Revisiting the not too distant past and comparing it to the realities of the Present. Taking a close look at the Metamorphosis of a power grab out of control
TYRANNICAL BO Has A Growing Hit List Of US Citizens To Assassinate (No Trial, Evidence, Etc)
By Glenn Greenwald
When The Washington Post’s Dana Priest first revealed (in passing) back in January that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens targeted for assassination, she wrote that “as of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens.” In April, both the Post and the NYT confirmed that the administration had specifically authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. Today, The Washington Times’ Eli Lake has an interview with Obama’s top Terrorism adviser John Brennan in which Brennan strongly suggests that the number of U.S. citizens targeted for assassination could actually be “dozens”: Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday. . . . “There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us,” said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. . . . “If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response,” Mr. Brennan said. “If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms.”
Nobody — or at least not me — disputes the right of the U.S. or any other country to kill someone on an actual battlefield during war without due process. That’s just obvious, but that’s not remotely what Brennan is talking about, and it’s not remotely what this assassination program is about. Indeed, Brennan explicitly identified two indistinguishable groups of American citizens who “will face the full brunt of a U.S. response”: (1) those “on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq”; and (2) those “in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place.” In other words, the entire world is a “battlefield” — countries where there is a war and countries where there isn’t — and the President’s “battlefield” powers, which are unlimited, extend everywhere. That theory — the whole world is a battlefield, even the U.S. — was the core premise that spawned 8 years of Bush/Cheney radicalism, and it has been adopted in full by the Obama administration (indeed, it was that “whole-world-is-a-battlefield” theory which Elena Kagan explicitly endorsed during her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General).
Anyone who doubts that the Obama administration has adopted the core Terrorism policies of Bush/Cheney should listen to the concession — or boast — which Brennan himself made in his interview with Lake: Mr. Brennan toward the end of the interview acknowledged that, despite some differences, there is considerable continuity between the counterterrorism policies of President Bush and President Obama. “There has been a lot of continuity of effort here from the previous administration to this one,” he said. “There are some important distinctions, but sometimes there is too much made of those distinctions. We are building upon some of the good foundational work that has been done.”
I would really like never to hear again the complaint that comparing Bush and Obama’s Terrorism and civil liberties policies is unfair, invalid or hyperbolic given that Obama’s top Terrorism adviser himself touts that comparison. And that’s anything but a surprise, given that Brennan was a Bush-era CIA official who defended many of the most controversial Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies.
I’ve written at length about the reasons why targeting American citizens for assassination who are far away from a “battlefield” is so odious and tyrannical, and I won’t repeat those arguments here. Suffice to say — and I’m asking this literally — if you’re someone who believes, or are at least willing to acquiesce to the claim, that the U.S. President has the power
Glenn Greenwald on Targeted Killing of U.S. Citizens
From the Majority Report, live M-F 11:30am EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:
Glenn Greenwald of Salon joins the show to talk about the Obama administration’s policy targeting American citizens for execution. Attorney General Holder’s speech earlier this week in defense of the policy did little to calm concerns. In fact, alarm bells are ringing…
President Obama’s Hit List – End of The 5th Amendment and America As We Know It
Ron Paul, Judge Napolitano, Jacob Hornberger and more talk about the Presidents assassination powers. The President now has the power to assassinate American citizens without charges… without due process? No Judge, No jury, No Trial.
Barack Obama is Using a “Hit List” to Trash Romney’s Donors (5/15/12)
Barack Hussein Obama wears many hats… in this report, Obama wears his “Liar in Chief” hat, and unjustly lies about a donor of Mitt Romney’s, Thomas O’Malley, whom many people call,”a hero”, because he’s a job creator and has saved many jobs.
Barack Obama still hasn’t gotten the message, because he keeps trying to change the subject… that “it’s the economy and we’re not stupid!”
The President’s Hit List
The attacks on Frank VanderSloot and political ‘civility.’
Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney’s campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as what’s really behind the drive for more “transparency” in political donations.
Related Video
Columnist Kim Strassel on President Obama’s enemies list. Photo: Associated Press
As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama’s campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight “less than reputable” Romney donors and a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.
Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”
Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target because of “his record on gay issues.”
If Mr. Simpson and Democrats really favor disclosure, then surely Mr. Simpson should disclose who is paying him to rummage through the personal lives of opposition donors. Someone should also ask the White House, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee if Mr. Simpson’s chop shop is on their payroll and if they approve of such tactics. Does Mr. Obama think the lifestyles and divorce records of campaign donors should be fair political game?
Strassel: Trolling for Dirt on the President’s List
First a Romney supporter was named on an Obama campaign website. That was followed by the slimy trolling into a citizen’s private life.
Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.
Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.
Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
Associated Press
About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.
Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk’s office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and a private cellphone number.
Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He’s found new work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from “Glenn Simpson.” That’s the name of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.
The website for that company, Fusion GPS, describes itself as providing “strategic intelligence,” with expertise in areas like “politics.” That’s a polite way of saying “opposition research.”
When I called Fusion’s main number and asked to speak to Michael Wolf, a man said Mr. Wolf wasn’t in the office that day but he’d be in this coming Monday. When I reached Mr. Wolf on his private cell, he confirmed he had until recently worked at the Senate.
When I asked what his interest was in Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records, he hesitated, then said he didn’t want to talk about that. When I asked what his relationship was with Fusion, he hesitated again and said he had “no comment.” “It’s a legal thing,” he added.
Fusion dodged my calls, so I couldn’t ask who was paying it to troll through Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. Mr. Simpson finally sent an email stating: “Frank VanderSloot is a figure of interest in the debate over civil rights for gay Americans. As his own record on gay issues amply demonstrates, he is a legitimate subject of public records research into his lengthy history of legal disputes.”
Related Video
Columnist Kim Strassel on President Obama’s enemies list. Photo: Associated Press
A look through Federal Election Commission records did not show any payments to Fusion or Mr. Wolf from political players, such as the Democratic National Committee, the Obama campaign, or liberal Super PACs. Then again, when political groups want to hire researchers, it is not uncommon to hire a less controversial third party, which then hires the researchers.
Hawai’i Island earthquake, May 31, 2012. Map courtesy USGS.
By Wendy Osher
There was no tsunami threat following a 3.5 magnitude earthquake reported at 11:15 a.m. on Thursday, May 31, 2012 on Hawai’i Island.
The earthquake was located: 11 miles N of Pahala, HI; 16 miles WSW of Volcano, HI; 22 miles NNE of Naalehu, HI; 34 miles SW of Hilo, HI; and 203 miles SE of Honolulu, HI.
The US Geological Survey, Hawaiian Volcano Observatory Hawaii National Park, recorded the data, reporting the earthquake to be at a depth of 0.3 miles.
The risk of a deadly tsunami ravaging the United States is now leading scientists to investigate hazards posed by giant earthquakes off the Alaskan coast.
Scientists are concentrating on the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone, where the tectonic plate underlying the Pacific Ocean is diving underneath the continental plate underlying North America. Tsunamis can be caused by earthquakes, especially large ones, and the second-largest recorded earthquake in history was a magnitude 9.2 at this zone in 1964.
“It concerns us a lot that we might have deadly waves aimed at U.S. shores,” said geophysicist David Scholl, an emeritus scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park, Calif., who discussed the work in Eos, a publication from the American Geophysical Union.
Traveling tsunamis
The fear is that a tsunami caused by a major earthquake along this zone could race across the Pacific Ocean and devastate highly populated areas of the U.S. West Coast, as well as Hawaii.
“We’ve been focusing on tsunami risks since 2004, when the Banda-Aceh earthquake and tsunami led to a loss of about 250,000 lives, and then the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and tsunami claimed another 20,000 or so people and caused a nuclear disaster,” Scholl told OurAmazingPlanet.
“Tsunamis show us that you may have an earthquake in one part of the world that visits damage on areas thousands of miles away.”
For instance, a tsunami in 1946 generated by a magnitude 8.6 temblor on the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone near Unimak Pass, Alaska, caused significant damage along the West Coast, claimed 150 lives in Hawaii, and inundated shorelines as far away as the South Pacific islands and Antarctica.
“These waves can travel at 500 mph [700 kph],” Scholl said. “From the Aleutians, a tsunami could get to Hawaii in four or five hours, two or three hours to get to Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and the California coast. And they don’t lose much energy as they go.
The waves aren’t horribly high as they travel over the deep ocean, only a meter [3 feet] or so, but when they get to the coast, in shallow waters they grow in height to dozens of meters, and in places like Long Beach harbor in California, they’d cause rapid currents that can tear up the harbor area.”
Next big one
It remains uncertain where the next tsunami generated along this zone might occur. It appears unlikely that a quake as large as the magnitude 9.2 event in 1964 will happen again soon — the interval for such major quakes is about 900 years.
However, the areas between the Shumagin and Fox Islands on the zone may cause trouble, Scholl said. In addition, the last time the Semidi Islands section of the zone experienced a great earthquake was in 1938, a magnitude 8.2 event, and enough time has passed for strain to build up for another major temblor. Indeed, satellite analysis of the area suggests the shallower portion of this section is accumulating strain at a high rate.
Research is under way to examine the ancient history of tsunamis on several of the Aleutian Islands by looking at layers of sediment there.
The hope is to yield insights on how often tsunamis recur there and to link these deadly waves to specific earthquakes to better model the potential deadliness of tsunamis based on the magnitudes and locations of the earthquakes that cause them. Such research is key to building effective defenses against tsunamis. [History's Biggest Tsunamis]
“When it came to the Fukushima disaster in Japan, they designed a sea wall to handle a tsunami, but they ended up lowballing how high the wave would be,” Scholl said. “You have to know how bad tsunamis have been to know what to prepare for.”
A fresh look at sedimentary evidence suggests the 900-930 AD rupture of the Seattle fault possibly produced a larger earthquake than previously recognized. The Seattle fault zone, a series of active-east-west trending thrust faults, poses seismic threat to the Puget Sound region.
The 900-930 AD rupture is the only known large earthquake along the Seattle Fault, making geological records of prehistoric events the only clues to the earthquake potential of the fault.
While a graduate student at the University of Washington, Maria Arcos looked at tsunami and debris flow deposits – both evidence of a paleo-quake – in the coastal marsh at Gorst, Washington. She also identified evidence of at least three meters of uplift that preceded a tsunami, which was followed by a sandy debris flow from Gorst Creek, and suggests that the 900-930 AD quake covered a greater geographic area than previous fault interpretations.
The revised height and width of deformation caused by the quake may influence current interpretations of the Seattle fault’s structure. This study found a minimum of three meters of uplift at Gorst, which is double the amount of previous fault models for the same location. A broader zone of deformation, says Arcos, may indicate either a wider zone of slip along the dip of the fault, a shallower dip or splay faults farther to the south.
More information: “The A.D. 900 – 930 Seattle Fault Zone Earthquake with a Wider Coseismic Rupture Patch and Postseismic Submergence: Inferences from New Sedimentary Evidence,” published in BSSA, Vol 102:3; DOI:10.1785/0120110123
The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Emissions of gas at Rincón de la Vieja Volcano has seen significant volcanic activity. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.
The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Emissions of gas at Poás Volcano are expected to increase. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.
The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Turrialba Volcano, 70 kilometers east of the capital, has seen significant volcanic and seismic activity in recent months, prompting the National Seismological Network to upgraded its own color threat level to yellow. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.
Tropical depression also dumping rain across coastal North Carolina
Tom Copeland / AP
The homes hit Wednesday by a tornado near Peletier, N.C., are along the White Oak River.
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 5/30/2012 4:45:43 PM ET
Winds from Tropical Depression Beryl spawned a tornado Wednesday that destroyed four homes and damaged 64 more near Peletier, N.C., the local emergency management chief told msnbc.com.
No injuries were reported, added JoAnn Smith, emergency services director for Carteret County.
National Weather Service teams confirmed that a tornado caused the damage. The area is about 100 miles southeast of Raleigh.
Overnight, Beryl spawned a twister with 105 mph winds that blew off roofs and ripped up trees in Holly Hill, S.C., WCSC-TV reported. No one was injured.
Beryl was expected to return to storm status as it heads out to sea — and after dumping up to 6 inches of rain Wednesday from eastern North Carolina to southeast Virginia.
In North Carolina, many schools along the coast decided to shorten Wednesday’s school day by several hours because of the flood threat, NBC affiliate WNCN-TV reported.
Beryl sloshed ashore near Jacksonville, Fla., on Memorial Day as a tropical storm but was a tropical depression Wednesday morning with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph.
While expected to strengthen later Wednesday, any tropical storm-force winds will be offshore, the National Hurricane Center stated.
Beryl is the second named tropical system of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season that doesn’t officially begin until Friday.
Beryl dumped 10 inches of rain in Sewanee County, Fla., while nearby areas wound up with 3 to 6 inches.
Forecasters had predicted that up to 4 inches could fall on parts of South Carolina on Tuesday, although dry air began to wrap into the system in Georgia and by late in the day, the forecast called for only about 2 inches of new rain.
Rain would be welcome along the South Carolina coast after what has been a warm winter and dry spring. Rainfall in the Charleston area is about 4 inches below normal for the year.
Prior to Wednesday’s tornado damage, reports from the National Weather Service indicated that damage from Beryl seemed confined to downed trees and branches.
One person, an 18-year-old who went swimming off Daytona Beach on Monday evening, died in the rough surf.
Msnbc.com’s Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A homeowner living near a massive sinkhole that closed an Anoka County road says the huge hole is getting even bigger.
The hole appeared on Saturday morning, taking out 15 feet of Kettle River Boulevard and 165th Avenue in Columbus, Minn. — but it’s still growing around the edges.
The roadway has been blocked to traffic, and the Anoka County engineer says crews will be out on Thursday morning to begin repairs.
Officials say heavy rains and an aging infrastructure caused the pipe beneath the road to give out.
Some 3,000 people living in the towns of Palena and Futaleufu, in the southern Chilean region of Los Lagos, on Wendesday remained isolated because of a mudslide that buried the road leading to the area, authorities said.
The mudslide, about 120 meters (390 feet) long and 20 meters (65 feet) deep, occurred late Tuesday during a storm that affected the area, in the vicinity of Villa Santa Lucia, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Santiago.
That is what Andres Ibaceta, the regional head of the National Emergency Management Office, or Onemi, told local media, adding that although the road link for the affected communities with the rest of Chile had been interrupted, the border pass to Argentina is open.
“You can’t get to Palena from the Chilean side, although it is possible from the Argentine side,” said Ibaceta, while the Highway Department said that the effort to clear the road could take between two and three days.
Ibaceta emphasized that the weather conditions had improved in recent hours, something that he said will enable work crews to accelerate the clearing of mud, rocks and other debris from the road.
The storm also resulted in power outages and the loss of telephone communications, a situation that authorities said they had resolved over the past few hours.
The front of bad weather that affected several regions of Chile over the past few days left two people dead and 3,542 with some sort of property damage, according to figures compiled by Onemi. EFE
31.05.2012
Landslide
India
State of Sikkim, [Between Gangtok and Tsomgo Lake]
Landslides triggered by rains have snapped the road link between Gangtok and Tsomgo Lake, leaving about 4000 tourists stranded near 15 Mile, en route to Tsomgo Lake and Nathu la in Sikkim. Officials said that visitors from all over the country on way to the lake and Nathu La have been put up in shelters provided by the Army at their bases beyond 15 Mile. The tourists were stuck after boulders fell on the main Jawaharlal Nehru Road, the link between Gangtok and Tsomgo Lake, yesterday. Lukendra Rasaily, president, Travel Agents Association of Sikkim (TAAS) said the boulders started falling on the road after 2 PM yesterday and at around 4 PM it got totally blocked after another landslide struck above 15 Mile. Many of the tourists who had reached the spot before the landslide were, however, lucky to make it to Gangtok.Some of the tourists braved it across the slide through other alternative routes to reach Gangtok, but the route was fraught with danger in view of fading light and continuous rains, Rasaily said. Border Road Organisation officials were working round-the -clock on re-opening the route depending on the weather, the sources said, adding last September’s tremor, 6.9 on Richter scale, could have loosened the ground underneath and continuing rains then resulted in the landslide. The alternative route via Rongli and Rhenock will be used to evacuate the tourists if the main route takes longer to be restored. Yesterday, was the first day of the week when Nathu la was open to tourists as any traffic upto the Indo-China border remains closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Chagas, a tropical disease spread by insects, is causing some fresh concern following an editorial—published earlier this week in a medical journal—that called it “the new AIDS of the Americas.”
More than 8 million people have been infected by Chagas, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States.
The editorial, published by the Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.
“There are a number of striking similarities between people living with Chagas disease and people living with HIV/AIDS,” the authors wrote, “particularly for those with HIV/AIDS who contracted the disease in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”
Both diseases disproportionately affect people living in poverty, both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged, expensive treatment, and as with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, “most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities.”
“It likes to bite you on the face,” CNN reported. “It’s called the kissing bug. When it ingests your blood, it excretes the parasite at the same time. When you wake up and scratch the itch, the parasite moves into the wound and you’re infected.”
“Gaaah,” Cassie Murdoch wrote on Jezebel.com, summing up the sentiment of everyone who read the journal’s report.
Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, kills about 20,000 people per year, the journal said.
And while just 20 percent of those infected with Chagas develop a life-threatening form of the disease, Chagas is “hard or impossible to cure,” the Times reports:
The disease can be transmitted from mother to child or by blood transfusion. About a quarter of its victims eventually will develop enlarged hearts or intestines, which can fail or burst, causing sudden death. Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.
“The problem is once the heart symptoms start, which is the most dreaded complication—the Chagas cardiomyopathy—the medicines no longer work very well,” Dr. Peter Hotez, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the editorial’s authors, told CNN. “Problem No. 2: the medicines are extremely toxic.”
And 11 percent of pregnant women in Latin America are infected with Chagas, the journal said.
Norma Andrews Part 1: Trypanosoma cruzi and Chagas’ Disease English Subtitle
http://www.ibioseminars.org/lectures/global-health-a-energy/norma-andrews.html
Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania are closely related intracellular protozoan parasites that cause serious diseases throughout the world. In the first part of this lecture, I will present background material on the biology of Trypanosoma cruzi and the history of its discovery as an important agent of human disease in Latin America. I will also discuss the main characteristics of the disease, and the current efforts to stop human transmission.
As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions.
In contrast, the Milky Way’s center shows little activity. But it wasn’t always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way’s central black hole was much more active in the past.
“These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago,” said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
“They strengthen the case for an active galactic nucleus in the Milky Way’s relatively recent past,” he added.The two beams, or jets, were revealed by NASA’s Fermi space telescope. They extend from the galactic center to a distance of 27,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. They are the first such gamma-ray jets ever found, and the only ones close enough to resolve with Fermi.
The newfound jets may be related to mysterious gamma-ray bubbles that Fermi detected in 2010. Those bubbles also stretch 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. However, where the bubbles are perpendicular to the galactic plane, the gamma-ray jets are tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. This may reflect a tilt of the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole.
“The central accretion disk can warp as it spirals in toward the black hole, under the influence of the black hole’s spin,” explained co-author Douglas Finkbeiner of the CfA. “The magnetic field embedded in the disk therefore accelerates the jet material along the spin axis of the black hole, which may not be aligned with the Milky Way.”
The two structures also formed differently. The jets were produced when plasma squirted out from the galactic center, following a corkscrew-like magnetic field that kept it tightly focused. The gamma-ray bubbles likely were created by a “wind” of hot matter blowing outward from the black hole’s accretion disk. As a result, they are much broader than the narrow jets.
Both the jets and bubbles are powered by inverse Compton scattering. In that process, electrons moving near the speed of light collide with low-energy light, such as radio or infrared photons. The collision increases the energy of the photons into the gamma-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The discovery leaves open the question of when the Milky Way was last active. A minimum age can be calculated by dividing the jet’s 27,000-light-year length by its approximate speed. However, it may have persisted for much longer.
“These jets probably flickered on and off as the supermassive black hole alternately gulped and sipped material,” said Finkbeiner.
It would take a tremendous influx of matter for the galactic core to fire up again. Finkbeiner estimates that a molecular cloud weighing about 10,000 times as much as the Sun would be required.
“Shoving 10,000 suns into the black hole at once would do the trick. Black holes are messy eaters, so some of that material would spew out and power the jets,” he said.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.
For more information, contact:
David A. Aguilar
Director of Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7462
daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu
Christine Pulliam
Public Affairs Specialist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7463
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu
A moderate solar flare on May 17 lit up ground stations all over the world with an unexpected and puzzling pulse of high-energy particles. It should not have happened, and scientists are now trying to figure out why it did.
Major solar flares, flashes of light at various wavelengths often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are known to disrupt communications and can even trip power grids on Earth. But the May 17 flare was an M-class event, moderate and relatively common and not expected to create disturbances on the surface of Earth. Yet either the flare or the CME generated a ground-level enhancement (GLE), a blast of high-energy particles that lit up ground stations called neutron monitors on Earth for the first time in nearly six years.
Scientists don’t expect an M-class flare to create a GLE.
“This solar flare was most unimpressive and the associated CME was only slightly more energetic,” said James Ryan, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center (SSC). “And looking at it optically, it was remarkably dim, it was, all things considered, a 98-pound weakling of solar events.”
Data on the event was captured by the European satellite called PAMELA, or Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics. Ryan is a co-investigator on the PAMELA mission, and hopes the spacecraft data will reveal how the high-energy particles morphed on their way to Earth and resulted in the mysterious GLE.
Scientists don’t know if the extremely energetic particles registered on the ground are the results of a shockwave in front of a CME or if the particles come from the solar flare itself.
“The PAMELA satellite provides us with a bridge that has never existed before,” says Ryan, “a bridge between solar energetic particles measured by other spacecraft and those made on the ground by neutron monitors.”
Until the data is studied, however, the May 17 event remains a mystery.
This illustration shows the collision paths of our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. The galaxies are moving toward each other under the inexorable pull of gravity between them. Also shown is a smaller galaxy, Triangulum, which may be part of the smashup. (Credit: NASA; ESA; A. Feild and R. van der Marel, STScI)
(Phys.org) — NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy
The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.
“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.
The solution came through painstaking NASAHubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.
“After nearly a century of speculation about the future destiny of Andromeda and our Milky Way, we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold over the coming billions of years,” said Sangmo Tony Sohn of STScI.
The scenario is like a baseball batter watching an oncoming fastball. Although Andromeda is approaching us more than 2,000 times faster, it will take 4 billion years before the strike.
Computer simulations derived from Hubble’s data show that it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.
Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today.
This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth’s night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull. (Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger)
To make matters more complicated, M31′s small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first.The universe is expanding and accelerating, and collisions between galaxies in close proximity to each other still happen because they are bound by the gravity of the dark matter surrounding them. The Hubble Space Telescope’s deep views of the universe show such encounters between galaxies were more common in the past when the universe was smaller.
A century ago astronomers did not realize that M31 was a separate galaxy far beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble measured its vast distance by uncovering a variable star that served as a “milepost marker.”
Hubble went on to discover the expanding universe where galaxies are rushing away from us, but it has long been known that M31 is moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to travel from here to the moon in one hour. The measurement was made using the Doppler effect, which is a change in frequency and wavelength of waves produced by a moving source relative to an observer, to measure how starlight in the galaxy has been compressed by Andromeda’s motion toward us.
Previously, it was unknown whether the far-future encounter will be a miss, glancing blow, or head-on smashup. This depends on M31’s tangential motion. Until now, astronomers had not been able to measure M31′s sideways motion in the sky, despite attempts dating back more than a century. The Hubble Space Telescope team, led by van der Marel, conducted extraordinarily precise observations of the sideways motion of M31 that remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way.
“This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period,” said Jay Anderson of STScI.
“In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits,” said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York, N.Y. “The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits. The galaxies’ cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy.”
The space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble upgraded it with ever more-powerful cameras, which have given astronomers a long-enough time baseline to make the critical measurements needed to nail down M31′s motion. The Hubble observations and the consequences of the merger are reported in three papers that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
One person has skin lesions and 16 animals have died in an anthrax outbreak in northern Colombia, near the Venezuelan border.
A notification on the website for the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said the outbreak has affected two farms in the department of La Guajira. Colombia’s Agriculture Ministry sent the information to the OIE on May 28.
The source of the deadly bacteria has not yet been determined, the report said. One of the affected populations “belongs to an indigenous community in the department of La Guajira,” the notice states.
“The community has been informed of the protocol to be applied to dispose of the carcasses, mainly the fact that, under no circumstances, the dead animals must be neither manipulated nor consumed,” the report said.
Humans commonly contract anthrax through close contact with infected animals or eating ones that have died from the disease.
“Susceptible species are being vaccinated. An intense epidemiological surveillance is being conducted in the area together with the public health authorities,” the notification continued.
The animals will be also be quarantined in response to the outbreak.
Three goats, three sheep and two pigs have died from the outbreak on one farm. Another five goats and two pigs have died on a separate farm.
Anthrax, also used as a biological weapon, is caused by the spore-forming bacteria Bacillus anthracia, the OIE website states. The disease causes dark ulcers on the skin of infected people when contracted from exposure to infected animals, and it occurs on all the continents.
“Anthrax spores in the soil are very resistant and can cause disease when ingested even years after an outbreak,” the OIE stated. “The bacteria produce extremely potent toxins which are responsible for the ill effects, causing a high mortality rate.”
The last anthrax outbreak in Colombia was in April 2011. An outbreak in 2010 caused the government to declare a state of emergency in La Guajira after 77 people developed lesions, a common symptom of the disease.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Fukushima, Japan, last year wreaked havoc in the skies above as well, disturbing electrons in the upper atmosphere, NASA reported.
The waves of energy from the quake and tsunami that were so destructive on the ground reached into the ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere that stretches from about 80 to 805 kilometres above Earth’s surface.
The ionosphere is the last, thinnest part of the atmosphere, where solar ultraviolet radiation breaks up molecules and leaves a haze of electrons and ions.
In images released on Friday, NASA showed how the earthly disturbances from the March 11, 2011, quake and tsunami were echoed in the movement of electrons far aloft. This movement was monitored by tracking the GPS signals between satellites and ground receivers.
Scientists have seen this phenomenon before, for tsunamis in Samoa in 2009 and Chile in 2010. The Japanese event, however, occurred in a region more closely monitored by a dense network of GPS receivers, NASA said in a statement.
The world is running out of drinkable water, and if you don’t believe me, just go to the movies. Documentaries with names such as Tapped and Thirst are at the leading edge of the new genre – the eco-disaster film – that have become our main source of information about our collapsing environment.
Last Call at the Oasis is a slick addition, a kind of report card on the state of what it calls the single most important element, although I don’t know what consideration they gave to air. Water is becoming a scarce commodity, and what’s left is becoming more and more polluted: by industrial waste, chemicals and the poo of a million farm animals. Droughts plague the world. Half of the hospital beds are taken up with people suffering form water-borne illnesses.
As one of the film’s experts, Jay Famiglietti, puts it, “We’re screwed.”
Eventually, Last Call at the Oasis does find reason for hope: We can use recycled water, for instance, if we can get people over their initial reluctance to drink something that started in the toilet (the film proposes an ad campaign for a product it calls Porcelain Springs water, “from the most peaceful place on earth”) and even in the Middle East, traditional enemies are co-operating to clean the sad polluted trickle that is the Jordan River.
Until then, though, director Jessica Yu (Breathing Lessons) takes us on a smoothly produced tour of the terrible things we’ve done to ourselves. Based on the Alex Prud’homme book, The Ripple Effect, the movie assigns much of the blame for the water crisis to America, and the contrast between the dancing fountains of Las Vegas and the surrounding desert is an instructive metaphor. Vegas is close to Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, which is dropping by 10 feet a year; by 2025, it could be dry. Meanwhile, Las Vegas (population two million) is pondering a $3-billion pipeline to Baker, Nev. (population 150), a lush town that now stands to lose its water supply.
But that’s only the start. “We’re all Vegas,” someone says, and Last Call at the Oasis tours other impending disasters: the Central Valley of California, where a quarter of American food is grown; Australia, where a decade of drought is destroying agriculture.
After a brief course in water usage (most domestic use is taken up by the toilet; there’s a hidden cost of water, so that four pounds of steak requires 18,000 gallons of the stuff, enough to fill the average swimming pool), Last Call brings in Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist whose fight against industrial pollution in Hinkley, Calif., became a hit movie. Brockovich, an engagingly straightforward expert, becomes the spokeswoman for another aspect of the crisis: the cocktail of birth control pills, steroids, antibiotics and other industrial contaminants in our water.
There’s no end to the troubles, including the herbicide Atrazine, which is blamed for causing male frogs to become females. The “safe level” of Atrazine in drinking water is 30 times the level that causes the sex change.
We also visit Michigan, where huge farms called Concentrated Animal Feed Operations pour tons of animal waste into lagoons that leach into the surrounding countryside. One cow can produce 150 pounds of manure a day, 23 times the average human output, although they never met my Uncle Myron.
The solution isn’t bottled water – an industry that has spawned documentaries of its own – but recycling and conservation. Last Call at the Oasis is just the latest call for such action, and in its accumulation of evidence, it really does feel like we’re nearing the end.
jstone(at)postmedia.com
canada.com/stonereport
CAPSULE -Last Call at the Oasis: A documentary about the impending water crisis that looks at the droughts, shrinking reservoirs and increasing pollution and scratches around for hope. “We’re screwed,” says one expert, but the film – which is slickly produced – proposes reasonable solutions. three stars out of five – Jay Stone
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Britain’s culture minister has denied having inappropriate contacts with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in testimony before a public inquiry, as pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister David Cameron’s government over the issue.
Jeremy Hunt, appearing before the Leveson media standards inquiry on Thursday, admitted that he was “sympathetic” towards US-based News Corporation’s failed bid to control British satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
From the Majority Report, live M-F 12 noon EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:
Thousands upon thousands of eligible voters are being told they cannot vote in Florida…
‘ACTA could turn honest citizens into criminals by mistake’
Amazing how they can see through this move in Europe and no one can seem to see their way clear of the subterfuge hidden within this legislation here in the United States! Makes you wonder huh ?
The controversial ACTA anti-piracy agreement has been dealt a blow by the European Parliament. Three key committees have voted against the treaty, citing concerns over its legality. ACTA sparked Europe-wide protests, with activists saying online freedom of speech is being put at risk.
Rick Falkvinge from the Swedish Pirate Party says the treaty is confused at best.
On Thursday, US lawmakers discussed whether or not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be renewed. FISA gives government the power to monitor phone calls, emails and other forms of electronic communication. Critics believe that FISA can now be used to target citizens all in the name of homeland security. Andrew Blake, RT’s web producer, joins us with more on the controversial legislation and discusses other legislation such as CISPA, SOPA and PIPA.
House rejects bill penalizing doctors for sex-selective abortions
By Pete Kasperowicz
The House on Thursday rejected a Republican bill that would impose fines and prison terms on doctors who perform abortions for the sole purpose of controlling the gender of the child, a practice known as sex-selective abortion.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), H.R. 3541, was defeated in a 246-168 vote. While that’s a clear majority of the House, Republicans called up the bill under a suspension of House rules, which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority vote to pass. In this case, it would have required more support from Democrats.
Twenty Democrats voted for the bill, while seven Republicans opposed it. The bill would have needed 30 more yeas to pass.
Suspension votes are normally used for noncontroversial bills, but the GOP-backed measure was clearly controversial. Republicans have occasionally put controversial bills on the suspension calendar in order to highlight that Democrats oppose certain policies.
In some cases, Republicans have rescheduled these bills for regular consideration after they have failed, allowing for passage by a simple majority. But Republicans gave no sign that they would try again with PRENDA.
Earlier in the day, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated that the issue of stopping sex-selective abortion is important enough that they would try again, but he was not specific.
Democracynow.org – After years of rumors that mining companies were exploring in Haiti, Canadian and U.S. corporations now confirm they have permits to mine gold in more than 1,000 square-miles in northern Haiti. Haiti’s new prime minister says the estimated $20 billion worth of minerals in Haiti’s hills could help liberate it from dependency on foreign aid, and rebuild from the devastating 2010 earthquake. But many worry the mines will be a boom for foreign investors and a bust for local communities. We speak to Jane Regan, lead author of “Gold Rush in Haiti: Who Will Get Rich?” The report by Haiti Grassroots Watch was published Wednesday in The Guardian and Haïti Liberté. “You have a perfect storm brewing where you have giant pit mines in the north in a country that is already environmentally devastated and giant pit mines being run by Canadian and American companies,” Regan says. “Most of the money and gold dug up will go straight north.”
To watch the complete weekday independent news hour, read the transcript, download the podcast, search our vast archive, or to find more information about Democracy Now! and Amy Goodman, visit http://www.democracynow.org/
Moody’s Investors Service has cut its credit ratings for nine Danish banks, citing the impact of the ongoing eurozone crisis on bank loan quality and on their fund-raising capacity.
The ratings agency lowered the debt ratings of the banks, along with the Finnish subsidiary of one of the banks, by up to three notches on Wednesday, AFP reported.
The banks are Danske Bank, Jyske Bank, Sydbank, Spar Nord Bank, Ringkjobing Landbobank, Nykredit, Realkredit, DLR Kredit, and Danmarks Skibskredit. Moody’s also downgraded Danske Bank’s Finnish arm Sampo Bank.
“Danish financial institutions face sluggish domestic economic growth, weakening real estate prices, and higher levels of unemployment, as well as the risk of external shocks from the ongoing euro area debt crisis,” Moody’s said.
“Asset quality is deteriorating, and these pressures are expected to continue,” it added.
The agency also noted that the significant reliance of most of the financial institutions on market funding has enhanced their vulnerability to the eurozone crisis.
“Structural changes to that market have increased refinancing risk, posing a particular concern for mortgage credit institutions whose access to alternative funding is limited,” Moody’s stated.
Europe was hit by a serious financial crisis in 2008 and the situation has intensified over the past few months.
DemocracyNow.org – We go to Bahrain to speak with two recently released political prisoners, Zainab Alkhawaja and Nabeel Rajab, both jailed for protesting the U.S.-backed monarchy. Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was released on bail after being held for nearly a month. “We always thought that America and Bahrain’s good relations would benefit our fight for freedom and democracy in our region, but it has turned out to be opposite,” he says. “They are supporting a dictator here, the oppressive regime. … We have to suffer for being a rich region.” Alkhawaja, who was jailed in April after protesting the detention of her father, Abdulhadi, vows: “We are going to carry on protesting … It doesn’t matter if we get arrested five, six, 10 times, it’s not going to stop. In the end, we have sacrificed a lot for democracy and freedom.”
To watch the complete weekday independent news hour, read the transcript, download the podcast, search our vast archive, or to find more information about Democracy Now! and Amy Goodman, visit http://www.democracynow.org/
A group of defectors fighting for the M23 rebel movement against the Congolese army say that they were recruited and trained in neighbouring Rwanda against their will.
The revelations come after weeks of fighting in the east of the country and would be the first direct evidence that Rwandan troops are involved in the fighting that has displaced thousands from their homes.
The allegations made by the rebel defectors across the border in Congo will strain relations with Rwanda, but so far officials from both sides have held back, and are talking about a joint investigation to get to the bottom of the matter.
The Syrian government says the massacre of more than a hundred people in the Syrian town of Houla was the work of armed terrorist gangs. This, as the U.S. Secretary of State admits military planning for action in Syria is already going ahead, but Moscow has vowed to block any moves for outside interference at the UN.
Activist Sara Flounders talks to RT. She says Washington was never interested in a diplomatic solution in Syria.
Mosaic News: Egypt’s Shafiq vows to crush revolution and restrain Islamists if he wins election
Egypt’s Shafiq vows to crush revolution and restrain Islamists if he wins the election, Sudan pulls troops from Abyei amid new bombing accusations by the South, prominent Bahraini activist Zainab al-Khawaja released on bail, and more.
Today’s headlines in full:
Egypt’s Shafiq vows to crush revolution and restrain Islamists if he wins election
Al-Alam, Iran
Sudan pulls troops from Abyei amid new bombing accusations by South
Dubai TV, UAE
Prominent Bahraini activist Zainab al-Khawaja released on bail
BBC Arabic, UK
Afghan rage over sharp increase in civilian casualties
Press TV, Iran
Israel lacks courage to wage war on Iran, says Supreme Leader’s aide
Press TV, Iran
Iran’s foreign ministry in talks with Saudi Arabia over jailed Iranians
Press TV, Iran
Iran hit by ‘Flame’ computer virus as Israel keeps mum on speculated involvement
IBA, Israel
Turkey authorizes arrest warrants for ex-IDF chiefs over 2010 flotilla deaths
IBA, Israel
Israeli forces turn Palestinian family home into prison
Palestine TV, Ramallah
Mood ‘deeply disturbed’ by executions in Syria
Future TV, Lebanon
Iraqis rally for national unity as government faces no-confidence vote
Al-Iraqiya TV, Iraq
Image: Flyers of Egyptian presidential candidate and former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq are seen on the ground outside his campaign headquarters in Cairo May 29, 2012:L REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
Mosaic is a Peabody Award-winning daily compilation of television news reports from the Middle East, including Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Iraq and Iran. Watch more Mosaic at http://www.linktv.org/mosaic
Syrian rebels have given president Bashar al-Assad a 48-hour deadline to comply with an international peace plan otherwise they would renew their battle to overthrow him.
The ultimatum was issued after UN observers reported the discovery of 13 bodies bound and shot in eastern Syria, adding to the world outcry over the massacre last week of 108 men, women and children.
The latest developments emphasised how the peace plan drafted by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has failed to stem 14 months of bloodshed or bring the Syrian government and opposition to the negotiating table.
Col Qassim Saadeddine of the rebel Free Syrian Army said its leadership set a deadline of 9am tomorrow for Mr Assad to implement the peace plan, which includes a ceasefire, deployment of observers, and free access for humanitarina aid and journalists.
If it fails to do so “we are free from any commitment and we will defend and protect the civilians, their villages and their cities,” Mr Saadeddine said in a statement posted on social media.
Both sides in the conflict have violated a tenuous ceasefire over the past two months but Mr Assad’s forces have been by far the worst offender, according to UN monitors.
Outrage at last Friday’s massacre in the town of Houla, led a host of Western countries to expel senior Syrian diplomats on Tuesday and to press Russia and China to allow tougher action by the UN Security Council.
Major-general Robert Mood, the Norwegian head of the observer mission, said the 13 corpses found yesterday in Assukar, about 50 km (east of Deir al-Zor, had their hands tied behind their backs. Some had been shot in the head from close range.
Mr Mood called the latest killings an “appalling and inexcusable act” and appealed to all factions to end the cycle of violence.
He did not apportion any blame but Syrian activists said the victims were army defectors killed by Mr Assad’s forces.
Video footage posted by activists showed the bodies face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, with dark pools of blood around their heads and torsos.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said in New York on Tuesday that the Syrian army and “shabbiha” militiamen supporting Assad were probably responsible for killing the 108 people in Houla with artillery and tank fire, guns and knives.
The government denied any responsibility and blamed Islamist “terrorists” – its term for rebel forces.
The uprising began last March with street protests against Mr Assad, who succeeeded his late, authoritarian father Hafez al-Assad 11 years ago to perpetuate the family dynasty.
While initially a pro-democracry movement, the struggle has grown into an armed struggle increasingly involving sectarian rivalries pitting the Sunni Muslim majority against the Alawite sect, to which the Assad clan belongs.
Mr Assad’s forces have killed 7,500 people since it began, according to a UN toll. The government, which says the unrest is the work of foreign-backed terrorists, says more than 2,600 soldiers or security agents have been killed.
Mr nnan, trying to save his peace plan from collapse, told Mr Assad in Damascus on Tuesday that Syria was at a tipping point.The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that more than 100 people were killed in Houla the same day.
Diplomats said the UN Human Rights Council would meet in Geneva on Friday to consider the Houla massacre, the fourth time Syria has faced such scrutiny since the anti-Assad revolt broke out in March 2011.
Mr Assad has so far proved impervious to international scolding and Western sanctions for his crackdown and has failed to return troops and tanks to barracks, as required by the Annan plan.
However, the UN observers sent in to monitor a notional ceasefire were able to verify the horrors in Houla, which produced a wave of world revulsion.
Mr Assad’s heavyweight international allies, China and Russia, stuck to their rejection of any intervention or UN-backed penalties to force him to change course.
The West is itself averse to military intervention, although French president Francois Hollande said on Tuesday this could change if the UN Security Council backed it. But that is not possible unless veto-wielding members Russia and China allow it.
Turkey joined other countries including the United States, Britain, France and Germany in expelling Syrian diplomats in protest at the Houla massacre, saying unspecified international measures would follow if crimes against humanity continued.
Stung by the expulsions, Syria told the Dutch chargee d’affaires to leave. She was one of the few senior Western diplomats left in Damascus.
Despite the diplomatic deadlock, Mr Annan, a former UN secretary-general and Nobel peace laureate, is pressing on with his mission.
“It is important to find a solution that will lead to a democratic transition in Syria and find a way of ending the killings as soon as possible,” he said after talks in Jordan yesterday.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined a plan Wednesday to ban the sale of sugary soft drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, movie theaters, street carts and other venues.
Reason.tv’s Anthony Fisher took to the streets to ask New Yorkers what they thought about Bloomberg and the ban.
Approximately 2 minutes.
Camera by Kaplan Akincilar. Produced by Anthony Fisher
A U.S. security institute has published satellite images which it said increased concerns that Iran was trying to “destroy evidence” of suspected past research relevant for developing a nuclear weapons capability, a charge Tehran dismisses.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) posted them on its website hours after diplomats said the U.N. atomic watchdog showed what appeared to be similar imagery at a closed-door briefing in Vienna.
Western envoys who attended Wednesday’s briefing earlier told Reuters that two small side buildings at the Parchin military facility had been removed, and ISIS said its pictures from May 25 showed that they “have been completely razed”.
The disclosure followed inconclusive talks between Iran and six world powers in Baghdad last week to address concerns about the nature of its nuclear activities, which Iran says are aimed at generating electricity.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly asked Iran for access to Parchin as part of a long-stalled probe into suspicions that Tehran may be seeking the ability to assemble nuclear bombs, should it decide to do so.
The Islamic state has so far refused to let inspectors visit the facility – which it describes as a conventional military complex – saying there must first be a broader framework agreement on how to address the IAEA’s questions.
The new satellite images will add to Western suspicions that Iran is “sanitizing” the site of any incriminating evidence before allowing the IAEA to go there.
Iran’s IAEA envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, dismissed such accusations by Western officials, telling reporters after the briefing at IAEA headquarters that “this kind of noise and allegations are baseless”.
ISIS, which tracks Iran’s nuclear programme closely, said there were visible tracks in the images “made by heavy machinery used in the demolition process”, adding that the two buildings had been intact in early April.
No Parchin Access?
“Heavy machinery tracks and extensive evidence of earth displacement is also visible throughout the interior as well as the exterior of the site’s perimeter,” the think-tank said.
The Parchin complex is at the centre of Western allegations that Iran has been conducting research and experiments that could serve a nuclear weapons development programme. The Islamic Republic has repeatedly denied any such ambition.
Last week, the IAEA said in a report issued to member states that satellite images showed “extensive activities” at the facility southeast of Tehran.
Western diplomats said this was an allusion to suspected cleaning at Parchin. They have earlier cited other images showing recent activity at the site, including a stream of water, as suggesting Iran is trying to remove evidence.
Iran, which denies Western accusations it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons capability, has dismissed charges aired about Parchin as “childish” and “ridiculous”.
“The newest image raises concerns that Iran is attempting to raze the site prior to allowing an IAEA visit. The razing of the two buildings may also indicate that Iran has no intention to allow inspectors access soon,” ISIS said.
An IAEA report last November said Iran had built a large containment vessel in 2000 at Parchin in which to conduct tests that the U.N. agency said were “strong indicators of possible (nuclear) weapon development.”
It said a building was constructed around a large cylindrical object, a vessel designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kg of high explosives. Diplomatic sources say the suspected tests likely took place about a decade ago.
Last week, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying the IAEA had not yet given good enough reasons to visit Parchin.
Comment: Images and words about tracks in dirt made by heavy machinery is offered as proof. No mention of earlier International Atomic Energy Agency Reports where the IAEA clearly said Iran is not a nuclear threat and has no nuclear ambitions in any military capacity.
Things are starting to take a repeat roll of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The obvious target: Iran.
By the way, construction in and around nuclear sites is not uncommon. In simple terms; a construction company who did work inside the facility leveled the lunchroom they built for their workers, since work at the site was complete. Leave it to the West to always conclude (for us) the worst, while bastardizing free decent people, whose resources the 1% intend on plundering.
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden, but put his deportation on hold to give his lawyers a final chance to reopen the case.
The court, which handed down its decision after an 18-month legal marathon, rejected Assange’s argument that the Swedish prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant over sex crime allegations was not entitled to do so.
“The request for Mr Assange’s extradition has been lawfully made and his appeal against extradition is accordingly dismissed,” Supreme Court president Nicholas Phillips said as he delivered the ruling to a hushed courtroom.
The seven judges were split five to two but their majority ruling was that the prosecutor was a rightful judicial authority, and therefore allowed to issue the warrant for the Internet whistleblower.
But in a new twist, Assange’s lawyer Dinah Rose asked for 14 days to consider whether to apply to reopen the case, on the grounds that the judgment referred to material that was not mentioned during the last hearing in February.
The judge granted the request, which is highly unusual in the three-year history of the Supreme Court.
“With the agreement of the respondent, the required period for extradition shall not commence until 13th June 2012,” the Supreme Court said in a statement.
Assange, a 40-year-old Australian national, was not in the central London court for the judgment. One of his supporters, journalist John Pilger, said he was “stuck in traffic” with his mother, who flew in from Australia for the verdict.
The Swedish lawyer for the two women who accuse Assange of rape and sexual assault said he would be extradited eventually.
“The decision was what we expected . . . It’s unfortunate that it has been delayed further, but he will ultimately be extradited,” Claes Borgstroem told AFP.
Assange is at present wanted for questioning over the sex crime allegations, but Borgstroem said he expected an indictment perhaps within a month after he gets to Sweden.
Australia said it would closely monitor the case and added that consular officials were available to help him if he wished.
“The Australian government cannot interfere in the judicial processes of other governments but we will closely monitor the proceedings against Mr Assange in Sweden,” said a spokeswoman for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs.
Assange, whose website enraged Washington by releasing a flood of state and military secrets, has been living under tight restrictions on his movement for 540 days, including wearing an ankle tag and reporting daily to police.
He has said he fears his extradition would eventually lead to his transfer to the United States, where U.S. soldier Bradley Manning is facing a court-martial over accusations that he handed documents to WikiLeaks.
Outside court, Assange’s principal lawyer Gareth Peirce confirmed that the extradition was stayed while his legal team considers whether to apply to reopen the case, although the judgment still stands.
The point in question is the interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties, “which was never addressed in the hearing, one way or another, by either side,” Peirce added.
If Assange fails to have the case reopened in Britain, he still has the option of a last-ditch appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The white-haired Assange does not deny that he had sex with two WikiLeaks volunteers in Sweden while attending a WikiLeaks seminar, but insists the sex was consensual and argues there are political motives behind the attempts to extradite him.
Assange’s mother Christine told Australian television ahead of the judgment: “It’s a 24-hour nightmare because we know he is not safe and the biggest governments in the world are gunning for him.”
The former computer hacker has been fighting deportation since his arrest in London in December 2010 on the European arrest warrant issued by Sweden.
The Supreme Court is his final avenue of appeal under British law, after two lower courts ruled he should be sent to Sweden for questioning.
The British Medical Association has decided to delay non-urgent patient care on June 21 after doctors voted with an overwhelming majority for the first industrial action in the profession in 40 years.
The BMA said in an open letter published in UK newspapers that the “reluctant” day of action is not meant to harm anyone and those with the most severe situations will still have access to medical care.
“On that day, doctors will be in their usual workplaces but providing urgent and emergency care only”, wrote the BMA.
“We will be postponing non-urgent cases and although this will be disruptive to the NHS, rest assured, doctors will be there when our patients need us most and our action will not impact on your safety,” it added.
The letter said the doctors are keen to have their “voice heard by the government.”
The action comes after BMA warned ministers against pushing ahead with “totally unjustified” pension contribution rises and a simultaneous increase in doctors’ retirement age.
The move puts doctors alongside a host of other public sector workers including teachers, civil service personnel and even police officers who have already announced or launched strikes in reaction to the austerity measures and changes to their pension schemes.
“We are taking this step very reluctantly, and would far prefer to negotiate for a fairer solution,” said chairman of council at the BMA, Dr Hamish Meldrum.
“But this clear mandate for action – on a very high turnout – reflects just how let down doctors feel by the Government’s unwillingness to find a fairer approach to the latest pension changes and its refusal to acknowledge the major reforms of 2008 that made the NHS scheme sustainable in the long term,” Meldrum added.
Rocker taps into anger at financial world, dedicating anti-bank song to ‘those who are struggling in Europe and Berlin’
Bruce Springsteen has touched on a nerve of widespread discontent with financiers and bankers while performing a concert in Berlin.
Springsteen played to a sold-out crowd at Berlin’s Olympiastadion, singing from his album Wrecking Ball and speaking about tough economic times that have put people out of work worldwide and led to debt crises in Greece and other countries.
“In America a lot of people have lost their jobs,” said Springsteen, 62, who performed for three hours to 58,000 fans in the stadium that hosted the 1936 Olympics and 2006 World Cup final.
“But also in Europe and in Berlin, times are tough,” he said, speaking in German. “This song is for all those who are struggling.” He then introduced Jack of All Trades, a withering attack on bankers that includes the lyrics: “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin.”
Europe has been especially hard hit since 2008′s financial meltdown that sparked an enduring sovereign debt crisis. Unemployment on the continent has risen to levels not seen since the 1990s.
Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball tour began on 13 May in Spain, which is struggling with its crushing debt load, and runs for two and a half months with 33 stops in 15 countries before concluding on 31 July in Helsinki.
Berlin has been a special place for Springsteen since his July 1988 concert behind the old Iron Curtain in East Berlin.
Watched by 160,000 people, it was the biggest rock show in East German history, and The Boss spoke out against the “barriers” keeping East Germans prisoners in their country. Some historians have said the concert fed into a movement gaining moment at the time that contributed to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall 16 months later in November 1989.
“Once in a while you play a place, a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life,” he told the crowd on Wednesday after being handed a poster from a fan thanking him for the 1988 concert. “East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”
Germany has weathered the financial crisis well so far but Berlin itself is struggling with double-digit unemployment, low wages and a high incidence of poverty.
“The financial world has caused us all a lot of our problems and Springsteen has always been a critical spirit – that’s what I like about him,” said Kathleen Wapp, a 42-year-old doctor’s assistant from Wolfsburg who was at the show. “I like the way he’s not afraid to put a critical light on the key issues.”
“I think it’s great the way he’s taking on the banking industry – he’s got it dead right,” said Matthias Beck, 46, a carpenter from Leipzig. “There’s hardly anything good about banks. They take advantage of the little people and it’s always hard to find someone who’ll take responsibility when it all goes wrong.”
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
“The proposed modifications promote a privatizing model that uses patents and “Plant Breeders’ Rights” (PBR) to deprive farmers of the labor of centuries in developing seed.”
Progressive small farmer organizations in Mexico scored a victory over transnational corporations that seek to monopolize seed and food patents. When the corporations pushed their bill to modify the Federal Law on Plant Varieties through the Committee on Agriculture and Livestock of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies on March 14, organizations of farmers from across the country sounded the alarm. By organizing quickly, they joined together to pressure legislators and achieved an agreement with the legislative committee to remove the bill from the floor.
What’s at stake is free and open access to plant biodiversity in agriculture. The proposed modifications promote a privatizing model that uses patents and “Plant Breeders’ Rights” (PBR) to deprive farmers of the labor of centuries in developing seed. The small farmers who worked to create this foundation of modern agriculture never charged royalties for its use.
Although the current law, in effect since 1996, pays little heed to the rights of small farmers, the new law would be far worse. Present law tends to benefit private-sector plant breeders, allowing monopolies to obtain exclusive profits from the sale of seeds and other plant material for up to 15 years, or 18 in the case of perennial ornamental, forest, or orchard plants–even when the plants they used to develop the new varieties are in the public domain.
The legislative reform would extend exclusive rights from the sale of reproductive material to 25 years. Further, it seeks to restrict the rights of farmers to store or use for their own consumption any part of the harvest obtained from seeds or breeding material purchased from holders of PBRs.
The proposed law would also include genetically modified organisms (GMOs) among the plant varieties covered, converging with the so-called Monsanto Law (Law of Biosecurity and Genetically Modified Organisms). This is an absurd inclusion, since GMOs are created by introducing genetic material from non-plant species.
GMOs cannot be considered a distinct variety, because they do not result from the genetic variability that underlies natural selection. They are the result of manipulation through biotechnology that crosses the boundaries between species and realms. Another absurdity is the private appropriation of genetic information from live organisms, even those altered with genes of other species.
The proposed law would create a “Monsanto Police,” by giving the National Service for the Inspection and Certification of Seeds the authority to order and conduct inspection visits, demand information, investigate suspected administrative infractions, order and carry out measures to prevent or stop violations of PBR, and impose administrative sanctions, which are increased by the proposal. It would have a government agency promote PBRs held by individuals or corporations.
Holders of PBRs already gain exclusive rights to exploit plant varieties and material for their propagation. The bill under consideration would extend those rights over the products resulting from use of monopolized plant varieties so that, for example, a special license would have to be obtained to use the variety in foods for human consumption or industrial uses.
At the Group of 8 (G8) meetings this past weekend, President Obama and the leaders of the rest of the world’s richest nations abandoned their governments’ previous commitments to donate $7.3 billion a year to end hunger in Africa, after disbursing only 58 percent of the total pledge of $22 billion and giving less than 6 percent in new money they pledged three years ago.
Instead, rich nations will leave the problem in the hands of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition where private corporations will invest $3 billion over 10 years — Monsanto has committed $50 million — beginning in three countries, Tanzania, Ghana and Ethiopia. (Human-rights activists have questioned the inclusion of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, noting that his authoritarian government has jailed dissidents and banned media access to hunger zones. The Committee to Protect Journalists said in a letter to President Obama that the Ethiopian government “routinely downplays the extent of the crisis by denying journalists access to sensitive areas and censoring independent news coverage.”)
The main U.S. spokesperson for the New Alliance is USAID administrator Rajiv Shah. OCA opposed Dr. Shah’s appointment because of his work for the Gates Foundation and his position as a board member of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which actively promote expensive and unsustainable technologies like genetic engineering.
Ronnie Cummins, Director of the Organic Consumers Association, issued the following statement in response to the news:
“Study after study has shown that organic, agro-ecological farming practices on small diverse farms can boost yields in Africa and the developing world from 100-1000% over the yields of chemical-intensive or genetically engineered mono-crop farms. To help the world’s two billion small farmers and rural villagers survive and prosper we need to help them gain access, not to genetically engineered seeds and expensive chemical inputs; but rather access to land, water, and the tools and techniques of traditional, sustainable farming: non-patented open-pollinated seeds, crop rotation, natural compost production, beneficial insects, and access to local markets. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) reduce crop yields, and increase pesticide use, even according to USDA statistics. Bill Gates, Monsanto, and Barack Obama may believe that genetic engineering and chemical-intensive agriculture are the tools to feed the world, but a look at the fatal harvest of modern agribusiness tells a different story. Not only can climate-friendly, healthy organic agriculture practices feed the world, but in fact organic farming is the only way we are going to be able to feed the world.”
OCA political director Alexis Baden-Mayer prepared the following notes for a talk she gave at the Occupy G8 People’s Summit, critiquing the New Alliance:
Contrary to the talking points of President Obama and the other leaders of the G8 nations, the problem of feeding the world isn’t about the need to produce more food, it’s about stopping the way wealthy countries are subsidizing their richest farmers, grabbing up the best land in Africa, speculating on food commodities in their financial markets, wasting food, diverting crop production to livestock feed and biofuels, and ratcheting up the costs of farming by encouraging the use of expensive and unsustainable GMO seeds, pesticides and fertilizers.
The world already produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050.
Nevertheless, 1 billion people on the planet are chronically hungry, and 70% are farmers.
If the G8 actually cared about ending hunger, they’d:
Stop Industrial-Scale Food Producers from Wasting the World’s Resources
35 percent of the food produced worldwide feeds meat and dairy animals. If humans switched to all-plant diets, all that agricultural land could produce 50 percent more human food, because feeding crops to animals that then become meat is a highly inefficient way to transfer plant energy to people.
30 to 50 percent of food intended for human consumption in the world gets wasted.
Stop Wall Street from Gambling on Hunger, and End Speculation in the Food Markets
The share of the food market owned by speculators, uninvolved in the food production process, has risen from 12% in 1996 to 61% today. The 4 biggest grain buyers, including ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis and Dreyfus, dominate 75- 90% of the trade in grain worldwide generating profits in the realm of $2 to 3 billion a year.
The controversial ACTA anti-piracy agreement has been dealt a blow by the European Parliament. Three key committees have voted against the treaty, citing concerns over its legality. ACTA sparked Europe-wide protests, with activists saying online freedom of speech is being put at risk.
Rick Falkvinge from the Swedish Pirate Party says the treaty is confused at best.
On Thursday, US lawmakers discussed whether or not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be renewed. FISA gives government the power to monitor phone calls, emails and other forms of electronic communication. Critics believe that FISA can now be used to target citizens all in the name of homeland security. Andrew Blake, RT’s web producer, joins us with more on the controversial legislation and discusses other legislation such as CISPA, SOPA and PIPA.
One of the biggest copyright infringement cases in history just took a turn. MegaUpload’s founder Kim Dotcom has taken steps to throw out the case where his company allegedly got rich off of the piracy of copyrighted movies, music and media. The defense is now arguing that the website can be held accountable for its users. Liz Wahl has more.
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden, but put his deportation on hold to give his lawyers a final chance to reopen the case.
The court, which handed down its decision after an 18-month legal marathon, rejected Assange’s argument that the Swedish prosecutor who issued the arrest warrant over sex crime allegations was not entitled to do so.
“The request for Mr Assange’s extradition has been lawfully made and his appeal against extradition is accordingly dismissed,” Supreme Court president Nicholas Phillips said as he delivered the ruling to a hushed courtroom.
The seven judges were split five to two but their majority ruling was that the prosecutor was a rightful judicial authority, and therefore allowed to issue the warrant for the Internet whistleblower.
But in a new twist, Assange’s lawyer Dinah Rose asked for 14 days to consider whether to apply to reopen the case, on the grounds that the judgment referred to material that was not mentioned during the last hearing in February.
The judge granted the request, which is highly unusual in the three-year history of the Supreme Court.
“With the agreement of the respondent, the required period for extradition shall not commence until 13th June 2012,” the Supreme Court said in a statement.
Assange, a 40-year-old Australian national, was not in the central London court for the judgment. One of his supporters, journalist John Pilger, said he was “stuck in traffic” with his mother, who flew in from Australia for the verdict.
The Swedish lawyer for the two women who accuse Assange of rape and sexual assault said he would be extradited eventually.
“The decision was what we expected . . . It’s unfortunate that it has been delayed further, but he will ultimately be extradited,” Claes Borgstroem told AFP.
Assange is at present wanted for questioning over the sex crime allegations, but Borgstroem said he expected an indictment perhaps within a month after he gets to Sweden.
Australia said it would closely monitor the case and added that consular officials were available to help him if he wished.
“The Australian government cannot interfere in the judicial processes of other governments but we will closely monitor the proceedings against Mr Assange in Sweden,” said a spokeswoman for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs.
Assange, whose website enraged Washington by releasing a flood of state and military secrets, has been living under tight restrictions on his movement for 540 days, including wearing an ankle tag and reporting daily to police.
He has said he fears his extradition would eventually lead to his transfer to the United States, where U.S. soldier Bradley Manning is facing a court-martial over accusations that he handed documents to WikiLeaks.
Outside court, Assange’s principal lawyer Gareth Peirce confirmed that the extradition was stayed while his legal team considers whether to apply to reopen the case, although the judgment still stands.
The point in question is the interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties, “which was never addressed in the hearing, one way or another, by either side,” Peirce added.
If Assange fails to have the case reopened in Britain, he still has the option of a last-ditch appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The white-haired Assange does not deny that he had sex with two WikiLeaks volunteers in Sweden while attending a WikiLeaks seminar, but insists the sex was consensual and argues there are political motives behind the attempts to extradite him.
Assange’s mother Christine told Australian television ahead of the judgment: “It’s a 24-hour nightmare because we know he is not safe and the biggest governments in the world are gunning for him.”
The former computer hacker has been fighting deportation since his arrest in London in December 2010 on the European arrest warrant issued by Sweden.
The Supreme Court is his final avenue of appeal under British law, after two lower courts ruled he should be sent to Sweden for questioning.
This is the first video in a long series on the basics of permaculture, during this series we will be covering the ethics, principals of design, earth works and more. In this video though I just want to explain why I am doing this series and how permaculture relates to modern survival thinking.
From disorganized slackers to terrorists – the Occupy movement has seen its media image go from bad to worse over its nine months of existence. Protesters now even face accusations that they pose a threat not just to Corporate America, but to the country as a whole. But activists say it’s all just scaremongering to stifle the movement.
A privacy group is calling on the California Assembly to keep Google’s self-driving cars off the road.
Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit privacy group, sent an open letter to the Assembly today urging members to defeat a bill, SB 1289, that would allow Google’s self-driving cars on California’s roads unless the bill is amended to provide “adequate” privacy protection for the cars’ users.
The letter (download PDF) asks legislators to ban all data collection from Google’s autonomous cars.
“While we don’t propose to limit the ability of the cars to function by communicating as necessary with satellites and other devices, the collection and retention of data for marketing and other purposes should be banned,” wrote Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, and John Simpson, privacy project director. “Unless the bill is amended, once again society will be forced to play catch-up in dealing with the impact of the privacy invading aspects of a new technology.”
Google has been pushing ahead with its research into developing autonomous automobiles that can be sold commercially.
Earlier this month, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles gave Google the state’s first license for driverless cars. It was also the first autonomous vehicle license ever issued in the United States, according to the Nevada DMV website.
“The cars have a number of sensors, such as cameras, lasers and radar, to monitor road conditions and improve the technology,” said Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman in an email to Computerworld. “For our testing purposes, the cars log data about their performance — how fast they’re going, where they are, where they detect obstacles, etc. — as well as data from the equipment on the car.”
Gaither noted that he could not say what, if any, data would continue to be collected from the cars once testing is over and they are being sold commercially. “It would be premature to speculate,” he added.
The letter was sent to Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, who has not replied to a request for comment.
According to Gaither, Google’s driverless cars have logged more than 200,000 miles so far.
Last month, Google executives went to Detroit looking for partners in the company’s efforts to develop the vehicles. Anthony Levandowski, head of Google’s self-driving car project, told an audience there that the company would like to get such cars on the road within the next decade.
A Google spokesman told Computerworld last month that the company has been reaching out to automakers but is keeping its options open.
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.
Some employees thought they were pretty sneaky downloading confidential data from corporate computers to thumb drives days before they turned in their resignations and bolted to a competitor.
More often than not, they didn’t get away with it. Armed with forensic computer analysis–namely, the USB port registry–managers confronted these employees during the exit interview.
What gives managers the right to pursue legal action or at least ask for those incriminating thumb drives back? The answer: a smorgasbord of protective polices with employees’ signatures on them, including the confidentiality non-disclosure policy, the ethics policy, the conflict of interest policy, the authorized use of computers policy.
“The BYOD fact pattern isn’t that dramatically different, and policies can be written to provide that type of protection for the employer,” says Brent Cossrow, partner at Fisher and Phillips, a law firm specializing in labor and employment law.
He adds: “Given the business interest that could be in jeopardy, there are employers who would take a look at how their computers were used in a certain time period. If a BYOD policy was written in a certain way, it could provide support for that examination.”
Cossrow’s practice area is employee defection and trade secrets, and so he helps companies navigate the murky legal waters that BYOD, or bring-your-own-device, stirs up. An employee-owned BYOD smartphone or tablet blurs the line between personal and work use. Compared to the thumb drive, a BYOD can easily store trade secrets either locally on the device or via a cloud storage service.
At the center of the legal debate is an employee’s expectation of privacy. Cossrow says the smartest companies will craft a detailed, customized BYOD policy that works in harmony with existing protection policies. Among the more restrictive regimes, employees would have to sign away their expectation of privacy with a BYOD smartphone or tablet that’s being used in conjunction with corporate computers.
Without an expectation of privacy, employees should assume they have no privacy on their personally owned BYODs.
For employees, it may get even worse. “I think we’re going to see case law evolve over time with companies wanting to do more ambitious and extensive searches of personal data on those devices,” Cossrow says.
A Legal Precedent?
On the upside, BYOD employees have at least one legal precedent in their workplace privacy corner, Stengart v. Loving Care Agency.
In December 2007, Marina Stengart resigned from Loving Care Agency in New Jersey and sued for gender discrimination. Just before resigning, Stengart communicated with her attorney via a personal, password-protected Yahoo email account on a company computer.
This use case blends personal and work actions on a single device, a precursor to BYOD.
Loving Care Agency hired a computer forensics expert who burned a forensic image of the computer, which uncovered HTML screen shots of the personal emails. A trial judge ruled that the emails were not protected by attorney-client privilege because a policy stated that emails were company property.
Stengart and her attorney took the matter to the New Jersey Superior Court, and the appellate judge reversed the decision. The judge held that those personal communications were protected. A big win for employee privacy, right?
Many factors played in the reversal, such as Stengart’s sophistication of computers. While the employee handbook might state that an employee waives the expectation of privacy, this doesn’t mean that the employee has a knowledge of how HTML files are created and whether or not a password will protect access to those files.
The Stengart v. Loving Care Agency case, though, has a big flaw for BYOD employees: The reversal toward employee privacy rights was anchored in the attorney-client privilege.
“It’s not likely that the same quality of protection would be available for non-privilege communication under those facts,” Cossrow says. “How broadly will Stengart be used? We’re going to see different types of [BYOD] policies, and they’re going to be tested in court over time.”
The BYOD Policy
BYOD policies are subject to state and federal laws, which can vary depending on the type of industry a company serves.
As stated earlier, a BYOD policy should work in harmony with existing protection policies. BYOD policies can be written to provide some protection against certain risks and some policies allow companies to inspect the BYOD in an exit interview.
BYOD employees better know what they’re signing, which often entails giving up their expectations of privacy.
“The art to this BYOD employment practice is defining the ground rules on which these devices can be used,” Cossrow says.
“If the employer is saying that you do not have an expectation of privacy with a personal device that you use in conjunction with corporate systems, this lets the employee know the device could be subject to a search or a review.”
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Rocker taps into anger at financial world, dedicating anti-bank song to ‘those who are struggling in Europe and Berlin’
Bruce Springsteen has touched on a nerve of widespread discontent with financiers and bankers while performing a concert in Berlin.
Springsteen played to a sold-out crowd at Berlin’s Olympiastadion, singing from his album Wrecking Ball and speaking about tough economic times that have put people out of work worldwide and led to debt crises in Greece and other countries.
“In America a lot of people have lost their jobs,” said Springsteen, 62, who performed for three hours to 58,000 fans in the stadium that hosted the 1936 Olympics and 2006 World Cup final.
“But also in Europe and in Berlin, times are tough,” he said, speaking in German. “This song is for all those who are struggling.” He then introduced Jack of All Trades, a withering attack on bankers that includes the lyrics: “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin.”
Europe has been especially hard hit since 2008′s financial meltdown that sparked an enduring sovereign debt crisis. Unemployment on the continent has risen to levels not seen since the 1990s.
Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball tour began on 13 May in Spain, which is struggling with its crushing debt load, and runs for two and a half months with 33 stops in 15 countries before concluding on 31 July in Helsinki.
Berlin has been a special place for Springsteen since his July 1988 concert behind the old Iron Curtain in East Berlin.
Watched by 160,000 people, it was the biggest rock show in East German history, and The Boss spoke out against the “barriers” keeping East Germans prisoners in their country. Some historians have said the concert fed into a movement gaining moment at the time that contributed to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall 16 months later in November 1989.
“Once in a while you play a place, a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life,” he told the crowd on Wednesday after being handed a poster from a fan thanking him for the 1988 concert. “East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”
Germany has weathered the financial crisis well so far but Berlin itself is struggling with double-digit unemployment, low wages and a high incidence of poverty.
“The financial world has caused us all a lot of problems and Springsteen has always been a critical spirit – that’s what I like about him,” said Kathleen Wapp, a 42-year-old doctor’s assistant from Wolfsburg who was at the show. “I like the way he’s not afraid to put a critical light on the key issues.”
“I think it’s great the way he’s taking on the banking industry – he’s got it dead right,” said Matthias Beck, 46, a carpenter from Leipzig. “There’s hardly anything good about banks. They take advantage of the little people and it’s always hard to find someone who’ll take responsibility when it all goes wrong.”
A privacy group is calling on the California Assembly to keep Google’s self-driving cars off the road.
“The cars have a number of sensors, such as cameras, lasers and radar, to monitor road conditions and improve the technology,” said Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman in an email to Computerworld. “For our testing purposes, the cars log data about their performance — how fast they’re going, where they are, where they detect obstacles, etc. — as well as data from the equipment on the car.”
Some employees thought they were pretty sneaky downloading confidential data from corporate computers to thumb drives days before they turned in their resignations and bolted to a competitor.
