we age have been uncovered by scientists.

The ageing genes are switched on or off by environmental and lifestyle factors such as diet, and may be programmed from an early age.

Knowing how the genes are altered could pave the way to new generations of anti-ageing drugs, researchers believe.

Scientists already knew that "epigenetic" changes - chemical alterations to DNA made by external factors in the environment - are important to ageing. [Read more...]



Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying--U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails (20 April 2012) [DN]
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I wanted to ask William Binney about this issue. When it comes to snail mail, the old postal system, it's very tough for the government to intercept mail, except in times of war, particular situations. When it comes to phone conversations, land phone conversations, you need a warrant to be able to intercept phone conversations. But what about email, and what about the communication now that is really the dominant form that not only Americans, but many people around the world communicate? What are the restrictions on the government in terms of email?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, after some of the laws they passed, like the PATRIOT Act and their secret interpretation of Section 215, which is--my view, of course, is same as Tom Drake's, is that that gives them license to take all the commercially held data about us, which is exceedingly dangerous, because if you take that and put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country. And having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges, if they want to target you. Like in my case, they fabricated several charges and attempted to indict us on them. Fortunately, we were able to produce evidence that would make them look very silly in court, so they didn't do it. In fact, it was--I was basically assembling evidence of malicious prosecution, which was a countercharge to them. So...

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe all emails, the government has copies of, in the United States?

WILLIAM BINNEY: I would think--I believe they have most of them, yes. [Read more...]



'Communication failure' on luxury cruise liner left adrift fishermen to die (20 April 2012)
A Panamanian man who saw two of his friends die from dehydration on a drifting fishing boat has claimed a luxury cruise ship 'ignored' their stricken vessel.

Adrian Vasquez and his two friends had been adrift on the Pacific Ocean for 16 days when they spotted the luxury cruise ship Star Princess.

Birdwatchers on board the luxury liner were using powerful spotting scopes on the promenade deck and noticed the fishing boat adrift a few miles away.

They alerted ship staff, informing them that the man aboard the fishing boat was waving a dark red sweater.

But the cruise ship did not stop. [Read more...]



Secret service in fresh embarassment over Sarah Palin photo comment (20 April 2012)
The secret service suffered fresh damage to its already battered reputation on Friday when it was disclosed that one of the agents involved in the Colombia prostitution scandal posted pictures on Facebook of Sarah Palin accompanied by a sexually suggestive comment.

The security service supervisor, David Chaney, had been assigned to protect her during the 2008 presidential campaign while she was John McCain's vice-presidential running-mate.

The photographs show Chaney in the background at a car door with Palin in the foreground. In a comment under one of the pictures, Chaney wrote: "I was really checking her out, if you know what I mean?"

Palin, interviewed on Fox on Thursday night, responded angrily. "Well, this agent who was kind of ridiculous there in posting pictures and comments about checking someone out. Well check this out bodyguard: you're fired." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Sounds like one desperate, desperate Secret Service agent.

The Anchorage paper has a link to the photo here.



Three more Secret Service officers set to be fired as investigators probe whether agents had sex with underage girls in Colombia (20 April 2012)
At least three more Secret Service officers implicated in the Colombia prostitution scandal were expected to lose their jobs today as the congressional committee probing the affair revealed it would be investigating whether any of the females involved were underage.

The disciplinary announcement expected later today would bring to six the number of Secret Service employees who no longer work for the agency in the wake of the scandal, according to a federal source.

The U.S. agents and military personnel involved could also face criminal charges if is proven that they had sex with girls under the age of 18.

When Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, was asked if any of the 11 men had, he said neither he nor the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, could be certain. [Read more...]



Tens of thousands protest Egypt's military rulers (20 April 2012)
Tens of thousands of protesters packed Cairo's downtown Tahrir Square on Friday in the biggest demonstration in months against the ruling military, aimed at stepping up pressure on the generals to hand over power to civilians and bar ex-regime members from running in upcoming presidential elections.

Both Islamists and liberals turned out in force for the protest, to show the widespread anger at the military over the country's political chaos ahead of the first presidential elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago. The confusion has raised suspicions the generals -- ruling since Mubarak's ouster -- are manipulating the process to preserve their power, to ensure the victory of a pro-military candidate and prevent reform.

"Down with military rule," protesters in Tahrir chanted, and banners draped around the sprawling plaza denounced candidates seen as "feloul," or "remnants" from Mubarak's regime.

But the crowds in Tahrir were divided between rival groups with differing complaints and goals. As a result, the participants failed to reach a unified list of demands.

Liberals and youth groups called for all factions to agree on an anti-military "revolution" candidate in the presidential vote, but the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists -- who have their own ambitions in the race -- refused to sign on. [Read more...]



NYC cops excavate basement in search of boy missing since 1979 (20 April 2012)
Etan Patz was six years old when he went missing on May 25, 1979. He was walking from the Manhattan apartment where he lived with his parents to his school bus stop when he disappeared and was never seen again. However, according to a CBS News report, New York City police personnel are currently directing an excavation by utility workers of a concrete floor in the basement of a building near where the boy disappeared 33 years ago.

Initial suspicion in the case has centered around neighbor Othniel Miller, now 76, who gave the boy a dollar the day before he disappeared, according to investigators. Miller was a neighborhood handyman who had a workshop in the basement of the building currently being searched. Shortly after Patz's disappearance, Miller gave the workshop a new concrete floor. Cadaver dogs indicated the presence of human remains in a recent search of the area.

The disappearance of Etan Patz became a iconic case. It changed the way cases of missing children are reported and investigated. The boy's face was the first missing child's picture to be distributed on milk cartons. It changed how parents raise their children, giving rise to today's hyper-involved "helicopter parents," whose children never spend a single unsupervised moment until approximately graduate school, as well as the corresponding backlash of the "Free Range Children" movement.

FBI spokespersons on the scene said that the removal of the basement floor was just one lead of many that are currently being pursued. [Read more...]



George Zimmerman granted $150K bond, apologizes to Trayvon Martin's family (20 April 2012)
Zimmerman arrived in court about 9 a.m., wearing a suit and handcuffs, with a chain across his waist. Also in the courtroom were Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, Trayvon Martin's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, and family attorney Benjamin Crump.

Minutes before the judge ruled on his bond, Zimmerman took the stand and apologized to Trayvon Martin's family. He was the last person to testify in court this morning.

"I did not know if he was armed or not," Zimmerman said of Trayvon Martin on the night of the shooting. He said he's sorry for the Martin family's loss.

Asked why he waited so long to apologize, Zimmerman said he was told not to reach out to the family. [Read more...]



Picture released that shows Zimmerman's bloody head wound minutes after Trayvon Martin shooting (20 April 2012)
A graphic photograph showing blood pouring from the back of George Zimmerman's head on the night he shot teenager Trayvon Martin was released today - and could be the key piece of evidence that will clear him of murder.

It was released on the same day Zimmerman appeared in court and spoke to the slain teen's parents for the first time, telling them: 'I am sorry for the loss of your son...I did not know if he was armed or not,' before he was released on $150,000 bond.

The photograph, obtained by ABC, was said to have been taken three minutes after the shooting took place on the night of February 26, and shows blood coming from two cuts and a possible contusion forming on the crown of his head.

It is the first piece of evidence to give substantial merit to Zimmerman's claim that 17-year-old Martin bashed his head against the concrete pavement as the 28-year-old tried to defend himself. [Read more...]



Personal data of airline passengers sent to US from Europe after controversial bill (19 April 2012)
MILLIONS of airline customers' personal data will be handed over to the United States after MEPs voted for new laws that it's claimed are vital to tackle terrorism.

Passenger Name Records, which include names, addresses, credit cards details and phone numbers, as well as religious meal choices and some sensitive health information, will be shared after the European Parliament voted to approve a controversial bill.

The United States will be able to store and actively exploit the data for up to five years to investigate terrorism and "transnational crime", although names will be removed after six months.

The data will then be retained for a further 10 years, under stricter access rules. [Read more...]



India tests long-range nuclear missile (19 April 2012)
India test-fired a long range missile capable of reaching deep into China and Europe on Thursday, thrusting the emerging Asian power into an elite club of nations with intercontinental nuclear weapons capabilities.

A scientist at the launch site confirmed the launch was successful, minutes after television images showed the rocket with a range of more than 5,000km (3,100 miles) blasting through clouds from an island off India's east coast.

"It has met all the mission objectives," SP Dash, director of the test range, told Reuters. "It hit the target with very good accuracy."

The Indian-made Agni V is the crowning achievement of a now-mothballed missile programme developed primarily with a possible threat from neighbouring China in mind. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: "I know how we can cut costs! Let's ship all the I.T. jobs to India, and all the manufacturing jobs to China! They could use the money, and we could use the cheap labor -- it's a win-win. What could possibly go wrong with such a great plan?"



Boehner to Catholic bishops: Take 'bigger look' at Republican budget (19 April 2012)
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Wednesday dismissed criticism brought against the Republican budget plan by Catholic bishops.

Referencing Matthew 25, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called on Congress to put the poor first in budget priorities and rethink cuts to programs that benefited the least among us.

But Boehner, a Catholic, said at a press conference Wednesday the cuts were necessary, despite the impact they may have on the poor.

"What's more of a concern to me is the fact that if we don't start to make some decisions about getting our fiscal house in order there won't be a safety net," he explained. "There won't be these programs." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: But there's plenty of money for every big fat oil war that the Bush family wants, isn't there?



Colombia prostitute reveals $800 cash row with US agent (19 April 2012)
"They never told me they were with Obama," she told the newspaper, adding: "They were very discreet."

In an interview with the New York Times, the unnamed woman said the US agent had agreed a price of $800 for a night with her.

But he changed his mind in the morning, she said, offering just $30 and sparking a furious row that ended with police being asked to intervene.

She told the Times she did not describe herself as a prostitute, suggesting that her price indicated she was a high-end escort.

"It's the same, but it's different. It's like when you buy a fine rum or a BlackBerry or an iPhone. They have a different price."

The woman said she was now scared of the implications of what had happened and planned to leave the city in the coming days. [Read more...]



Scandal ousts three Secret Service personnel (19 April 2012)
The Secret Service on Wednesday announced the departure of three employees connected to a prostitution scandal last week involving members of President Obama's security detail who were in Cartagena, Colombia.

As the agency tried to manage the fallout from the embarrassing episode, it said in a statement that one agent is expected to resign and another, a supervisor, intends to retire. A third, also a supervisor, has been recommended for firing but will have an opportunity to appeal, officials said.

In all, 11 Secret Service employees -- either agents or staff members of the agency's uniformed division -- and 10 military personnel are suspected of being involved in a night of carousing that included heavy drinking, visits to strip clubs and prostitutes on April 11, two nights before Obama was to arrive in the seaside town of Cartagena for an international summit.

The agency and the Defense Department are each investigating the alleged misconduct. The remaining eight Secret Service personnel are on administrative leave, and their top-secret security clearances have been suspended. The military has returned its service members to their home bases. [Read more...]



Postal Service closings could be averted by Senate measure (18 April 2012)
WASHINGTON -- The Senate began debate Tuesday on postal reform legislation that could avert the planned closing of the New Orleans mail-processing facility that employs 880 workers. The bill would require the Postal Service, which is reporting record financial losses, to retain regional overnight delivery capability -- at least for some markets. That should ensure roughly half the 260 mail-processing facilities slated for closing stay open, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who pushed the proposal.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said it's impossible to tell whether the New Orleans processing facility would be among the survivors.

"But at least this gives us a fighting chance," said Landrieu, who has been involved in negotiations that led to the reconfigured bill brought to the Senate floor Tuesday.

Landrieu said a key component for Louisiana makes it harder for the Postal Service to close rural post offices. Closings slated in some communities, including Lake Providence and Norco, she said, could be a major blow to new industrial facilities there. [Read more...]



Keyes charged in Samantha Koenig abduction, murder (19 April 2012)
A self-employed Anchorage carpenter police linked to the abduction of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig is now charged in her disappearance and slaying, according to a grand jury indictment.
The indictment charges Israel Keyes, 34, with kidnapping and killing Koenig, receiving ransom money and using a stolen debit card to pilfer a bank account. The charges -- punishable by life in prison or death if he's found guilty in federal court -- come 11 weeks to the day since Koenig was abducted from the Midtown coffee hut where she worked.

Keyes forced Koenig out of the coffee stand about 8 p.m. on Feb. 1 and walked her to his pickup, parked across Tudor Road at a Home Depot, the indictment says. He stole a debit card from a vehicle Koenig shared with someone else and sent text messages using her phone that were intended to conceal her abduction, the indictment says.

Keyes forced Koenig to give him the card's personal access number and scratched the number onto the card, the indictment says. He killed her on Feb. 2, then flew to Houston, Texas, the indictment says. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: You can see photos of her scummy-looking killer on other sites, but this is the local paper and gives some great detail, like a timeline, and a link to a PDF copy of the Israel Keyes indictment.



Pepper spray cop's boss calls it quits (19 April 2012)
The chief of police at the University of California Davis will resign so the school can move on from a ghastly incident last year that ended with one of her officers becoming known around the world as the "pepper spray cop."

The revelation was made by Chief Annette Spicuzza herself in an email last night to a Sacramento newspaper. She and Lt. John Pike have been on leave since late November, after Pike deployed streams of pepper spray on Nov. 18 against a group of about 20 student protesters who were sitting on the pavement demonstrating against recent tuition hikes. Two were hospitalized following the incident, and 11 more were treated for exposure.

"My 27 years in law enforcement have been dedicated to the ethical and committed service to the departments and communities I have been proud to be a part of," she told The Sacramento Bee. "For the past seven years, I have accomplished many good things for both the Police Department and community here at UC Davis; and am grateful to those of you who have remembered this."

Spicuzza added that she did not want the incident to be a "defining moment" for the university or her own career. [Read more...]



City Council votes down extension for Occupy Madison (18 April 2012)
The Madison City Council voted not to extend an April 30 deadline for Occupy Madison dispersal as the group's legal hurdles piled up.

For the second consecutive week, members of Occupy Madison pressed the City Council to allow their encampment to continue, even if it meant moving. Council members, however, voted unanimously against granting an extension because of zoning violations and potential problems receiving state approval.

Alds. Marsha Rummel, Lisa Subeck and Brian Solomon on Monday proposed a resolution to let Occupy Madison stay for a limited time on the city-owned, vacant asphalt lot on the north side of the 800 block while the city explored ways to deal with homeless issues. But after learning that Occupy Madison will no longer qualify for a state temporary camping permit at that site after April 30, an amendment was made Tuesday night to change the location of the camp.

City Attorney Michael May on Tuesday issued a memo saying Occupy Madison's temporary dwellings will no longer qualify for a state temporary camping permit after April 30. [Read more...]



Aung San Suu Kyi to leave Burma for first time in decades (18 April 2012)
After nearly two decades under house arrest in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to Norway and Britain in June, her party said on Wednesday.

It will be the first time she has set foot outside Burma in 24 years and the first time a member of her National League for Democracy has made a diplomatic visit abroad.

Nyan Win, her party spokesman, said she plans to visit Norway first, where she will have meetings in Oslo.

She will move on to the UK and is expected to visit Oxford, where she attended university in the 1970s. But it is unclear which British dignitaries she will be meeting. [Read more...]



It Doesn't Mean You're Crazy -- Talking to Yourself Has Cognitive Benefits, Study Finds (18 April 2012)
"One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening." Franklin P. Jones once said.

Can talking to oneself also help adults?

In a recent study published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, psychologists Gary Lupyan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Daniel Swingley (University of Pennsylvania) conducted a series of experiments to discover whether talking to oneself can help when searching for particular objects. The studies were inspired by observations that people often audibly mutter to themselves when trying to find, for example, a jar of Peanut Butter on a supermarket shelf, or the stick of butter in their fridge.

In the first experiment, participants were shown 20 pictures of various objects and asked to find a particular one. In some trials, participants saw a text label telling them what object they should find ("Please search for the teapot.") In other trials, the same subjects were asked to search again while actually say the word to themselves. It was found that speaking to themselves helped people find the objects more quickly. [Read more...]



AP Wins Pulitzer for Exposing NYPD's CIA-Linked Intel Program, Leading Widespread Spying on Muslims (17 April 2012) [DN]
AMY GOODMAN: But you certainly caught the attention of many throughout this country as you talked about the New York Police Department. Explain very briefly, if you will, what happened after 9/11. Talk about how the CIA hooked up with the New York Police Department.

MATT APUZZO: Well, so, Ray Kelly came back as police commissioner, and the city also hired David Cohen to be the intelligence chief at the NYPD. Cohen is the former top spy in the United States at the CIA, the deputy director of operations. So he came in basically to build an intelligence division that had kind of become backwater, glorified chauffeur service for VIPs. And one of his first calls was to--back to Langley, back to his old employer. And, you know, remember, this is late two thousand--this is 2002. And so, he says, "Hey, I need--I need somebody. I need somebody to come up here and help me out."

And remember, the recriminations and finger-pointing of 9/11 were really starting to happen. Everybody, rightly, was focused on how to prevent another attack. And the CIA didn't want to say no to New York, and they dispatched a senior officer to New York to basically be the NYPD's private liaison with the CIA. That opened the door to a relationship in which the CIA officer who was working there helped set up a lot of these programs, helped set up programs to be the eyes and--to have eyes and ears inside every Muslim community in the city. You know, the demographics unit, which is, you know, these rakers, as you referred to, informants known as "mosque crawlers," a lot of that was built with the help from the CIA, this officer who helped start these programs while on CIA payroll. [Read more...]



KPFT (90.1 FM) off the air today with transmitter issues, station says (18 April 2012)
KPFT (90.1 FM), the Houston radio station owned by the Pacifica Foundation, is off the air today because of problems with its primary transmitter, according to a notice on the station's web site.

The notice described the issue as "technical problems" at the station's tower site and said workers were attempting to restore the signal.

The Pacifica Radio station said it can be heard at its website and via its subsidiary towers at 89.5 FM in Galveston, 89.7 FM in Huntsville and 90.3 FM in Goodrich). [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: KPFT is one of the Pacifica stations, serving the Houston, Texas news market.



Study: GOP guests dominate Sunday morning talk shows (18 April 2012)
If you feel like the Sunday morning political talk shows are overrun by Republican politicians, their surrogates and other right-wing spinners, you're actually right, according to a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group.

FAIR's magazine, Extra! tracked the breakdown of guests featured in one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions on the four main Sunday morning talk shows, ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press," CBS's "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday" from June 2011 to March 2012. The results skewed heavily Republican, white and male, with only token representation by blacks and Latinos, and virtually no appearances by guests outside of one of the two national political parties.

Extra! points to November 6 of 2011 as typical of the ideological breakdown of the Sunday shows. CBS's Bob Schieffer welcomed "a cross section of Republicans" to discuss the issues facing the primary that week. On ABC's "This Week," lone liberal Arianna Huffington was featured alongside conservatives Matthew Dowd, George Will and Niall Ferguson. "Meet the Press" featured Republican operative Alex Castellanos with Wall Street Journal conservative scribe Kimberly Strassel alongside a pair of middle-of-the-road Beltway journalists.

The study showed that one-on-one interviews with policy makers and other national figures, which are the ratings bread and butter of the talk shows, featured 166 Republicans to Democrats' 70. Roundtable discussions welcomed 189 Republican guests and 109 Democrats. [Read more...]



Longstanding East Village Vegetarian Diner Kate's Joint Seized By Marshal (17 April 2012)
It appears the beloved (some would say overrated) vegetarian diner Kate's Joint has reached the end of its rope. EV Grieve reports that the establishment, located on the corner of Avenue B and 4th Street, has been seized by the Marshal. The news does not come as a shock--owner Kate Halpern had been trying to raise money to pay back rent through an Indiegogo fundraiser that tried to appeal to locals' desire to "preserve the East Village. It is about preserving small, female owned businesses. Don't let Avenue B turn in to a row of Starbucks and banks; help keep small businesses alive!"

Calls to Kate's Joint have gone unanswered, but as of last week, the Indiegogo page had raised less than $5,000 of the $30,000 Halpern said she needed to stay afloat. The demise of Kate's comes on the heels of news that popular bar Lakeside Lounge will close at the end of the month. On a semi-related note, Eater reports that Kenny's Castaways on Bleecker Street is now on the market. "The bar was originally opened in 1967 by Pat Kenny and has been run by his family ever since, hosting music luminaries like Jeff Buckley, New York Dolls, Blondie, Kiss, and Patti Smith," recalls Eater's Scott Solish. "It was also home to Phish's first New York City concert." And a pretty sweet setlist! [Read more...]



Rescuers searching for tangled whale off Orange County, California (18 April 2012)
LAGUNA BEACH -- A team of rescuers is hoping to continue Wednesday to untangle a 40-foot gray whale from a line that's wrapped around the whale's left pectoral fin and entangled in its mouth.

The team worked for about two hours Tuesday to cut through the tangle on the older, healthy whale. As darkness fell, boats returned to shore for safety reasons. On Wednesday, Coast Guard helicopters as well as boats searched for the distressed whale to continue rescue efforts.

Melissa Sciacca of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center said it's not clear if the whale is still near Orange County waters, or if it had moved toward San Diego or Los Angeles.

"Once the animal is located, that will determine what our next steps are," she said. [Read more...]



TNK-BP slammed over oil spills in Russia's major oil field (18 April 2012)
TNK-BP has been grilled by the Russian Minister of Natural Resources Yuri Trutnev over negligent drilling safety after allegedly allowing more than 700 oil spills this year.

After visiting one of the oldest oil fields Samotlor in Nizhnevartovsk district, which is developed by a TNK-BP subsidiary, Trutnev slammed TNK-BP management over its high breakdown rate and described the drilling methods as 'inadmissible'.

The majority of spills happen because of the worn out equipment, he stressed.

"The main reason [of breakdown rate] is that the company doesn't invest enough money to replace old pipelines in order to fight old spills and prevent new ones," Trutnev said. "They should simply invest more money in modernization of the exploration system". [Read more...]



AMSC Taking Sinovel Infringement Suit to China's Supreme Court (9 April 2012)
American Superconductor Corp. (AMSC), a U.S. maker of wind-turbine components, filed an appeal with China's highest court for an intellectual property lawsuit against Sinovel Wind Group Co. (601558)

The company filed the appeal with China's Supreme People's Court today for a case that was dismissed by a provincial high court last week, Devens, Massachusetts-based AMSC said in a statement.

AMSC is pursuing four suits in China against Sinovel, seeking more than $1.2 billion in damages. It accused the Chinese turbine maker, formerly its largest customer, of violating sales contracts and stealing its technology in September. Today's filing is for a $200,000 copyright infringement case against the Chinese turbine maker and Dalian Guotong Electric Co.

"While this case means little to us from a monetary perspective, we will continue to seek justice through the Chinese courts on this matter of global importance," John Powell, AMSC's general counsel, said in the statement. [Read more...]



U.S. Wind Energy Industry Confronts Squalls (18 April 2012)
Wind energy in the United States faces strong cross-currents--some blowing in from overseas, and others being stirred up right at home.

The nation that comfortably led the world in wind power (in both installed capacity and growth) as recently as three years ago saw a 17 percent increase in wind capacity to nearly 47,000 megawatts (MW) in 2011, the American Wind Energy Association said recently.

While the 6,800 MW in new installations marked a slight increase in growth compared to 2010 (5,100 MW, or a 16 percent increase) it was nowhere near the 40 percent to 50 percent annual growth rate the industry saw in the United States from 2007 through 2009.

Still, "American wind power is really at the heart of an American success story," said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. "2011 was another year of double-digit growth, leading to America's fastest growing source of made in America jobs ... we're well on our way to providing 20 percent of America's electricity by the year 2030." [Read more...]



Congress falls short on oil spill safety, panel says (17 April 2012)
WASHINGTON -- Two years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion unleashed the worst oil spill in American history, Congress has failed to take meaningful action to prevent a similar disaster, according to a new report from members of a presidential panel.

The report cited significant progress by the Obama administration and the oil industry, giving them a B and a C+ grade, respectively, for their efforts to bolster safety, spill response and resources. Congress, however, got a D grade for its inability to "enact any legislation responding to the explosion and spill."

The assessments were graded against the panel's year-old recommendations.

The report by members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling complained that Congress had failed to pass legislation requiring the offshore oil and gas industry to bear the costs of federal oversight through fees on leasing and permitting reviews. The presidential panel had also recommended that the $75-million liability cap for offshore oil spills be increased substantially. [Read more...]



Georgia welfare law requires drug test to receive aid (17 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Low-income adults seeking public assistance in Georgia will have to pass a drug test before receiving benefits under a measure signed by Governor Nathan Deal on Monday, making it the latest state to push through the controversial testing requirement.

Supporters of the Social Responsibility and Accountability Act said it is designed to ensure that welfare payments, called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, are not "diverted to illicit drug use."

Under the law set to take effect on July 1, applicants who fail a drug test will become ineligible to receive benefits for a certain time period, based on the number of past test failures.

The measure will not affect benefits for children. If a parent fails a drug test, children can still receive payments through another person designated by the state.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia opposed the drug-testing requirement and believes it is unconstitutional, Executive Director Debbie Seagraves said on Tuesday. There is no evidence that welfare recipients are any more likely than other groups to use illegal drugs, she said. [Read more...]



ALEC eliminates task force on social issues (17 April 2012)
ALEC's 2012 National Chairman and Indiana State Representative David Frizzell released a statement indicating that the group would go back to focusing on economic issues only.

"We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy," Frizzell said. "The remaining budgetary and economic issues will be reassigned."

"While we recognize there are other critical, non-economic issues that are vitally important to millions of Americans, we believe we must concentrate on initiatives that spur competitiveness and innovation and put more Americans back to work."

ALEC's economic focus will continue to be on repealing the minimum wage, paid sick days laws, the estate tax, and capital gains taxes along with privatizing public lands and pushing state union-busting measures. [Read more...]



Walled gardens look rosy for Facebook, Apple -- and would-be censors (17 April 2012)
It was in May 2008 that Jonathan Zittrain first sounded the warning. While the argument was raging -- as it is now -- about censorship of the internet by governments seeking to control what their populations read, in countries such as China, India and Pakistan, the professor of cyberlaw at Oxford and Harvard universities had another concern: what if it were actually the gadgets we used that were in effect censoring the world that we could connect to, and the things we could do?

Zittrain fretted that smartphones, which were just beginning to take off, might actually limit what users could do online compared with devices such as personal computers. Besides the obvious difference -- a smartphone is light and can be slotted in a pocket; a personal computer is power-hungry and bulky -- there's another subtle but essential difference. Personal computers are "generative": they can be programmed to do more than they were set up to. Smartphones, on the other hand, generally can't be programmed directly by the user. For the most part, they're appliances, as limited in what they can do as a coffee maker.

In his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain noted: "We care little about the devices we're using to access the net ... we don't think of that as significant to its future the way we think of [direct censorship]."

But does the rise of appliance-like smartphones -- and more generally of "walled gardens" such as Facebook, MySpace and Google+ -- presage an age where we simply cut ourselves off from uncomfortable truths online because our devices, or the sites we use, won't show them to us, like a North Korean radio made so it cannot be tuned to unauthorised sources? [Read more...]



Does Fracking Cause Earthquakes? (16 April 2012)
There are plenty of reasons to worry about fracking--groundwater contamination, methane leaks, that flaming tapwater thing. But can it really cause earthquakes? That's the question the US Geological Survey set out to answer after a spate of tremors in the Midwest--an area not usually known for earthquakes--alerted scientists to the possibility that some of them might be manmade.

Seismic activity in the Midwest started increasing around twelve years ago but picked up significantly in the past few years, says seismologist Bill Ellsworth, the lead author of a new USGS study examining potential links between fracking and earthquakes in the region. Since 1970, the baseline for earthquakes in the Midwest measuring above a 3.0 hovered at around 21 per year, but beginning in 2001, that number began to rise. There's been a "remarkable increase" in the past few years: The number of 3.0+ earthquakes rose from 29 in 2008 to 50 in 2009, then to 87 in 2010, and in 2011, to a staggering 134. Something unusual was going on, but what? As Ellsworth and his colleagues at USGS ask in the study, "Is this increase natural or manmade?" And if it's manmade, is fracking--which has ramped up in the region in the past several years--to blame?

According to the study, the answer to the first question is "almost certainly." But the second one is a little more complicated. Though fracking does cause tiny tremors, the USGS scientists found no links between the process of fracking itself and the larger earthquakes that have been occurring more frequently. They did, however, notice that earthquakes have clustered around wastewater wells in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and neighboring states. Disposing of wastewater by pumping it deep into the ground is standard practice in many industries, including mining, chemical manufacturing, and oil and gas extraction, and the oil and gas industry alone operates tens of thousands of wastewater disposal wells. But the recent surge of fracking activity, which uses millions of gallons of water to crack rock deep in the ground and release natural gas, has boosted the volume of wastewater being injected into the ground.

Stresses are everywhere in the earth's crust, Ellsworth explains, and drilling activity can affect them. Many wastewater wells actually go deeper than gas drilling wells, reaching an older layer of rock known as basement rock, where stresses and faults are more common. The high pressure used to pump water into waste wells can cause those faults to shift, and the water itself can lubricate already-stressed faults, easing their movement and making an earthquake-causing slip more likely. As Ellsworth told NPR,"small perturbations can tip the scales, allowing an earthquake that might not otherwise happen for a very long time." [Read more...]



7 Tax Breaks You Probably Overlooked (16 April 2012)
Most people know that they get tax breaks on their kids and on the mortgage interest they pay on their homes, but experts say many taxpayers leave a slew of other deductions and credits on the table that could potentially save them big bucks. Here are some things besides owning a home or having a child that can benefit you when tax time rolls around.

Enrolling in higher education. When the economy went south and unemployment rose, many people decided to go back to school. Although the cost of higher education is rising rapidly, a few tax breaks take some of the sting out of those tuition bills.

"I think a lot of people aren't aware that if you have qualified tuition, you may very well qualify for one of the breaks," says Jackie Perlman, tax analyst with the H&R Block Tax Institute. The lifetime learning credit gives you up to $2,000 against your tuition costs. "The good news is, you don't even have to be in a degree program," Perlman says, which could be a big help for anyone picking up classes on an ad-hoc basis while job-hunting. This credit is phased out above a certain income level; single filers making up to $61,000 and married filers with a combined income of up to $122,000 are eligible.

Another education credit is the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives up to $2,500 back for the costs of tuition and books for people enrolled in a post-secondary degree program. In addition to credits, Perlman says there also are numerous deductions available for room and board, travel, loan interest and other expenses associated with college, the qualifications for which vary and depend on income, degree and other factors. [Read more...]



Occupy Unveils 'Spring Awakening' (16 April 2012)
During the long winter months, Occupy protesters kept reassuring those of us in the media still covering their actions that the spring would prove to be a time of resurgence for Occupy Wall Street. If the "Spring Awakening" meet-up at Central Park this past weekend is any indication of future turnouts, OWS organizers may be correct in their predictions.

Hundreds of protesters gathered at New York City's most famous park, an inspired location that placed Occupy in the heart of tourist alley, guaranteeing the group's activities attracted the attention of curious passersby.

Two women walking by the "People's Assembly" that took place during the tail end of the day's festivities were heard remarking, "That's the group that occupies shit"--a not entirely inaccurate statement.

"Today is about coming together in a space that's going to allow us to be less confrontational than we often are downtown and kind of bond, and also engage the Saturday, Central Park-going public," said Scott, an OWS protester. [Read more...]



New York unions to join 99-percenters in major May Day rally (15 April 2012)
Major unions and the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement in New York have announced plans to stage a joint massive protest rally on May first -- the international workers' day, Press TV reports.

"The Occupy Wall Street has joined with all the major unions and labor unions in New York City and it is going to be quite a massive day of action, with actions all over the city, people demanding justice against Wall Street bankers and corporations," said activist Caleb Maupin from the International Action Center in New York in a Saturday interview.

The event is expected to trigger a remarkable public participation as the Occupy movement has gained a significant momentum over the past five months, Maupin added.

Meanwhile, anti-corporatism protesters have begun spending the nights on sidewalks of the Wall Street, near the New York Stock Exchange and in front of banks. [Read more...]



Vegetarian Diet for a Better Mood? (12 April 2012)
Can eating meat be detrimental for your mood and mental health? Is there a reason that your vegetarian friend is so energetic and cheerful all the time? The latest nutrition research suggests there may be scientific validity to these observations.

According to a recent study published this February by Bonnie Beezhold in Nutrition Journal, a randomized group of omnivores reported improved mood states after only two weeks of eliminating meat, fish and poultry from their diets.

The study consisted of three groups. The omnivores were randomly assigned to either a control group, which included consuming meat, fish and poultry daily, a second group assigned to consuming fish 3-4 times a week but avoiding meat and poultry, and a third group that avoided meat, fish, and poultry altogether. At baseline and at the end of the two weeks, the participants completed a food frequency questionnaire, a "Profile of Mood States" questionnaire, and a "Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale." According to the self-reported results, both the omnivore's and the fish eater's moods remained unchanged, while the vegetarian group showed significant improvements in their mood scores at the end of the two week trial. (1) This and other studies conducted by Beezhold suggest that vegetarianism is associated with overall healthier mood status.

So what is it about meat and poultry that may have adverse affects on our mood? Omnivorous diets are high in arachidonic acid (omega-6) in comparison to vegetarian diets. Past research has shown that high intakes of arachidonic acid, found mainly in red meat, poultry, and some fish, promotes changes in the brain that can negatively disturb our mood. High blood levels of arachidonic acid, in relationship to eicosapentaenoic acid (omega-3), have been linked to clinical symptoms of depression. (2) While omega-3s, especially fish oil, have become the poster child for brain function and lowering oxidative stress, the high levels of omega-6 in our modern omnivorous diets may be doing us more harm than good. A possible solution to this imbalance of omegas in your diet could be the addition of several amazing plant sources of omega-3s such as walnuts and flaxseed, that provide the benefits of omega-3s with lower levels of omega-6s. [Read more...]



Florida Seeks to Delay Approval of $7.8 Billion BP Settlement (16 April 2012)
The Attorney General for the State of Florida has asked a federal court to delay granting preliminary approval of BP Plc's $7.8 billion settlement with businesses and individuals suing over the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi, representing her constituents, said in a filing in Louisiana federal court on Friday that there is not enough information available about the settlement terms.

She asked that the court "delay any immediate decision on the preliminary approval" of the settlement and to establish a schedule to allow interested parties an opportunity to review the settlement.

The settlement requires approval from U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. [Read more...]



Morocco picks EDF green arm for wind farm project (16 April 2012)
The Taza wind project, with a capacity of 150 megawatts (MW), is to be located in northern Morocco to the east of Fes.

Morocco, which has no oil production and relies heavily on energy imports, wants to make the most of its ample wind and sunlight to become a top renewable energy producer.

The kingdom aims to build 4,000 MW in wind and solar power capacity by 2020 to meet nearly half its energy consumption.

The project will be equipped with 50 Alstom wind turbines of 3 MW each. EDF Energies Nouvelles, Mitsui and Alstom will subcontract at least 30 percent of the construction work to Moroccan companies. [Read more...]



George Washington voted Britain's greatest enemy commander (15 April 2012)
(Reuters) - American revolutionary leader George Washington has been voted the greatest enemy commander to face Britain, lauded for his spirit of endurance against the odds and the enormous impact of his victory.

In a contest organised by the National Army Museum, Washington triumphed over Irish independence hero Michael Collins, France's Napoleon Bonaparte, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Making the case for Washington, historian Stephen Brumwell said the American War of Independence (1775-83) was "the worst defeat for the British Empire ever."

"His personal leadership was crucial," he said. [Read more...]



Facebook supports Cispa cyber-security bill (16 April 2012)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a statement on its website that the language used in the act was too vague.

"The broad language around what constitutes a cyber-security threat leaves the door wide open for abuse," stated the organisation.

"For example, the bill defines 'cyber threat intelligence' and 'cyber-security purpose' to include 'theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.'

"It's a little piece of Sopa [the Stop Online Piracy Act] wrapped up in a bill that's supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defence against cyber-security threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property."

Sopa, along with the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa), are two other bills being considered by members of the US Congress. [Read more...]



Google: friend or foe to the open internet? (16 April 2012)
Threats to the open internet from governments and corporations have never before been so grave, Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, told the Guardian in an interview on Sunday:

"There are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past ... it's scary."

The list of threats to the net Brin cites is compelling. On one side, there are new "walled gardens" hived off from the open internet, unsearchable domains created and controlled by companies such as Apple and Facebook. These are a particular concern for Google as content held within Facebook's domain, or within apps, are inaccessible to the site's crawling software and so don't appear in Google's index.

This is a loss of commercial power for Google, and potentially a loss of future revenue. The growth of Facebook's traffic and reach is also a direct threat, as people start to navigate the web through social networks rather than search -- Facebook traffic now occasionally overtakes even that from Google on sites like the Guardian. [Read more...]



Oracle and Google's Android copyright row trial begins (15 April 2012)
Java was first released in 1995 and allows software to be run across computer platforms, rather than just being limited to one type of operating system.

Oracle - a business hardware and software provider - inherited the intellectual properties when it took over Java's original developer, Sun Microsystems, in 2009.

The language is used by many business applications as well as other software, such as the video game Minecraft, on PCs.

Oracle argues that by using its intellectual property, and then giving Android away for free, Google undermined the possibility of it licensing Java to mobile phone makers.

It adds: "Because Android exploits Java but is not fully compatible with it, Android represents Sun's, and now Oracle's, nightmare: an incompatible forking of the Java platform, which undermines the fundamental 'write once, run anywhere' premise of Java that is so critical to its value and appeal." [Read more...]



Free antiviral programs offer enough protection (16 April 2012)
Q: We are planning to buy a new desktop computer with Windows 7. We will be replacing an almost 10-year-old system running Windows XP. Our question is, should we still buy security software, or does the antivirus software that's included in Windows 7 provide adequate security? We have religiously bought Norton antivirus products over the years.

A: All big e-mail providers scan for viruses in incoming mail, but that still leaves the door open to a wide range of nasty infections that can be inadvertently downloaded to your computer. Things like spyware that steals personal information, adware that can give you a case of the pop-ups, and scareware that announces your computer is infected and tries to sell you a remedy.

That's the bad news. The good news is that you don't have to pay Norton or anyone else to guard against these dangers. Windows 7 comes with Windows Defender, a decent antimalware program, and you can install a second free program like Avast Free Antivirus (from avast.com), Ad-Aware Free Antivirus (lavasoft.com), or Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free (malwarebytes.org).

I should note that the options are more limited for Mac owners - largely because Macs have always been less vulnerable to hackers than Windows. As I pointed out a short time ago, the best free antimalware solution for Macs may be Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition, from sophos.com. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: I don't necessarily endorse any of the opinions that I link to here.



Cosby blames gun culture for Trayvon Martin's death (16 April 2012)
"When a person has a gun, sometimes their mind clicks that this thing is -- it will win arguments and straighten people out," the 74-year-old African-American actor told CNN.

"In the wrong hands, in the wrong mind, it's death. It's wounding people, people who don't have money to buy a decent meal for themselves, yet, someone will put an illegal gun in their hand," he said, lamenting that firearms are "all around this United States."

Cosby was speaking to CNN about the shooting of 17-year-oldTrayvon Martin, a case which has gripped the nation and sparked a fresh debate about race relations and the right to self-defense in the United States.

Prosecutors in Florida last week filed second-degree murder charges against neighborhood watch guard George Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, over the shooting of Martin in a gated community of Sanford, Florida. [Read more...]



Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin (15 April 2012)
He said the threat to the freedom of the internet came from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry attempting to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" so-called walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly controlled what software could be released on their platforms.

The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google's partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks.

He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long but he had been proven wrong: "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle."

Although he said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, he also warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and Balkanising the web. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: Exactly. Now, can we please have the old Gmail format back? What's this "labels" thing? Everyone wants folders! And what's wrong with basic HTML format, for those of us who aren't sold on an "upgrade" to Google Chrome?



11 Secret Service agents put on leave amid prostitution inquiry (15 April 2012)
Fraser said he was "disappointed by the entire incident and . . . this behavior is not in keeping with the professional standards expected of members of the United States military."

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Saturday that Secret Service officials conducting an internal investigation told him that the staff at the Hotel Caribe summoned local police after discovering a woman in the room of one agent after 7 a.m., against the hotel's policy for visitors of paying guests.

Although the agent eventually paid the woman and she left, King added, police reported the incident to the U.S. Embassy, which informed the Secret Service. The agency quickly recalled the agents and replaced them with a new team before Obama's arrival Friday afternoon at the Hilton a few blocks away.

King praised the agency for removing the men involved, but he added that "everything they did was a violation of proper conduct."

"First of all, to be getting involved with prostitutes in a foreign country can leave yourself vulnerable to blackmail and threats," King said. "To be bringing prostitutes or almost anyone into a security zone when you're supposed to protect the president is totally wrong." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: The Washington Post's site was giving me "busy" messages this morning and had apparently crashed -- was it due to interest in this scandal, or something else?



Canada and U.S. singled out at summit over drugs, Cuba (14 April 2012)
Canada and the United States are finding themselves at odds with Latin American countries on two thorny issues -- the war on drugs and the exclusion of Cuba -- at a summit of hemispheric leaders in Colombia.

The event's host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, delivered a frank speech Saturday to the assembled heads of state and government in which he said it would be "unacceptable" to hold another Summit of the Americas without Cuba. The communist country was suspended from the Organization of American States, the main organizing body for the summits, in 1962.

Canada and the United States are the only two countries in the organization that have not lobbied to invite to Cuba to the events.

"The isolation, the embargo, the indifference, the looking the other way don't work," Santos said in the coastal resort city of Cartagena. "It's an anachronism that keeps us anchored in a Cold War era that was overcome decades ago." [Read more...]



Sexual side effects added to Merck drug labels (12 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Prescribing labels for Merck & Co's drugs for baldness and enlarged prostate will add reports of sexual side effects that continued after use of the medicines was stopped, U.S. health regulators said.

Labels will be revised for Proscar, which treats symptoms of enlarged prostate, and hair-loss treatment Propecia, the Food and Drug Administration said. The active ingredient in both drugs is finasteride.

The Propecia label will now include notification of problems with libido, ejaculation and orgasms that continued after use of the drug was ended. Proscar's label will include notification of decreased libido.

The labels of both drugs will also include a description of reports of male infertility and poor semen quality that normalized or improved after use of the drugs was stopped. [Read more...]



Pro-vegetarian group finds E. coli on stores' chicken (13 April 2012)
A new study of grocery store chicken carried out by a pro-vegetarian group reports that almost half the meat tested, including some from two supermarkets in Milwaukee, was contaminated with fecal matter.

The examination by the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has come under criticism because of the group's agenda and the study's sample size and conclusions.

The group tested chicken products sold by 15 grocery chains in 10 cities, including a Pick 'n Save and a Piggly Wiggly in Milwaukee. Some samples showed levels of E. coli hundreds of times higher than those deemed acceptable by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, the group also counted as contaminated samples that showed E. coli levels well within the acceptable limits. Overall the study reported that 48% of the samples it tested were positive for fecal contamination.

Joseph Gonzales, a registered dietitian for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said the group's findings show that there are numerous opportunities for contamination in the preparation of chicken for sale, and current testing and inspections are insufficient to catch it.

"They only test one out of every 22,000 chickens," Gonzales said, referring to tests carried out by the companies themselves under USDA supervision. "It's just so hard to regulate because there are so many birds going through." [Read more...]



Tycoon's Trumped by wind firm boss (15 April 2012)
AN energy boss turned the tables on Donald Trump -- by asking him to invest in wind power.

The US tycoon, who has slammed wind farms as "ugly monstrosities" -- is battling against an 11-turbine offshore site near his golf resort at Balmedie, near Aberdeen.

But in a letter to the billionaire, Scottish Renewables boss Niall Stuart said: "Despite the attacks from the Trump Organisation on wind power, we are confident about the future of our industry.

"Indeed, we would very much like to invite you to consider the opportunity of investing in the success of Scotland's renewable energy sector." [Read more...]



St. Louis Cardinals Cooking With Solar Power for Home Series (15 April 2012)
There may not have been any sunshine bearing down on the St. Louis Cardinals' home opening series, but the stadium will be cooking with solar energy as the season progresses.

St. Louis Cardinals' fans may not taste the difference, but the next hot dog they consume at Busch Stadium could be cooked with power from solar energy. The Cardinals have partnered with Microgrid Energy, the Electrical Connection, and Sachs Electric, headquatered in Fenton, to bring solar energy to Busch Stadium for the first time ever, according to a news release. Some food, beverage and retail shops are now powered by 106 solar panels, producing approximately 32,000 kilowatt hours of solar energy per year.

"This is all part of the St. Louis Cardinals' commitment to green its game," said Joe Abernathy, vice president, stadium operations. "Since the stadium opened in 2006, we've been able to cut our energy use by 20 percent and water use by 10 percent."

The Cardinals will be celebrating "Solar Day" at Busch Stadium at the home game on April 29, and a variety of related activities and events will take place at the game and throughout the day. [Read more...]



Oil from Deepwater Horizon spill still causing damage in gulf 2 years later, scientists find (15 April 2012)
On Florida's Panhandle beaches, where local officials once fretted over how much oil washed in with each new tide, everything seems normal. The tourists have returned. The children have gone back to splashing in the surf and hunting for shells.

Every now and then, a tar ball as big as a fist washes ashore. That's the only apparent sign that the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history tainted these sugar-white sands two years ago.

But with an ultraviolet light, geologist James "Rip" Kirby has found evidence that the oil is still present, and possibly still a threat to beachgoers.

Tiny globs of it, mingled with the chemical dispersant that was supposed to break it up, have settled into the shallows, mingling with the shells, he said. When Kirby shines his light across the legs of a grad student who'd been in the water and showered, it shows orange blotches where the globs still stick to his skin. [Read more...]



Prison sentences for bosses could stop oil spills (15 April 2012)
Take, for instance, the worst of the accidents preceding the Deepwater Horizon explosion. It took place in 2005, at a BP-owned refinery in Texas City, when an explosion killed 15 workers. Lustgarten's reporting for ProPublica makes it abundantly clear that the problems at the refinery were well known. Necessary maintenance was deferred. Warnings signs were ignored. Managers would plead for money to improve the safety of the plant, only to have their budgets savagely cut. Top management in London turned a blind eye to reports recounting problems.

Then, when the inevitable occurred, BP blamed it on ''operator error''. John Browne, who was then its chief executive - and the man most responsible for creating BP's culture of putting profits over safety - insisted that the accident, like all the other BP accidents, was just a matter of being unlucky.

Lots of people knew better, including a handful of federal investigators who had been tracking the company for years.

Yet, in the end, BP wound up paying $US2.1 billion - most of it to compensate the victims - and agreed to a felony conviction. These punishments did nothing to change the company. [Read more...]



Causes of low Louisiana seafood catches remain a mystery (15 April 2012)
Scientists and biologists disagree about the difficulties of pinpointing the cause of the poor catches the local seafood industry has reported in recent years.

Catch numbers and conventional wisdom among shrimpers, crabbers, oystermen and fishermen suggests that the poor haul coincided with the BP oil spill of 2010, which leaked an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

But scientists say it isn't so simple to establish a cause-and-effect connection, since for nearly every species affected, there is an alternate narrative that explains the landings.

"As scientists, it's hard for us to speculate because there's such a high standard. We hold out on what claims we make," said Scott Porter, a scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium research center in Cocodrie. Porter also works as a researcher and diver at the nonprofit EcoRigs, which converts retired oil platforms for sustainable fisheries. [Read more...]



More work on leaking ocean gas well planned (15 April 2012)
There has been "significant progress" towards plans to stop a gas leak on an offshore platform, the operator has said.

All 238 staff were evacuated from the Elgin platform, around 150 miles off Aberdeen, when it began leaking gas more than two weeks ago.

About 200,000 cubic metres of gas are escaping from the platform each day, coming out from a rock formation below the sea. It is then escaping into the air from a leak on the platform at the top of the well, about 80ft above sea level.

Oil and gas company Total said preparatory work for the planned drilling of both a primary and back-up relief well continued this week with two flights to the platform to assess the situation. [Read more...]



ALEC is cloning 'model laws' for Alaska (15 April 2012)
Ever wonder why the same legislation that banned collective bargaining in Wisconsin, surfaced in six states including Alaska (it was sponsored by the late Carl Gatto, a former union member)? Or why voter discrimination legislation, better known as Voter-ID, has been introduced in at least 33 states?

Or the invasive, big-government legislation that requires women seeking an abortion to submit to a transvaginal ultrasound? Carbon-copy measures have been introduced in at least eight states including Alaska (ours came courtesy of Sen. John Coghill).

It's no coincidence the same "Stand Your Ground," anti-women's rights, anti-environmental, voter suppression, school privatization, anti-health care, anti-workers' rights, anti-immigrant, prison privatization and tax cut legislation pops up all over the country with almost identical language.

You can thank ALEC and its army of lawmaking clones.

Last August, Sen. Fred Dyson, R-Eagle River, and Rep. Wes Keller, R-Wasilla, attended the ALEC conference in New Orleans. You can bet that Alaska will end up paying for more than hotel rooms, meals and plane tickets because of it. [Read more...]



News from the Week of 8th to 14th of April 2012

U.S. Secret Service agents leave Colombia over prostitution inquiry (14 April 2012)
Donovan declined to disclose details about the nature of the alleged misconduct. But Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said the accusations relate to at least one agent having involvement with prostitutes in Cartagena.

In a statement, Donovan said the matter has been turned over to the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility, which serves as the agency's internal affairs unit.

"The Secret Service takes all allegations of misconduct seriously," Donovan said. "These personnel changes will not affect the comprehensive security plan that has been prepared in advance of the President's trip."

Adler said the entire unit was recalled for purposes of the investigation. The Secret Service "responded appropriately" and is "looking at a very serious allegation," he said, adding that the agency "needs to properly investigate and fairly ascertain the merits of the allegations." [Read more...]



Naked Vermont governor almost eaten by bears (13 April 2012)
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin said Friday that he was chased by one of four large bears in his back yard the night prior... absent his pajamas.

Speaking to the editorial board of Valley News in Vermont, the first-term Democrat said he noticed the bears in the back yard late at night, outside his rental home near Monteplier, where they were nosing at his bird feeders just feet from his windows.

After shouting at them from relative safety, for some reason Shumlin said he decided to fetch the bird feeders, explaining that he didn't want the bears to become a frequent feature on his property.

"The (bear) charges me on the porch -- I'm tearing through the door," he reportedly said. "You almost lost the governor. Security was not there. I was within three feet of getting 'arrrh.'" [Read more...]



U.S. judge finds for MegaUpload, orders DOJ to cooperate on user files (14 April 2012)
A judge in Alexandria, Virginia ruled Friday in favor of attorneys for the cyberlocker website MegaUpload, ordering the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to work with the site's operators to return personal files to more than 60 million of the site's users.

MegaUplaod founder Kim Dotcom, an eccentric New Zealand millionaire, stands accused in the U.S. of running the largest pirate media operation in history, and is currently fighting a U.S. extradition request in his own country following a January SWAT raid on his estate. MegaUpload provided blind file hosting to its users, enabling them to upload and share anything, but it also gave content creators the ability to report and delete links to files that infringed upon copyrights.

U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady agreed with MegaUpload attorney Ira Rothken in a hearing Friday, and ordered the DOJ to work with MegaUpload and its users to reach an amicable solution to the quandary of legitimate, non-infringing files being held in legal limbo. The question of what will happen to the files arose after an Ohio-based entrepreneur teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to sue for access to his business files.

Prosecutors argued Friday that the DOJ should simply order the hosting company to delete MegaUpload's user files, as they've already obtained a large sample of the files to be used as evidence against MegaUpload, which will be turned over to defense attorneys amid the evidence discovery process.

The site had more than 150 million users at the time of the New Zealand raid. MegaUpload's managers have since said that its users included government workers and even congressional staffers, along with soldiers overseas who used the service to share multimedia with their families in the U.S. At least six movie studios have argued that MegaUpload was growing an illegal operation that, at its core, was just designed to facilitate piracy.

Judge O'Grady's ruling Friday is another in a series of minor victories for MegaUpload and Dotcom, who recently saw a judge in New Zealand chastise police for raiding his home based upon a bogus warrant. Officials tried to file for the correct warrant after the fact, making it retroactive. The judge said she may ultimately order that all of Dotcom's assets be returned to him, which would provide a significant boost to his legal defense. Security footage of that raid has since mysteriously disappeared while in police custody. [Read more...]



Afghan war whistleblower Daniel Davis: 'I had to speak out -- lives are at stake' (14 April 2012)
"I am -- how do you say it? -- persona non grata," said Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, as he sat sipping a coffee and eating a chocolate sundae in a shopping mall, just a subway stop from the Pentagon.

The career soldier is now a black sheep at the giant defence department building where he still works. The reason was his extraordinarily brave decision to accuse America's military top brass of lying about the war in Afghanistan. When he went public in the New York Times, he was acclaimed as a hero for speaking out about a war that many Americans feel has gone horribly awry. Later this month he will receive a Ridenhour prize, an award given to whistleblowers that is named after the Vietnam war soldier who exposed the My Lai massacre.

Davis believes people are not being told the truth and said so in a detailed report that he wrote after returning from his second tour of duty in the country. He had been rocketed, mortared and had stepped on an improvised explosive device that failed to explode. Soldiers he had met were killed and he was certain that a bloody disaster was unfolding. So he spoke out. "It's like I see in slow motion men dying for nothing and I can't stop it," he said. "It is consuming me from the inside. It is eating me alive."

Davis, 48, drew up two reports containing research and observations garnered from his last tour. He was not short of material. As part of his job he had criss-crossed the country, travelling 9,000 miles and talking to more than 250 people. He had built up a picture of a hopeless cause; a country where Afghan soldiers were incapable of holding on to American gains. US soldiers would fight and die for territory and then see Afghan troops let it fall to the Taliban. Often the Afghans actively worked with the Taliban or simply refused to fight. One Afghan police officer laughed in Davis's face when asked if he ever tried to fight the enemy. "That would be dangerous!" the man said. [Read more...]



Spitfires buried in Burma during war to be returned to UK (14 April 2012)
Twenty iconic Spitfire aircraft buried in Burma during the Second World War are to be repatriated to Britain after an intervention by David Cameron.

The Prime Minister secured a historic deal that will see the fighter aircraft dug up and shipped back to the UK almost 67 years after they were hidden more than 40-feet below ground amid fears of a Japanese occupation.

The gesture came as Mr Cameron became the first Western leader to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner held under house arrest for 22 years by the military regime, and invited her to visit London in her first trip abroad for 24 years.

He called on Europe to suspend its ban on trade with Burma now that it was showing "prospects for change" following Miss Suu Kyi's election to parliament in a sweeping electoral victory earlier this year. [Read more...]



How Hyundai went from joke to contender in US (12 April 2012)
Americans were laughing at Hyundai's cars when John Krafcik joined the company eight years ago.

The cars were ugly and often broke down. The only reason to buy one was because it was cheap. Jay Leno once joked that you could double a Hyundai's value by filling it up with gas.

No one's laughing now.

The Korean automaker's quality has improved, and it's among the leaders in fuel efficiency and styling. Sales are up more than 60 percent since 2008, the year Krafcik (pronounced KRAF-chick) became CEO of American operations. Hyundai's Elantra compacts and Sonata midsize sedans are in such demand that few discounts are offered. And although the company's U.S. sales are just a fraction of General Motors' or Ford's, they're growing so quickly that Hyundai is feared by every other carmaker. [Read more...]



Study: Meat eaters must cut consumption by half to forestall climate change (13 April 2012)
Meat eaters in developed countries will have to eat a lot less meat, cutting consumption by 50%, to avoid the worst consequences of future climate change, new research warns.

The fertilisers used in farming are responsible for a significant share of the warming that causes climate change.

A study published in Environmental Research Letters warns that drastic changes in food production and at the dinner table are needed by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic global warming.

It's arguably the most difficult challenge in dealing with climate change: how to reduce emissions from food production while still producing enough to feed a global population projected to reach 9 billion by the middle of this century. [Read more...]



SDS Founder, Veteran Activist Tom Hayden on Participatory Democracy from Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street (13 April 2012) [DN]
TOM HAYDEN: Exactly. Well, the movement began with sit-ins, which were occupations of lunch counters. I was a Freedom Rider. I occupied a train from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia. But very swiftly, the organizers kept hearing from, particularly elderly people, black people in the South, "I want to vote before I die. I served in Korea. I want, just once, to be able to vote." And the principle was to help people accomplish what they already wanted to do. And there was a strategy also because the disenfranchisement of all these people was the power foundation on which the Dixiecrats, the white racist wing of the Democratic Party that dominated all the committees, was based upon. And so, it was not an accident that these projects occurred in McComb, Mississippi, or in Lowndes County, Alabama, or Albany, Georgia. And they weren't--it wasn't an either/or of direct action or voter registration, because the vote was a real threat to the status quo.

And SNCC people made virtually a blood oath to spend at least five years--nobody knew who would live and who would not--but to attack this problem. And it took great courage and--but also strategic intelligence, listening to people who had been waiting for all these years. And it resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, fortunately, had some teeth. That's why the right wing is complaining today, and the Confederate states are complaining, because they're still under a monitoring provision of the 1965 act. So, in a sense, SNCC accomplished that. I remember I was at a SNCC reunion, 50th, last year, year before. And the attorney general of the United States, Holder, was there, and he gave a talk, and he said, "You know, there's a straight line between those projects in the Deep South and where I sit today at the Department of Justice. And I owe it to SNCC."

JUAN GONZALEZ: But, Tom, there's also another straight line, which is that, obviously, that Voting Rights Act and then the protests that occurred against the war in Vietnam led as well to the mass defections from the Democratic Party of so many Southern whites and, of course, the Nixon strategy in '68 to basically woo the South, the Republican Party, woo Southern Democrats away, and that really made a major shift in the political alignment in the country for a generation.

TOM HAYDEN: I think--I think, Juan, that was a failure of the Liberal Democrats. The plan was this: risk your neck to do the voter registration and, in doing so, awaken a liberal constituency of clergy, of labor, of like-minded people around the country, and, yes, get the white racists out of the Democratic Party base, move them to wherever they want to go: the Klan, the Republican Party, whatever. [Read more...]



Movie clips help ease drug craving (12 April 2012)
Led by neuroscientist Lin Lu of Peking University in China, researchers first tested the idea in animals, easing drug-seeking behaviors in rats by calling up and then dampening drug-related memories. Next, the team turned to people who were battling heroin addiction in China.

Sixty-six people underwent a two-step process: First, volunteers watched a video of either a natural scene or of people smoking and injecting heroin. The heroin movie served as a quick reminder, calling up former memories of drug use. Each time these kinds of memories are called to mind, the former drug users become fragile, vulnerable to being rewritten or modified, Epstein says. "It's not like a tape recorder playing something back," he says. "It's more like a computer pulling up a document, potentially editing the document, and then resaving the document." This process is called reconsolidation.

After this reminder, participants spent about an hour watching more drug-related movies and slide shows, and even handling fake heroin, a trial called an "extinction session." The researchers varied the time between the reminder and the extinction sessions: Some people waited just 10 minutes, and others waited six hours. This process was repeated on two consecutive days.

In later tests, people whose memories were primed with the drug reminder 10 minutes before the extinction reported less craving for heroin after seeing drug cues one, 30, and 180 days after the technique. Bodily responses to drug cues were blunted, too: People who had been primed in the 10-minute window showed less of a blood pressure rise in response to seeing drug paraphernalia compared with people who hadn't received the reminder. [Read more...]



Mars Inc. Says Adios to ALEC (13 April 2012)
Mars Inc., the company that makes everything from Skittles to M&M's to Uncle Ben's, has joined McDonald's, Wendy's, and a half-dozen other companies in quitting the American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC, as it's known, is a corporate-funded non-profit that writes pro-business and often anti-union draft legislation for state lawmakers to introduce in their legislatures. ALEC has come under fire recently from good-government and civil rights groups for pushing voter identification bills that critics say discriminate against blacks and Hispanics. ALEC foes have also blasted the organization for promoting so-called Stand Your Ground laws like the one at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, one of the groups in the anti-ALEC coalition, hailed Mars' decision. "Its leaders understand that continued support for ALEC's advocacy of vigilante justice and assaults on voting and employee rights, public schools, and reasonable environmental regulations is neither good business nor good corporate citizenship," Edgar said in a statement.

In a statement published this week, ALEC executive director Ron Scheberle said his organization wouldn't be cowed by what it called an "intimidation campaign launched by a coalition of extreme liberal activists committed to silencing anyone who disagrees with their agenda." He continued, "Finally, now more than ever, America needs organizations like ALEC to foster the discussion and debate of policy differences in an open, transparent way and not fall back on bullying, intimidation and threats." [Read more...]



Goldman Sachs stolen code case thrown out over irrelevant statutes (13 April 2012)
A former Goldman Sachs programmer will not serve time for stealing the investment firm's proprietary source code because prosecutors charged him for the theft under one statute that was irrelevant to the case, and another that is too antiquated to apply, lawyers say.

When Sergey Aleynikov left his job as a programmer at Goldman Sachs in 2009, he didn't just take the odd office supply. He walked out with "hundreds of thousands of lines" of source code for the firm's high-speed trading system, according to prosecutors.

He was swiftly charged, and convicted, of theft of property under two laws: the Economic Espionage Act and National Stolen Property Act.

There's only one problem with that: neither of those laws really apply in this case. [Read more...]



US adds 13,000 to unemployment rolls in latest disappointing claims report (12 April 2012)
The number of new claims for unemployment benefits rose unexpectedly last week in another sign of the fragility of the recovery in the US jobs market.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 13,000 to 380,000 in the week ending 7 April, the largest rise in nearly a year, the labor department said. Economist polled by Reuters had been expecting claims to fall to 355,000.

The numbers come less than a week after disappointing news about the new jobs the US is creating. Last Friday the labor department announced the US had added 120,000 new jobs in March, half the number created in February. March's number ended a four-month streak in which the US had added over 200,000 jobs a month.

Every jobs report is being parsed by Washington as President Barack Obama gears up for the election. Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, has consistently attacked Obama's record on the economy and jobs. "It is increasingly clear the Obama economy is not working and that after three years in office the president's excuses have run out," Romney said after last week's jobs report. [Read more...]



5,500-plus federal job cut notices sent out in Canada (12 April 2012)
More than 5,500 federal service employees were notified Wednesday that their jobs are on the line, while unions are accusing the government of making the wrong choices and rushing through the cuts.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada said that it was advised that 5,561 of its members in 23 government departments received notices saying they could lose their jobs.

The employees were notified that they are "affected" but layoffs are not guaranteed for all of them, as some may be moved to other departments where there are vacancies.

More than 2,000 of the affected jobs are located in the Ottawa region; 775 are in the Prairies; 236 in the Atlantic region and in Quebec; 222 in British Columbia; and 11 in the North. [Read more...]



Wisconsin's "Choking Judge" Prosser wants choking victim Justice Bradley to recuse herself (12 April 2012)
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser is asking that fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley step down from the disciplinary case stemming from the physical altercation in June in which Prosser has acknowledged putting his hands on Bradley's neck.

In the petition filed Thursday, Prosser said state law prohibits judges from overseeing cases in which they are witnesses or participants or have an interest in the outcome.

Prosser also charges that Bradley is biased because she leaked "skewed representations" to the press, initiated a criminal investigation against him and was responsible for the complaint filed against him by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission. However, the five-page petition offers no information to back up those allegations.

"It is evident that Justice Bradley is disqualified from participation in this matter and must withdraw," Prosser argues, adding that "Justice Bradley cannot turn around and sit in judgment in her own case, and no rational person would believe that she could." [Read more...]



Head to Head: Would Rep. Paul Ryan's tax plan improve the U.S. tax system? (12 April 2012)
Our federal tax system currently is collecting historically low revenues as a share of the national economy.

Since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, federal taxes have ranged from 17.5 percent to 20.6 percent of gross domestic product. Under President Barack Obama, taxes have averaged 15.2 percent of GDP -- historic lows not seen since the Great Depression and World War II.

And it shows. Since the Bush era, we've been borrowing to pay for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, basic government services, recovery from deep recession and investments in infrastructure.

Rep. Paul Ryan's tax plan would make our financial problems worse. [Read more...]



Wisconsin hunting lobby group votes for sandhill crane hunt (11 April 2012)
Voters also supported the idea of a sandhill crane hunt by a 2,559 to 1,271 margin. The migratory bird is hunted in many western states and in 2011 Kentucky became the first state in the species' Eastern population to hold a sandhill hunt.

The Legislature would have to pass a bill authorizing a sandhill hunt in Wisconsin. A sandhill crane hunting bill introduced in February died in committee.

And then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would have to approve the state's plan.

Kent Van Horn, migratory ecologist for the DNR, said given authorization and support, it would likely take several years for Wisconsin to enact a sandhill hunt. [Read more...]



Shift workers 'risking' Type 2 diabetes and obesity (11 April 2012)
Shift workers getting too little sleep at the wrong time of day may be increasing their risk of diabetes and obesity, according to researchers.

The team is calling for more measures to reduce the impact of shift working following the results of its study.

Researchers controlled the lives of 21 people, including meal and bedtimes.

The results, published in Science Translational Medicine, showed changes to normal sleep meant the body struggled to control sugar levels. [Read more...]



George Zimmerman court affidavit: 'Zimmerman confronted Martin' (12 April 2012)
George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer arrested yesterday in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, faced a judge for the first time this afternoon.

Meanwhile, a probable cause affidavit has been filed in the second-degree murder case. In the two-page document, prosecutors offer little new information about the shooting.

However, they said in the affidavit that "Zimmerman confronted Martin," an apparent contradiction of Zimmerman's version of the events that led to the shooting.

The document says Trayvon's mother identified the screams for help heard in a 911 call as those of her son. It also reveals that investigators interviewed a "friend" of Trayvon's who was talking to him in the leadup to the shooting. [Read more...]



Trayvon Martin shooting: Why the case against George Zimmerman may never make it to trial (12 April 2012)
Legal experts said Corey chose a tough route with the murder charge, which could send Zimmerman to prison for life if he's convicted, over manslaughter, which usually carries 15-year prison terms and covers reckless or negligent killings.

The prosecutors must prove Zimmerman's shooting of Martin was rooted in hatred or ill will and counter his claims that he shot Martin to protect himself while patrolling his gated community in the Orlando suburb of Sanford. Zimmerman's lawyers would only have to prove by a preponderance of evidence -- a relatively low legal standard -- that he acted in self-defence at a pretrial hearing to prevent the case from going to trial.

There's a "high likelihood it could be dismissed by the judge even before the jury gets to hear the case," Florida defence attorney Richard Hornsby said.

Corey announced the charges Wednesday after an extraordinary 45-day campaign for Zimmerman's arrest, led by Martin's parents and civil rights activists, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Protesters wore hooded sweatshirts like the one Martin had on the night of the shooting. The debate reached all the way to the White House, where President Barack Obama observed last month: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

Corey would not discuss how she reconciled conflicting accounts of the shooting by Zimmerman, witnesses and phone recordings that indicated Martin thought Zimmerman was following him. [Read more...]



Search is on for source of US Gulf of Mexico oil sheen (12 April 2012)
WASHINGTON -- The US Coast Guard and oil company experts on Thursday used aircraft and undersea probes to monitor and search for the source of a 10-mile long oil sheen in the Gulf of Mexico.

The 1.6 kilometer (one mile) wide slick is located some 210 kilometers (130 miles) south-east of New Orleans, Coast Guard spokeswoman Elizabeth Bordelon told AFP.

"At first light this morning Air Station New Orleans sent out a ... helicopter with a pollution investigator aboard to do an overflight," Bordelon said.

The sheen is between two offshore oil rigs owned by oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, Bordelon said. [Read more...]



New gas liquids pipeline to link Colorado, Panhandle (12 April 2012)
Two Houston-area companies and one in Denver will build a 435-mile natural gas liquids pipeline that would link fields in Colorado's Denver-Julesburg Basin to a pipeline network in the Texas Panhandle that could carry liquids to the Gulf Coast, the companies said today.

Enterprise Product Partners of Houston, Anadarko Petroleum of The Woodlands and and Denver-based DCP Midstream are equal partners in the Front Range Pipeline project. It is scheduled to begin service in late 2013.

The Front Range will terminate in the Panhandle-city Skellytown, with connections to the Mid-America Pipeline System and the recently announced Texas Express Pipeline, a venture of Anadarko, Enterprise and Canada's Enbridge Energy Partners. The Texas Express will run from Skellytown to processing plants in Mont Belvieu.

A binding open commitment period for prospective Front Range customers runs from Thursday through May 14. [Read more...]



A smartphone app designed to tamper with your dreams (11 April 2012)
Can a smartphone app influence your dreams? That's what the makers of Dream:ON, a new app and mass-participation experiment available for iPhone users hope to find out.

Dream:ON was designed by Richard Wiseman, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain, who said it may be possible to influence dreams by monitoring people's sleep patterns to discern when they go into REM sleep (when dreaming happens), and then play soundscapes designed to create a desired dream.

To use the Dream:ON app, you would select from one of several prerecorded soundcapes such as a peaceful garden (the gentle twittering of birds) or ocean (waves lapping at the shore).

Then you would place the phone on your bed, where it will monitor your movements as you sleep -- and present you a chart of how much you move around in your sleep in the morning. The soundscape will not start playing until the phone has determined that you are in REM sleep.

When the app senses you are moving out of REM sleep, it will sound a gentle alarm that should wake you up. Then, it asks you to submit a brief description of your dreaming experience into a "dream catcher" database. [Read more...]



The Walker Recall: Four Democratic candidates for governor file nomination signatures (11 April 2012)
The four-week political sprint to the recall primary kicked off Tuesday with four Democratic candidates submitting enough signatures to make official their bids to unseat Gov. Scott Walker.

The key question now is whether the winner will survive the abbreviated primary process strong enough to defeat the embattled first-term Republican.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, Secretary of State Doug La Follette and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, will compete in the Democratic primary for the right to face off against Walker. The primary election is scheduled for May 8, with the winner to face the governor June 5.

Three other candidates filed their papers for governor Tuesday: Republican Arthur Kohl-Riggs of Madison, who will take on Walker in a primary; Hari Trivedi, an Independent candidate from Brookfield; and Republican candidate Michael Mangan of West Allis, who only collected 303 valid signatures. Four people filed nomination papers for the lieutenant governor race: Bruce Berma, of Marinette, Mahlon Mitchell of Fitchburg, Dale Paul of Portage and Ira Robins of Milwaukee.

It has been a tough year for Walker. He all but ended collective bargaining for most public employees and presided over a state that became crippled by partisan war. His party lost its majority in the state Senate, and Walker faces fallout from the ongoing John Doe investigation into his close associates and former aides from his time as Milwaukee County executive. [Read more...]



Monsanto sued - 'Knowingly Poisoned Workers' Causing Devastating Birth Defects (11 April 2012)
In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused "devastating birth defects" in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.

The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto's herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies "wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects."

The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto's Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What's more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto's Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers -- many in dire economic conditions -- were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to 'purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides'.

Most shocking, the farmers were ordered to discard leftover herbicides and pesticides in locations in which they leached directly into the water supply. With Monsanto's Roundup already known to be contaminating the groundwater, this comes as a serious threat to pure water supplies. [Read more...]



Johnson & Johnson, subsidiary fined $1.1B in Arkansas suit over antipsychotic drug Risperdol (11 April 2012)
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - An Arkansas judge on Wednesday fined Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary more than $1.1 billion after a jury found that the companies downplayed and hid risks associated with taking the antipsychotic drug Risperdal.

Circuit Judge Tim Fox determined that Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., committed nearly 240,000 violations of the state's Medicaid fraud law -- or one for each Risperdal prescription issued to state Medicaid patients over a 3 1/2-year period. Each violation carried a $5,000 fine, the state's mandatory minimum amount, bringing the total to more than $1.1 billion.

Fox issued an additional $11 million fine for more than 4,500 violations under the state's deceptive practices act, but he rejected the state's request to levy fines in excess of the $5,000 minimum for the Medicaid violations.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said in an emailed statement that the ruling "sends a clear signal that big drug companies like Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceuticals cannot lie to the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), patients and doctors in order to defraud Arkansas taxpayers of our Medicaid dollars." [Read more...]



Why Woodpeckers Don't Get Concussions (11 April 2012)
For woodpeckers, "thick skull" is no insult. In fact, new research shows that a strong skull saves these birds from serious brain injury.

Woodpeckers' head-pounding pecking against trees and telephone poles subjects them to enormous forces -- they can easily slam their beaks against wood with a force 1,000 times that of gravity. (In comparison, Air Force tests in the 1950s pegged the maximum survivable g-force for a human at around 46 times that of gravity, though race-car drivers have reportedly survived crashes of over 100 G's.)

Researchers had previously figured out that thick neck muscles diffuse the blow, and a third inner eyelid prevents the birds' eyeballs from popping out. Now, scientists from Beihang University in Beijing and the Wuhan University of Technology have taken a closer look at the thick bone that cushions a woodpecker's brain. By comparing specimens of great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major) with the similarly sized Mongolian skylark, the researchers learned that adaptations in the most minute structure of the woodpecker bones give the skull its super strength.

Notably, the woodpecker's brain is surrounded by thick, platelike spongy bone. At a microscopic level, woodpeckers have a large number of trabeculae, tiny beamlike projections of bone that form the mineral "mesh" that makes up this spongy bone plate. These trabeculae are also closer together than they are in the skylark skull, suggesting this microstructure acts as armor protecting the brain. [Read more...]



How Exercise Can Prime the Brain for Addiction (11 April 2012)
So, the researchers propose, the animals that had been running before they were introduced to cocaine had a plentiful supply of new brain cells primed to learn. And what they learned was to crave the drug. Consequently, they had much more difficulty forgetting what they'd learned and moving on from their addiction.

That same mechanism appeared to benefit animals that had started running after becoming addicted. Their new brain cells helped them to rapidly learn to stop associating drug and place, once the cocaine was taken away, and start adjusting to sobriety.

"Fundamentally, the results are encouraging," Dr. Rhodes says. They show that by doubling the production of robust, young neurons, "exercise improves associative learning."

But the findings also underscore that these new cells are indiscriminate and don't care what you learn. They will amplify the process, whether you're memorizing Shakespeare or growing dependent on nicotine. [Read more...]



FDA plan would seek voluntary limits of antibiotics in animal feed (11 April 2012)
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday finalized a plan that would ask drug companies to voluntarily limit the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed, citing long-held concerns that their overuse in livestock promotes the development of drug resistant bacteria that can infect people.

Currently, many antibiotics that are widely used to treat human illnesses are mixed with animal feed to promote rapid growth and weight gain in the animals. Their prevalence in livestock has been linked in several studies to the creation of drug-resistant "superbugs" that can spread to humans who eat, or even work with, the animals.

The FDA is asking drug companies to revise their product labels and remove growth-promotion in animals as a permissible use, a plan that the agency said many drug makers are willing and ready to adopt. The timetable would be determined through a separate agency proposal, which would give drug companies three months to detail their strategies and three years to phase out the growth-promotion uses.

To make sure the drugs are used solely to target disease treatment and prevention, the government wants veterinarians to prescribe the antibiotics for the first time. [Read more...]



Alcohol sharpens the mind, research finds (11 April 2012)
MEN who drink two pints of beer before tackling brain teasers perform better than those who attempt the riddles sober, scientists have found.

In findings that will be toasted by pub quiz aficionados, researchers found drinkers got more test questions right and were quicker in delivering the right answers.

It is thought alcohol hinders analytical thinking and allows 'creative' thoughts that might otherwise by stifled to take root, allowing test subjects to come up with more imaginative solutions.

Psychologists at the University of Illinois set 40 healthy young men a series of brain teasers. They involved being given three words, such as coin, quick and spoon, and coming up with a fourth word that links the three - in this case, silver. [Read more...]



Justice Dept. sues Apple, publishers over e-book prices (11 April 2012)
The U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday it was suing Apple and five major publishers, alleging they colluded to keep the price of e-books artifically high.

"As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. "We allege that executives at the highest levels of these companies--concerned that e-book sellers had reduced prices--worked together to eliminate competition."

The suit was filed against Apple as well as HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, and MacMillan.

Three of them -- HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group -- settled with the government, Holder said. [Read more...]



State's hygiene lab tests pollutants from major historical sites (11 April 2012)
Most people are familiar with the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene because of its routine but important work testing everything from well water for contaminants to blood samples for alcohol levels.

But tucked away in various corners of the laboratory on Madison's Far East Side are hints of a lesser-known and stranger science. Ice cores from the Greenland ice cap, for example. Scrapings from the walls of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Air samples from the refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie Church in Milan, Italy, home to Da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

Though they may seem connected, these collections have ended up in Madison because of unique and sought-after research skills for which the state laboratory is internationally known. Researchers at the lab have developed and perfected precise techniques for measuring invisible substances that pollute the air and using the data to pinpoint the source of the pollution.

Thus, it makes sense that officials in India, concerned about the pollution darkening the walls of the Taj Mahal, would call on scientists at the lab, specifically Martin Shafer, who specializes in measuring, analyzing and ferreting out the source of air contaminants. [Read more...]



Charles Manson quickly denied parole (11 April 2012)
A California parole board Wednesday quickly rejected parole for convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, a prison spokesman said.

Manson did not attend the hearing, which was the 12th in which state officials concluded Manson was too great a danger to be released.

The board was expected to make a ruling Wednesday afternoon, and it's unclear exactly why the decision was rendered so quickly.

Before the hearing, his attorney, DeJon R. Lewis, said he would like to see Manson transferred to Atascadero State Hospital from the state prison near Corcoran. "Charles Manson does not need incarceration at this point in his life," Lewis told CNN. "He needs hospitalization."

Manson and other members of his so-called family were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area during two August nights in 1969. He is housed at Corcoran State Prison in a special unit for inmates felt to be endangered by other inmates, separate from the general prison population. [Read more...]



Peruvian miners rescued from collapsed mine (11 April 2012)
ICA, Peru (AP) -- Nine Peruvian miners were rescued Wednesday after six days trapped in an abandoned copper mine.

The nine, ranging in age from 23 to 58, walked out without assistance about an hour after dawn from a reinforced tunnel that rescuers had built as they removed more than 26 feet (8 meters) of dirt and rock.

The miners wore sunglasses and were covered with blankets. President Ollanta Humala greeted them.

Humala had spent the night at the mine 150 miles (240 kilometers) southeast of Lima. [Read more...]



Insight: China's coalbeds spur unconventional gas supply boom (11 April 2012)
(Reuters) - After more than a century ripping out its insides to supply coal to the rest of the country, the heavily mined and polluted province of Shanxi in northern China is in the midst of a gas boom.

Under the spray of the Yellow River near the city of Jincheng, "nodding donkeys" bob in lines that stretch to the horizon, hitched up amidst precious farmland to feed on the gas streaming through the coal seams below.

Gleaming white storage tanks tower over the highways and dozens of drilling rigs dot the cliffs and valleys, some near the famed ancient cave settlements of Shanxi.

Gas output from the coal seams is rising fast and is set to hit 8 billion cubic meters (bcm) this year, up a half from 2011 - emerging from nowhere just six years ago to provide China with a cleaner, home-grown alternative fuel for the future. [Read more...]



Rendition evidence cannot be shown to MPs, US judge rules (11 April 2012)
The US is preventing MPs from seeing evidence of British involvement in the CIA's practice of secretly sending terror suspects to prisons where they faced torture.

A federal judge in Washington has used a particular section of the US Freedom of Information Act to block a request from the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition chaired by the senior Conservative backbencher Andrew Tyrie.

The judge, Ricardo Urbina, ruled that the information must be withheld on the grounds that the parliamentary body was part of a "foreign government entity". Tony Lloyd, a deputy chair of the committee and Labour MP for Manchester Central, described the ruling as "odd". He said it seemed as though the US was looking for an excuse to withhold the information.

It would have been more understandable had the US blocked the request on national security grounds, Lloyd said. "It's an abuse of the spirit of freedom of information," he said. To claim that a parliamentary body was part of the British state was "not acceptable", Lloyd added. [Read more...]



Sudan vows to retake Heglig oil fields from South Sudan (11 April 2012)
Sudan has vowed to use "all legitimate means" to repulse South Sudan from its largest oil field, a statement on the official Suna news agency says.

South Sudanese troops seized control of Heglig on Tuesday, as heavy fighting raged for a second day.

Both sides blame each other for the latest conflicts along the undemarcated and disputed oil-rich border area.

Fierce clashes over the past two weeks have fuelled fears of a return to outright war.

Oil-rich Heglig is usually recognised as being part of the north, although South Sudan disputes this. [Read more...]



"Kony 2012" group confirms WikiLeaks spy allegation (10 April 2012)
The non-profit group Invisible Children has confirmed that a U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, which claims the group fed intelligence to the Ugandan government to enable the 2009 arrest of a central resistance figure, is in fact true.

"In 2009, Invisible Children was contacted by a member at the US Embassy in Kampala regarding Patrick Komakech, a former [Lord's Resistance Army] combatant who Invisible Children had been supporting in attempts to assist with his personal recovery and academic development, in keeping with Invisible Children's mandate to provide assistance to individuals affected by LRA violence," an Invisible Children spokesperson told Raw Story in an email.

"At the time, it was brought to our attention that Mr. Komakech and a group of others were allegedly involved in activities that could be jeopardizing the lives of civilians and putting the organization and its staff at risk," the spokesperson added. "Invisible Children was deeply saddened to learn of these allegations; the organization was cooperative in providing information to the US Embassy regarding the nature of our relationship with and academic support to Mr. Komakech.

"In light of the severity of these allegations, the organization severed all ties immediately with Mr. Komakech," they concluded. "In this case and as always, Invisible Children acts in good faith to preserve the integrity of our programming and uphold the protection of human rights in the communities we work." [Read more...]



Seaweed linked to post-menopause cancer risk (11 April 2012)
A Japanese study Wednesday said regular seaweed consumption among post-menopausal women heightened their risk of developingthyroid cancer, linking it to iodine in the macrobiotic food.

A 14-year national survey of nearly 53,000 Japanese women, aged between 40 and 69, found that the group reported 134 thyroid cancer cases, including 113 cases of papillary carcinoma, a common type of the illness.

Those who ate seaweed daily were 1.7 times more likely to developcancer than those who ate it no more than twice a week, the study said.

The risk more than doubled among post-menopausal women who were about 3.8 times more likely to develop the cancer than those who limited their consumption of seaweed, a popular food in Japan, the study said. [Read more...]



Bat-killing fungus likely came from Europe (10 April 2012)
The fungus Geomyces destructans, which exists naturally in North America as well as Europe, causes the deadly syndrome. It's typically found in cool, humid environments such as the caves where bats prefer to hibernate. It can cause bats to wake up during hibernation, move out too early and die from starvation.

But the fungus hasn't caused mass bat deaths overseas and North American bats started to die off only about five years ago, Willis said.

Either the North American fungus mutated to harm bats, or the European fungus was inadvertently imported here and North American bats haven't evolved to cope with it, Willis and a team of Canadian and U.S. researchers hypothesized.

Researchers infected two groups of little brown bats with the versions of the fungus. They found that both fungi harmed the bats but the European one was more damaging. If the North American version had mutated, it would likely have been "especially nasty," Willis explained.

The most reasonable hypothesis, then, is the "accidental tourist introduction idea." "Someone possibly picked it up in Europe, then visited a cave over here," he said, adding that the fungus can survive on clothing and boots. [Read more...]



No d'oh! Oregon town is 'Simpsons' Springfield (11 April 2012)
Matt Groening has finally revealed where the Springfield that serves as the hometown for "The Simpsons" actually is.

And, given that he grew up in Portland, it's not too big a shock.

Groening admits what every Oregonian probably believed from the start, which is that Springfield, Ore., is where he got the name for the animated family's hometown.

In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Groening admits he has been giving fake answers for years when asked which Springfield was the Springfield. [Read more...]



Employers posted 3.5 million job openings in February (10 April 2012)
Employers posted slightly more job openings and stepped up overall hiring in February. The figures suggest that modest job gains may continue in the coming months.

The Labor Department says employers posted 3.5 million job openings in February, up slightly from a revised 3.48 million in January. Job openings reached a three-year high of 3.54 million in December.

The data come after a disappointing jobs report last week. Employers added only 120,000 jobs in March, about half the average that were added in the previous three months.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.2 percent, though that was mostly because people gave looking for work. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: That seems to be the trend in this recession/depression -- almost all of the advertised job openings are "unfunded," and they close without hiring anyone at all.



Bush wishes his name wasn't attached to tax cuts (10 April 2012)
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Former President George W. Bush said Tuesday he wishes his name wasn't so firmly attached to one of his administration's signature pieces of legislation -- the broad-based tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year.

"I wish they weren't called the Bush tax cuts. If they were called someone else's tax cuts, they'd be less likely to be raised," he said in introductory remarks at a conference at the New York Historical Society.

The former president repeated the argument often used by Republicans -- that eliminating those tax cuts for the wealthy, as Democrats have proposed, would hit small businesses and hurt hiring.

"If you raise taxes on these so-called rich, you're really raising taxes on the job creators," he said at the conference, which was sponsored by the Bush Institute, which he opened after leaving office. "And if the goal is to create private sector growth, you have to recognize that the best way is to leave capital in the treasuries of the job creators." [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: He still refuses to admit that he ruined the economy... And he still looks stoned.



Proposed 'Natural Health Products Bill' in New Zealand would fine individuals $50,000 for making a cup of unapproved herbal tea (10 April 2012)
(NaturalNews) The health freedom of New Zealanders is under very serious threat, as the federal government there pushes to pass a bill known as the Natural Health Products Bill (NHPB), or Bill 324-1, that will bring the nation into compliance with the overbearing and authoritarian food and health restrictions found in Codex Alimentarius, the so-called world food code.

If passed, NHPB will combine with the equally-threatening New Zealand Food Bill (http://www.naturalnews.com) to make it essentially illegal for individuals to even prepare for themselves, let alone try to sell, herbal products and teas, vitamins and supplements, or any other natural products that are not explicitly approved by the government as acceptable.

Overturning the common law principles of freedom that have triumphed in New Zealand for centuries, Bill 324-1 will require that all herbal remedies, traditional treatments, homeopathic remedies and dietary supplements first be approved -- and very strictly regulated -- by the government before being allowed to be sold or even prepared for one's own personal use.

"The system will, for the first time in New Zealand, introduce risk-based regulation of natural health products," says Bill 324-1. In simple terms, this means that natural herbs, vitamins, minerals, and all other nutrients used to promote health and prevent disease will be subject to the same corrupt regulatory approval process that pharmaceutical drugs are, which will in turn make it difficult or even impossible for New Zealanders to access many of these products in the future. [Read more...]



Facebook snaps up Instagram app for $1 billion (10 April 2012)
Facebook took steps Monday to bolster its mobile strategy, acquiring popular photo-sharing application Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase, the social network's largest and the most expensive by far for a smart-phone app, gives Facebook a company that's adept at producing mobile apps as well as a passionate community of more than 30 million users. It also neutralizes a potential competitive threat from the San Francisco startup, whose 28-year-old co-founder has talked about building a large global business.

The move comes on the eve of an expected initial public offering from Facebook that could value the Menlo Park company at $100 billion.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the deal was unusual for a company that traditionally has bought startups primarily for their engineering talent. The price tag makes it one of the priciest startup acquisitions ever, in the same league as Google's purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. [Read more...]



UW System schools pay agencies for international students (10 April 2012)
Seven University of Wisconsin System campuses pay foreign agencies to help them recruit international students, sometimes spending more than $1,000 per student, according to a State Journal survey of the 13 four-year campuses and the System's two-year colleges.

The practice of paying commissions for each recruited international student is common yet controversial. It's banned within the U.S. but largely unregulated abroad.

"It's something we would collectively, I think, agree is completely unethical here," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "How does it become acceptable just because the targets are foreign nationals?"

Commission-based agents are motivated by money, not by making the perfect match between a student and a school, critics say. Agents working for Dickinson State University in North Dakota, for example, reportedly misrepresented themselves as employees of the school, giving students inaccurate information about majors and degree requirements. An agency hired by UW-Stevens Point allegedly falsified admissions information to get foreign students accepted into U.S. colleges. Stevens Point has since stopped using that company. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: As I was leaving UW in the late 1980s, the strategy of its new administrators (among them Donna Shalala -- later to become President Clinton's Health and Human Services Secretary) was to reduce the number of state residents attending the university -- after state taxes had built the university system into one of the top ten universities in America according to The Chronicle of Higher Education's survey of Deans of American colleges.

Rather, Shalala and others changed policies to encourage more foreign students to enroll because foreign students paid higher tuition -- or as some of my fellow student politicians called it, "cheating the middle class out of an education." The last time I checked, UW no longer made the top ten list, no doubt due to all of those past policy changes. The "new" administrators wanted to use the university as a revenue stream, even though there was no need and no pressure to do so.



Dental X-rays linked to brain tumors (10 April 2012)
People who get regular dental X-rays are more likely to suffer a common type of brain tumor, US researchers said on Tuesday, suggesting that yearly exams may not be best for most patients.

The study in the US journal Cancer showed people diagnosed with meningioma who reported having a yearly bitewing exam were 1.4 times to 1.9 times as likely as a healthy control group to have developed such tumors.

A bitewing exam involves an X-ray film being held in place by a tab between the teeth.

Also, people who reported getting a yearly panorex exam -- in which an X-ray is taken outside the mouth and shows all the teeth on one film -- were 2.7 to three times more likely to develop cancer, said the study. [Read more...]



Britain to fight landmark ban on chemical linked to cancer (10 April 2012)
Britain and other EU member states are opposing a new law which would ban a common chemical which has been linked to breast cancer, heart disease, obesity and other conditions.

The UK, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy, Slovenia and Spain have objected to a French plan to ban bisphenol A, or BPA, from food packaging by 2014, saying the move -- arising from a hazard assessment by France's Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety -- would breach trade rules. In Britain, the BPA is deemed to be safe by the Food Standards Agency. The UK has told the European Commission the draft French law does not follow sound science.

Elizabeth Salter Green, director of the pressure group Chem Trust, said: "The UK is trying to scupper the French ban, but it is not alone. Many member states seem to want to stop the French initiative. I feel this is very much a reflection of what industry wants. The UK does not manufacture BPA, but we do use it a lot in consumer products."

The row is the latest twist in the scientific and political dispute over the plastics hardener, which mimics the female hormone oestrogen -- and is found in televisions, mobile phones, flooring, dental sealants and the plastic lining inside food and drink cans. [Read more...]



Flame retardant chemicals show up in High Arctic (7 April 2012)
New research shows chemicals commonly used to keep flames from spreading are now being found in northern environments.

Environment Canada scientist Dr. Hayley Hung has found new flame retardants -- chemicals often sprayed onto products like furniture, computer equipment or children's clothing -- are drifting from the south all the way up to the High Arctic.

The chemicals were detected at an Environment Canada air-monitoring station at Alert, Nunavut, about 800 kilometres from the North Pole.

"These are the first evidence that these chemicals that are usually present in more populated areas do show up in more remote locations," said Hung.

Mark La Guardia, a researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has studied the flame retardants and said they can take a long time to break down, and they accumulate in plants and animals.

"You can't take it back once it's out there," he said. "And if we keep on putting them out there, then sooner or later we may have a serious problem." [Read more...]



Pantanal: protecting the world's largest wetland - Guardian video (10 April 2012)
The world's largest wetland, the Pantanal in South America, is a paradise for wildlife. Its annual cycles of flooding and drought create a strikingly beautiful and rich ecosystem. It is a haven for almost 5,000 species of animals and plants, and attracts about a million tourists a year -- joining the eight million people who live there. The region's 'ecosystems services', such as irrigation of agriculture and wildlife tourism, have been valued at $112bn a year. But this paradise is at serious risk. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: This video starts, with sound, without the reader taking any action.



At least 10 species arrive early in Wisconsin (9 April 2012)
News of Wisconsin's rare spring heat wave traveled far - even black-necked stilts, blue-gray gnatcatchers and Savannah sparrows knew March felt like July.

So they revised their travel plans.

A record number of migratory birds have arrived much earlier than normal this spring, setting the birding community in Wisconsin aflutter. Birders are tweeting, emailing and posting messages to each other when they're not outdoors with upturned faces affixed with binoculars.

"People are excited," said Tom Prestby, a Department of Natural Resources bird research technician. "It's always really cool - especially if you're one of the people lucky enough to find them - to know you're contributing to the record book."

At least 10 early arrival records of migratory bird species are likely to be broken, pending approval by the records committee of the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology. Most of Wisconsin's early migrant birds spend the winter in the southern United States, Mexico or the Caribbean. More records are expected to be broken this month as birds that winter in Central and South America begin to show up.

The warmth is shattering records across the United States. [Read more...]



Petrobras Notified of Oil Leak Near Chevron Frade Area (10 April 2012)
Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4), the country's state-controlled oil company, is leaking crude from the seabed near where Chevron Corp. (CVX) has had two spills since November, the country's oil regulator said.

The leak from the Roncador field is near the Frade field operated by Chevron Corp., where a spill was detected in November and a seep was found in March, ANP said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. The agency expected to get crude test results over the next two days to determine the source of the leak, according to the statement.

Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based company is known, confirmed the leak in a separate e-mailed statement yesterday.

Chevron discovered the oil seep on April 7 while it was investigating the ocean floor near Frade and determined it was outside the contract boundary, spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. The spill is coming from Petrobras' Roncador field in the Campos Basin, the second- biggest producing field in Brazil, ANP said.

No oil from the leak has reached the surface, according to ANP and Petrobras.

A leak of 3,000 barrels of crude into the Atlantic Ocean off Rio de Janeiro's coast in November and a seep last month have led to probes against Chevron and Transocean Ltd. (RIG), which operated the rig at Frade. Federal prosecutor Eduardo Santos de Oliveira has filed a total of 40 billion reais ($22 billion) in two lawsuits and pressed criminal charges against executives of the two companies last month, seeking penalties of up to 31 years in prison. [Read more...]



Analysis: Oil firms hurt by Gulf spill welcome back drill rigs (10 April 2012)
(Reuters) - Gulf of Mexico oil drillers will be busier this year than at any point since the BP (BP.L) oil spill in 2010 that upended their industry and soiled their reputation along with parts of the marshy Louisiana coast.

Eight more deepwater rigs are expected in the Gulf this year, based on what oil companies tell contractors including Transocean (RIGN.VX), Ensco (ESV.N) and Seadrill (SDRL.OL). Such an influx would bring the active deepwater count to 29, just short of the level before the well blowout two years ago this month that killed 11 people and destroyed a Transocean rig.

The rebound cannot come soon enough for companies that rely on the drilling business. While the increasingly varied economy of southern Louisiana may be recovering, no sector pays like oil and gas. Energy has been part of the state's commercial fabric since the first offshore boom during the 1970s oil crisis, when crude was much cheaper than it is now.

More Gulf activity could help President Barack Obama, ahead of the November 6 election, as he tries to fend off charges from some Republicans and the industry that drilling has not recovered after the spill due to new rules and slow permitting. [Read more...]



Video: US students pepper sprayed at protest over tuition fees (9 April 2012)
AMATEUR footage shows students in California crying and screaming after they were pepper sprayed during a rally against a tuition fees hike.

Around 30 students from Santa Monica college in California were overcome by the caustic substance after a campus police officer sprayed at a crowd of people as they attempted to enter a meeting on Tuesday.

A number of college staff and other police personnel were also affected by the pepper spray release.

Footage of the incident showed dozens of shrieking students clutching their hands over their eyes and pushing their way past police as they tried to flee through a hallway. [Read more...]



Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials (8 April 2012)
Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest -- she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. "My left eye was closed when the tape was applied," she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. "But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony." The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi's prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar's case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar's husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK -- a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant. [Read more...]



Fukushima radiation found in California kelp (8 April 2012)
Kelp off California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state's coastline, according to a new scientific study.

Scientists from CSU Long Beach tested giant kelp collected off Orange County, Santa Cruz and other locations after the March 2011 accident and detected radioactive iodine, which was released from the damaged nuclear reactor.

The largest concentration was about 250 times higher than levels found in kelp before the accident.

"Basically, we saw it in all the California kelp blades we sampled," said Steven Manley, a CSU Long Beach biology professor who specializes in kelp. [Read more...]



Indian forest-dwellers take battle against mining conglomerate to supreme court (8 April 2012)
The leaders of thousands of forest-dwelling tribesmen who have fought for years to preserve their ancestral lands from exploitation by an international mining corporation have promised to continue their struggle whatever the decision in a key hearing before India's supreme court on Monday.

Dubbed the "real life Avatar" after the Hollywood blockbuster, the battle of the Dongria Kondh people to stop London-based conglomerate Vedanta Resources mining bauxite from a hillside they consider sacred has attracted international support. Celebrities backing the campaign include James Cameron, the director of Avatar, Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize-winning author, as well as British actors Joanna Lumley and Michael Palin.

On Monday the court will decide on an appeal by Vedanta against a ministerial decision in 2010 that stopped work at the site in the Niyamgiri hills of India's eastern Orissa state.

Lingaraj Azad, a leader of the Save Niyamgiri Committee, said the Dongria Kondh's campaign "is not just that of an isolated tribe for its customary rights over its traditional lands and habitats, but that of the entire world over protecting our natural heritage". [Read more...]



World's rarest ducklings Madagascan pochards hatch (6 April 2012)
Eighteen Madagascan pochards - the world's most endangered duck - have hatched in a captive breeding centre.

This brings the world population of the ducks to just 60.

The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the groups leading the captive breeding programme, say this "builds hope that the bird can be saved from extinction".

The precious pochards are being reared at a specially built centre in Antsohihy, Madagascar. [Read more...]



The battle to save Israel's biblical-era desert dogs (9 April 2012)
Motorists thundering past on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway probably never notice the modest kennels set slightly back from the road in the British Mandate-era buildings that are home to Israel's only breeding programme for the native, biblical-era Canaan dog.

Indeed, many Israelis have never even heard of the Canaan dog -- distinctive for its pointed ears, curled tail and fiercely independent spirit -- even though it is the country's national breed.

Owing to a land dispute, the future of the little-known Canaan is now in doubt. Myrna Shiboleth, a diminutive Israeli originally from Chicago, who has devoted years to ensuring the survival of the breed at the Shaar Hagi kennels south of Jerusalem, is now fighting an eviction order from the Israeli government.

If forced to leave her home of four decades, Mrs Shiboleth says she will almost certainly have to end her breeding project. Experts fear the abandonment of the programme could lead to the extinction of the Canaan breed within a generation, robbing Israel of an important part of its history. [Read more...]



Studies show how pesticides make bees lose their way (29 March 2012)
The treated colonies were on average eight to 12 percent smaller than the control colonies at the end of the experiment, and also produced about 85 percent fewer queens - a finding that is key because queens produce the next generation of bees.

In the separate study, a team led by Mickael Henry of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Avignon tagged free-ranging honeybees with tiny radio-frequency identification microchips glued to each bee's back. This allowed them to track the bees as they came and went from hives.

The researchers gave some of the bees a low dose of the neonicotinoid pesticide thiamethoxam which they knew would not kill them and compared them to a control group of bees that was not exposed to the pesticide.

The treated bees were about two to three times more likely to die while away from their nests, and the researchers said this was probably because the pesticide interfered with the bees' homing systems, so they couldn't find their way home. [Read more...]



Your Easter egg just might hatch ... a dinosaur? (8 April 2012)
The research started as an analysis of a newly discovered 70-million-year-old egg, one that would've been laid by a mama dinosaur during the Late Cretaceous when Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth. The researchers named the new species, whose egg was discovered in the Pyrenees, Sankofa pyrenaica. (Sankofa is an Ashanti word meaning "learning from the past.")

To figure out if the egg belonged to an ancient bird or its dinosaur relatives, the team compared the shapes of eggs from birds and dinosaurs. They came up with a mathematical formula to determine and describe all possible egg shapes; next they plotted real eggs, based on size and shape, into this "egg morphospace."

"We found that different species have different-shaped eggs, and that the eggs of dinosaurs are not the same shape as the eggs of birds," study researcher Enric Vicens, of the Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona, in Spain, said in a statement.

In general, birds' eggs tend to be more rounded than dinosaur eggs, which are more elongated, the researchers found. Dinosaur eggs "also tend to be more symmetrical with less distinction between the blunt and the more pointed end," Vicens said. [Read more...]



Shale oil: from curse to cure for East Coast refiners? (4 April 2012)
(Reuters) - In 1902, the S.S. Paraguay set sail from Texas carrying the first shipment of 400,000 barrels of oil from the Spindletop field to a new refinery on the Delaware River.

The Pew family, which had large holdings in Texas, built the plant to help absorb the gusher of crude that had unexpectedly emerged in east Texas, which lacked refining capacity and sufficient demand for the fuel. The Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania plant, perched at the tip of a spit of land, would provide both.

Amid another U.S. oil market upheaval more than a century later, the roles are reversed: a new kind of oil from Texas and North Dakota may rescue some East Coast refiners from the brink of oblivion, providing a local alternative to the costly imported crude that had threatened to put them out of business.

While it appears too late to spare Marcus Hook, which has been shuttered since December, evidence of new buying interest has emerged this week for two other major plants, potentially saving the Northeast region from a summer fuel squeeze that had unnerved politicians all the way to the White House. [Read more...]



Sony 'to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide' (9 April 2012)
Sony will cut about 10,000 jobs worldwide over the next year as it tries to return to profit, Japanese news reports say.

The Nikkei business daily and other media said Sony's decision to slash 6% of its workforce comes as it struggles with weak TV sales and swelling losses.

Sony spokeswoman Yoko Yasukouchi would not confirm the reports.

New CEO Kazuo Hirai is holding a press conference on Thursday. [Read more...]



Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit (8 April 2012)
Phoenix -- Perhaps no law in the past generation has drawn more praise than the drive to "end welfare as we know it," which joined the late-'90s economic boom to send caseloads plunging, employment rates rising and officials of both parties hailing the virtues of tough love.

But the distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript: much as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession -- in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners -- all with children in tow. [Read more...]



Dread turns to amazement as casualties hold to zero (8 April 2012)
How?

That's the question everyone is asking.

How does a 30,000-pound fighter jet fall from the sky, slam into a crowded neighborhood, burst into a fireball, incinerate dozens of apartments -- and kill no one?

On Saturday, one day after a Navy F/A-18D crashed into the Mayfair Mews apartments on Birdneck Road, everyone on the ground was declared safe and accounted for, and both pilots had been released from the hospital. [Read more...]



CBS "60 Minutes" Journalist Mike Wallace dies, 1918-2012 (8 April 2012)
(CBS News) For half a century, he took on corrupt politicians, scam artists and bureaucratic bumblers. His visits were preceded by the four dreaded words: Mike Wallace is here.

Wallace took to heart the old reporter's pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as "nosy and insistent."

So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn't submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence.

He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy.

He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan.

And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination. [Read more...]



Wisconsin Republican: Gender discrimination in workplace is all in your head (7 April 2012)
Wisconsin state senator Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) wants women to know that the whole concept of wage discrimination is all in their heads. "It's an underreported problem," Grothman told The Daily Beast, "but a huge number of discrimination claims are baseless. Most of them are filed by fired employees, and really today almost anybody is a protected class."

It was this rationale that led the senator to spearhead the drive to repeal Wisconsin's 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, the state's equivalent of the Ledbetter Act, the federal law that helped provide the means for workers to pursue discrimination claims against employers.

Governor Scott Walker (R) signed the repeal of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act into law on Thursday. The repeal, now known as Act 219, was brought before Walker after passing in party-line votes in the Republican-dominated state senate and state assembly.

One of the authors of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, Democratic state senator Christine Sinicki (Milwaukee) said of Act 219, "This whole (legislative) session has been anti-woman and anti-middle class, and this fits right in with that agenda." [Read more...]



Public gets chance to sound off on crane hunt at Monday hearings (7 April 2012)
The battle over a sandhill crane hunt in Wisconsin isn't over. In fact, it might just be starting.

The Wisconsin Conservation Congress plans to ask the public whether a hunt is a good idea at its spring hearings Monday, less than a month after a Republican bill that would have created a hunt died in the Legislature after bird lovers railed that hunters already kill enough animals. (See the attached PDF for a list of the hearings.)

The question promises to re-ignite a heated debate. Wisconsin prides itself on its hunting heritage. Hunting advocates argue the sandhill population is out of control and the birds devour farmers' corn seeds. But the state also is home to the International Crane Foundation, one of the world's leading crane protection organizations, not to mention throngs of people who admire sandhills.

"I'm really not surprised it's being brought up again, simply because I understand the nature of hunting in Wisconsin," said Lyn Young Lorenz of Poynette, who has volunteered for three decades to count sandhills for the foundation. "I just don't think it's necessary. If people lived near a wetland or paid attention to sandhill cranes the way I have for 30 years, they wouldn't be asking for this."

Sandhill cranes are tall, elegant creatures with huge wing spans and a call that sounds like something out of "Jurassic Park." The bird was hunted to near extinction around the turn of the 20th century, but the species has since rebounded and is now found throughout North America and eastern Siberia. [Read more...]

PAM COMMENTARY: I can't believe they're even considering this -- sandhill cranes aren't that easy to find, even in Wisconsin. Outside of Horicon Marsh, you'd be lucky to spot a group of them once or twice a year, usually around migration time when they're flying their chicks around, helping the chicks to build strength for the winter migration.



Whales sensed Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster (8 April 2012)
A technique that monitors whales through the sounds they emit has answered a key issue raised by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago this month.

The sound-monitoring technique revealed that sperm whales retreated from the immediate area around the spill caused by the explosion.

"There's obvious evidence of relocation," said team member Azmy Ackleh, professor and head of mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The discovery is important because it provides information about a species almost hunted to extinction for its valuable oil in the 19th century. [Read more...]



Hackers 'shut down' Home Office website (7 April 2012)
An apparent 'denial of service' attack, made it impossible to access the Home Office website for at least an hour.

Those trying to access the website were instead confronted by a notice that "Due to a high volume of traffic this page is currently unavailable."

The attack appeared to have been partly in protest at extradition proceedings against Gary McKinnon, 46, who is accused of hacking US military computers.

Other posts about "draconian surveillance proposals" suggested the hackers were also angry about recent Government draft proposals that would potentially allow the security services to monitor every email, phone call and website visit to see who people were contacting and what websites they were looking at. [Read more...]



'War on drugs' has failed, say Latin American leaders (7 April 2012)
Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalisation -- allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever -- would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?"

He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."

The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead. [Read more...]



Natural gas glut means drilling boom must slow (8 April 2012)
NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. natural gas market is bursting at the seams.

So much natural gas is being produced that soon there may be nowhere left to put the country's swelling surplus. After years of explosive growth, natural gas producers are retrenching.

The underground salt caverns, depleted oil fields and aquifers that store natural gas are rapidly filling up after a balmy winter depressed demand for home heating.

The glut has benefited businesses and homeowners that use natural gas. But with natural gas prices at a 10-year low -- and falling -- companies that produce the fuel are becoming victims of their drilling successes. Their stock prices are falling in anticipation of declining profits and scaled-back growth plans. [Read more...]



Beet Cakes (vegan potato pancakes) (8 April 2012)
PAM COMMENTARY: I was going through visitor statistics this morning, and noticed that my Beet Cakes recipe was number eight on the "top ten" list. Normally it doesn't even appear in the top ten.

The Beet Cakes in my cookbook are a type of potato pancake, a vegan variety. I assume their new popularity is due to the Passover religious holiday, when potato pancakes are very popular.

When I first mixed shredded beets, carrots, and potatoes together to make a new potato pancake, I thought the result would be a tri-colored pancake. Not so. The beets stain everything purplish red. Beet Cakes are actually a very pretty color of purplish red, pink, or magenta, and they're a little less starchy and sweeter than simple potato pancakes. It's actually flattering that people are using my recipe for their religious holiday, and I can try to guess why. If you're inviting the relatives over, or trying to get children to eat their food, the visual presentation is very nice. How can a kid resist magenta-colored food?








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Sources (if found on major alternative news boards) -- you may want to look at these boards yourself, as they're much more extensive than my site:
[AJ] - InfoWars.com, PrisonPlanet.com, or other Alex Jones-affiliated sites
[BF] - BuzzFlash.com
[DN] - DemocracyNow.org
[R] - Rense.com
[WRH] - WhatReallyHappened.com

...and a few other news sources (a work in progress)


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