Wearing the mantle of education reform, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told attendees at a recent summit on innovation in education that,“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”
A really, really good way to do that, Zuckerberg said, is to let kids ages 13 and under join Facebook.
Research Credit: afterhours
KHOU:
Newly-released e-mails from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show the agency’s top commissioners directed staff to continue lowering radiation test results, in defiance of federal EPA rules.
The e-mails and documents, released under order from the Texas Attorney General to KHOU-TV, also show the agency was attempting to help water systems get out of formally violating federal limits for radiation in drinking water. Without a formal violation, the water systems did not have to inform their residents of the increased health risk.
“It’s a conspiracy at the TCEQ of the highest order,†said Tom Smith, of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “The documents have indicted the management of this commission in a massive cover-up to convince people that our water is safe to drink when it’s not.â€
Smith is talking about what happened to residents who live in communities served by utilities like Harris County Municipal Utility District 105. For years, tests performed by the Texas Department of State Health Services showed the utility provided water that exceeded the EPA legal limit for exposure to alpha radiation.
However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were. In MUD 105’s case, the utility was able to avoid violations for nearly 20 years, thanks to the TCEQ subtractions.
…
Alpha radiation is emitted from radionuclides such as uranium and radium. While health scientists have said it poses little danger if someone is externally exposed to it, the experts maintain that ingesting even the smallest amount of the particles can cause damage to DNA, and in rare cases, cause cancer.
The head of a Catholic religious order in the Netherlands has confirmed one of his subordinate priests served on the board of an organisation that promotes paedophilia.
Herman Spronck, head of the Dutch arm of the Salesian order, said in a statement Friday the priest served on the board of the“Martijn” organization, which is widely reviled but not illegal.
“Of course we reject this and distance ourselves from this personal initiative” on the part of the priest, Spronck’s statement said.
“Membership in such organizations does not fit with the ethos of the Salesian order.”
However, RTL Nieuws, which broke the story, published interviews both with Spronck and the priest, identified as 73-year-old“Father Van B.,” in which they defend some paedophile relationships.
“Society thinks these relationships are harmful. I disagree,” RTL quoted Van B. as saying. He served on Martijn’s board from 2008 until 2010, when the organization’s founder was arrested for alleged possession of child pornography. That case is ongoing.
RTL quoted Spronck as saying that“formally I always say that everyone must obey the law. But these relationships do not necessarily have to be damaging.”
Spronck and his organisation could not be reached for comment.
BBC:
China has expanded export quotas for rare earth metals, further tightening its grip on the minerals used in a number of high-tech electronics.
From Friday, iron alloys containing more than 10% of rare earths will fall under the export quota, the commerce ministry said in a statement.
Rare earths are a collection of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table.
World manufacturers rely heavily on China for these minerals.
Rare earth metals are used in high tech goods such as mobile phone handsets, hybrid car batteries, wind turbines and weapons guidance systems .
China had already cut exports by about 35% in the first half of 2011 driving up prices to record levels. It produces around 97% of rare earth metal supply.
If you’ve read the lead story in The New York Times on President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech this afternoon, you’re probably under the impression that the president has taken a bold new step to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama,“seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world… publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position.”
The only problem is, it’s not much of a shift at all.The key word in that opening paragraph is that word“explicitly.” What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say?“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land“swaps” of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, amid a push to restart peace talks that failed, that a solution could be found that“reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”
Sound familiar?
What wasn’t in Obama’s speech was anything new on how you get from here (complete dysfunction– it’s a“process” by convention only at this point) to there (peace). He made no mention of the settlement freeze his administration had pushed for– and failed to get – in return for restored talks with the Palestinian leadership. He also sought to shoot down Palestinian efforts to win recognition for an independent state at the United Nations, something the Palestinian Authority has been gearing up for in September.
Fresh doubts have arisen about the safety of genetically modified crops, with a new study reporting presence of Bt toxin, used widely in GM crops, in human blood for the first time.
Genetically modified crops include genes extracted from bacteria to make them resistant to pest attacks.
These genes make crops toxic to pests but are claimed to pose no danger to the environment and human health. Genetically modified brinjal, whose commercial release was stopped a year ago, has a toxin derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis ( Bt).
Till now, scientists and multinational corporations promoting GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut. But the presence of this toxin in human blood shows that this does not happen.
Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant as well as non-pregnant women.
They have also detected the toxin in fetal blood, implying it could pass on to the next generation. The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) in Quebec.
None of them had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides.
They were all consuming typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes. Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.
Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women. Earlier studies had found trace amounts of the Cry1Ab toxin in gastrointestinal contents of livestock fed on GM corn. This gave rise to fears that the toxins may not be effectively eliminated in humans and there may be a high risk of exposure through consumption of contaminated meat.
As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other“attributes†that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.†By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.â€
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When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls.“It was my brainchild,†he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.†He said that although he was not “read in†to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they toldme, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this?They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ â€â€”logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ â€
Drake recalled that, after the October 4th directive,“strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ †Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.†In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally†if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.â€
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,†he says.
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Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with“dictionary selection,†in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.â€
Research Credit: coxsone
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and the man French Socialists hope will be the next occupant of the Elysée Palace, was arrested at JFK airport in New York on Saturday afternoon accused of a sex attack on a Times Square hotel maid earlier in the day.
He was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and turned over to Manhattan police, according to a spokesman from the agency. Plainclothes officers boarded the flight at 4.45pm, moments before take-off, and took the 62-year-old out of the first-class cabin and into custody. He had been due to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday.
“It was 10 minutes before its scheduled departure,” said John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.
Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal alleged attack on a woman employee at the Sofitel New York on West 44th Street in the heart of the city’s theatre district.
The 32-year-old woman told police that she entered Strauss-Kahn’s room at about 1pm on Saturday and he emerged from the bedroom naked, threw her down and tried to sexually assault her, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She broke free and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened who called the police.
When New York City police detectives arrived moments later, Strauss-Kahn had already left the hotel, leaving behind his mobile phone and other personal items.“It looked like he got out of there in a hurry,” Browne added.
Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.
“We believe… a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said.“We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”
Research Credit: C
Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones:
Giant polyester covers will soon be placed around the damaged reactor buildings at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex to help contain the release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere, the plant operator said Friday.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. will install the first cover at the No. 1 reactor, the focus of recent stabilization efforts.
Workers will erect a steel framework and place a giant polyester tent-like cover around the reactor building. The cover will be 55 meters high, 47 meters long and 42 meters wide.
The operation to fit the cover will begin next month. Similar covers will be placed around units Nos. 3 and 4. The work is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Japan will scrap a plan to obtain half of its electricity from nuclear power and will instead promote renewable energy and conservation as a result of its ongoing nuclear crisis, the prime minister said Tuesday.
Naoto Kan said Japan needs to“start from scratch†on its long-term energy policy after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was heavily damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami and began leaking radiation.
Nuclear plants supplied about 30 percent of Japan’s electricity, and the government had planned to raise that to 50 percent by 2030.
Kan told a news conference that nuclear and fossil fuel used to be the pillars of Japanese energy policy but now the government will add two more pillars: renewable energy such as solar, wind and biomass, and an increased focus on conservation.
Related:Children Don Masks, Hats in Fukushima as Radiation Looms
After more than five years of planning, a national emergency alert system that will send messages to cellphones during disasters is set to be launched in New York City and Washington by the end of year.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said the Commercial Mobile Alert System will direct messages to cellphones in case of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other serious emergency. The plan was approved by Congress in 2006.
Genachowski and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s administrator, Craig Fugate, said the new system will be selective. “These are really focused on the highest levels of alerts, and those that require urgent action,’’ he said.
There will be at least three levels of messages, ranging from a critical national alert from the president to warnings about impending or occurring national disasters to alerts about missing or abducted children. People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts.
A special chip is required to allow a phone to receive the messages, and soon all new phones will have the technology. Some smartphones already have the chip, and software updates will be available when the network goes online later this year, Genachowski said.
Fugate said cellphones turned on in the vicinity of a disaster— an evacuation zone, for instance — would receive a message warning them of the impending danger. The alert would show up on the phone’s front screen, instead of the traditional text message inbox, and arrive with a distinct ring and probably a vibration.
U.S. home values fell in the first quarter at the fastest rate since late 2008, real estate data firm Zillow said on Monday, suggesting that a bottom will not be seen until 2012 at the earliest.
Zillow said its home value index fell 3 percent in the first three months of the year from the previous quarter, and was down 8.2 percent year-over-year.
The number of homeowners under water—or, those who owe more on the mortgage than their house is currently worth—amounted to 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners, representing a peak since Zillow began calculating the data in 2009.
That was up from 27 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
Foreclosures also rose, following the moratoriums that had been in place in late 2010. In March, one out of every 1,000 homes was in foreclosure.
An unknown amount of radioactive water was released accidentally into the Mississippi River late last week at the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is investigating the incident, but suggests the release poses no public health hazard.
Entergy Nuclear, which operates Grand Gulf, filed a report with the NRC explaining that crews located standing water at the plant last week after the area experienced heavy rains.
Water was found Thursday at the Unit 2 turbine building— which is an abandoned, partially constructed building — and began pumping the water into the river.
An alarm apparently alerted workers to the presence of tritium, a byproduct of the nuclear reactor processes. The pumps were turned off stopping the flow. Investigators are not certain why tritium was in the storm water or how it got there.
“Although the concentrations of tritium exceeded EPA drinking water limits, the release should not represent a hazard to public health because of its dilution in the river,†said Lara Uselding, public affairs officer with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Region IV.
Over 30 years ago, a man by the name of Nelson Bunker Hunt hatched the perfect plan: protect his inherited wealth (which then was one of the largest legacy fortunes in the world) from the inflationary destruction of“paper” assets by converting his assets into silver, and in the process cover the silver market, and send the price of silver to an inflation adjusted price of over $140 (nearly three times higher than the nearly record nominal silver price hit last week). Understandably, Hunt’s name has appeared very often in the popular media in recent months, since after all it was the“Hunt” price that the May 1 silver smackdown (which will most certainly never be investigated) that sent silver from $48 to $42 in seconds that was being protected by the paper cartel. Yet just who is Nelson Bunker Hunt? And how did he cover the silver market when did? What exactly did he do, and is someone doing a comparable silver cornering right now? And, most importantly, why? The answers, all of which are provided in this September 1980 Playboy article reprint, will surprise and astound many, primarily due to the myriad parallels between the world of the 1970s and our own. What follows is one man’s attempt to escape from the“system.”
From“Silverfinger”
IN THE SUMMER of 1979, an invisible hand reached out from an island in the Atlantic and quietly began tightening its grip on the world’s supply of silver. The fingers of that hand extended to London, New York, Dallas, Zurich and Jidda. But the only visible clue to its existence was a newly formed Bermuda shell corporation called International Metals Investment Company Ltd. That dull sounding little trading company was not just another offshore tax scam but the operating front for a secret partnership seemingly capable of controlling the world price and supply of silver.
The debt crisis in Greece has taken on a dramatic new twist. Sources with information about the government’s actions have informed SPIEGEL ONLINE that Athens is considering withdrawing from the euro zone. The common currency area’s finance ministers and representatives of the European Commission are holding a secret crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night.
Greece’s economic problems are massive, with protests against the government being held almost daily. Now Prime Minister George Papandreou apparently feels he has no other option: SPIEGEL ONLINE has obtained information from German government sources knowledgeable of the situation in Athens indicating that Papandreou’s government is considering abandoning the euro and reintroducing its own currency.
Alarmed by Athens’ intentions, the European Commission has called a crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night. In addition to Greece’s possible exit from the currency union, a speedy restructuring of the country’s debt also features on the agenda. One year after the Greek crisis broke out, the development represents a potentially existential turning point for the European monetary union— regardless which variant is ultimately decided upon for dealing with Greece’s massive troubles.
Given the tense situation, the meeting in Luxembourg has been declared highly confidential, with only the euro-zone finance ministers and senior staff members permitted to attend. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Jörg Asmussen, an influential state secretary in the Finance Ministry, are attending on Germany’s behalf.
Schwenninger’s recent report“The American Middle Class Under Stress” has some stunning facts that highlight the struggles the average American is having getting a decent-paying job and keeping up with rising cost of living.
Here are just some of the sobering facts:
– There are 8.5 million people receiving unemployment insurance and over 40 million receiving food stamps.
– At the current pace of job creation, the economy won’t return to full employment until 2018.
– Middle-income jobs are disappearing from the economy. The share of middle-income jobs in the United States has fallen from 52% in 1980 to 42% in 2010.
– Middle-income jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs, which now make up 41% of total employment.
– 17 million Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
– Over the past year, nominal wages grew only 1.7% while all consumer prices, including food and energy, increased by 2.7%.
– Wages and salaries have fallen from 60% of personal income in 1980 to 51% in 2010. Government transfers have risen from 11.7% of personal income in 1980 to 18.4% in 2010, a post-war high.
The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director†of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,†its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability†and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.â€
In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in warzones; no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry; and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.
A Nato air strike in Tripoli has killed the youngest son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan government spokesman has said.
Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, 29, was killed along with three of Muammar Gaddafi’s grandsons, according to reports.
The Libyan leader was in the building at the time of the strike, but was unharmed. Several of Gaddafi’s friends and relatives were wounded.
