Japan Shuts Down Last Nuclear Reactor for ‘Regular Maintenance’
May 9th, 2012Does anyone know how long this “regular maintenance” period is supposed to last?
Via: CNN:
As Japan began its workweek Monday morning, the trains ran exactly on time, the elevators in thousands of Tokyo high-rises efficiently moved between floors, and the lights turned on across cities with nary a glitch.
What makes this Monday so remarkable is that for the first time in four decades, none of the energy is derived from a nuclear reactor.
Over the weekend, Japan’s last remaining nuclear reactor shut down for regular maintenance. In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, reactors have not been allowed back on. Japan is now the first major economy to see the modern era without nuclear power.
Tomari Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor 3 in Hokkaido shut down Saturday evening in a much-watched move by government, industry and environmentalists, who are waged in a public battle over the future of Japan’s energy policy.
Related: Coal and Gas Assets ‘At Top of Japan’s Shopping List’
Southern California Edison Hopes to Restart Damaged San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Next Month
May 9th, 2012Via: AP:
More than 1,300 tubes that carry radioactive water inside the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California are so damaged that they will be taken out of service, the utility that runs the plant said Tuesday.
The figures released by Southern California Edison are the latest disclosure in a probe of equipment problems that have kept the coastal plant sidelined for more than three months.
At issue has been the integrity of tubing that snakes through the plant’s four steam generators, which were installed in a multimillion-dollar makeover in 2009 and 2010.
A company statement said that as of Monday, 510 tubes had been plugged, or retired from use, in the Unit 2 reactor, and 807 tubes in its sister, Unit 3. Each of the generators has nearly 10,000 tubes, and the number retired is well within the limit allowed to continue operation.
The statement comes just days after an Edison executive said the company hopes to restart at least one of the twin reactors next month. The company is drafting a plan under which the reactors would run at reduced power, at least for several months, because engineers believe that will solve a problem with vibration that the company believes has been causing unusual wear in the alloy tubing.
Colleges Hold Transcripts Hostage for Graduates Behind on Their Student Loans
May 8th, 2012Via: Oregon Live:
Students traditionally have a soft spot for their alma maters. But as growing numbers of students run up debt in the high five and even six figures to pay for college, that may change. Especially when they discover their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree.
That’s what increasing numbers of students are finding when they try to obtain an official transcript to send to potential employers or graduate admissions offices.
It turns out many colleges and universities refuse to issue these critical documents if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind.
This is happening at a time when recent grads are finding it particularly hard to find work, not just in their chosen fields, but anywhere. About half of recent college degree-holders were unemployed or underemployed last year, according to a recent Associated Press study. And the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates student loan debt has passed $1 trillion, an amount greater than all outstanding credit card debt. The Department of Education put the default rate at 8.8 percent of student borrowers as of September 2010.
Research Credit: ottilie
Las Cruces Threatens to Cut Off Utilities for Residents with Unpaid Red-Light Camera Tickets
May 8th, 2012How long until this is linked to other databases? Unpaid property taxes, unlicensed pets, overdue library books, or who knows what else???
—Britain: CCTV at Petrol Stations Will Prevent Uninsured Cars from Being Fueled
Via: ABC News:
Residents of Las Cruces, New Mexico with outstanding red-light-camera traffic tickets are in danger of having their utilities shut off.
The program, placing cameras at intersections, is just over three years old, and in that time violators have run up $2 million in unpaid fines.
“Over time we were looking at various options, various ways to recoup that money,” Udell Vigil, the communications director for the City of Las Cruces, told ABC News.com.
The fines are broken up between the city, the state of New Mexico and the camera company. The city is owed $600 thousand in unpaid tickets.
“We can’t go through the courts; it’s not that type of citation,” said Vigil. “We don’t have legal enforcement authority.”
When the city explored options, officials came across Section 28-10 of the Las Cruces Municipal Code, which says, “The city may decline, fail or cease to furnish utility service to any person who may be in debt to the city for any reason, except ad valorem taxes and special assessments,” according to the city website.
Letters are being sent out to violators. Once the resident receives the letter, there is a deadline for the ticket to be paid in full, or for reasonable payment arrangements to be made. If a resident refuses to pay, the city could shut off their water, sewage and gas. Electricity is not provided by the city.
Research Credit: anchoviesmegma
Commandos Now Play Digital Brain Games as War Prep
May 8th, 2012Via: Danger Room:
U.S. special operations forces carry out some the military’s toughest, most high-stakes missions. To pull them off, the commandos need speed, agility and swift perception skills akin to those of top-tier professional athletes. That might explain why the military’s latest commando training program will rely on a virtual-reality system already employed by pro sports teams.
The system, called “NeuroTracker,” was designed by CogniSens, a company spun out of the neurophysics lab of Dr. Jocelyn Faubert, a researcher at Canada’s University of Montreal. NeuroTracker has until now been deployed almost exclusively for athletic training: It’s used by several teams in the NFL and NHL, as well as at Olympic training centers in a handful of European countries.
Now commandos are going to get the NeuroTracker treatment as well. According to an announcement released last week, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) plans to purchase the NeuroTracker system in an effort to “improve situational awareness, multiple target tracking and decision-making efficiency” among operatives.
U.S. Companies Selling Drones to Undisclosed Foreign Governments
May 8th, 2012Via: The American Independent:
A Texas-based defense contractor is selling drones overseas to foreign governments for use in combating narcotics trafficking and terrorism. Which countries are buying them and exactly how they are being used, however, is largely unknown. This uncertainty has led to calls from human rights activists for greater transparency and accountability for drone proliferation.
As sales of drones increase worldwide, human rights activists are concerned about the potential for such technology to be used by oppressive governments against citizen uprisings. This past weekend, human rights organizations and those affected by drone warfare met for the first international drone summit.
Vanguard Defense Industries, is among the companies at the forefront of the emerging drone market. As The Texas Independent reported, Vanguard projects its domestic sales for next year at between $35 million and $40 million, which would represent a 25 percent increase. However, despite the increase in the domestic market, the majority of Vanguard’s sales will be overseas.
France and Greece Want to Print the Confetti
May 8th, 2012I like the picture of Merkel in the story below. She’s doing a good *pffft*
Via: Guardian:
Europe’s 30-month effort to save the euro by slashing spending and debt levels risks turning into a crisis of political legitimacy after EU leaders’ strategies collided spectacularly with the wishes of voters in Greece and France.
The impasse was most graphically demonstrated when Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, insisted Athens must comply with the stringent terms of its €130bn (£100bn) bailout even though more than 60% of the Greek electorate had voted for parties rejecting those terms.
Following a French election campaign in which she strongly backed the loser, Nicolas Sarkozy, and snubbed the president-elect, François Hollande, Merkel stressed her opposition to Hollande’s central campaign pledge: reopening the euro’s new rulebook, or fiscal pact.
“That’s just not on,” she told a Berlin press conference called to address the huge shift from right to left in France.
The first attempt to cobble together a new Greek government collapsed quickly when Antonis Samaras, the centre-right leader, called off negotiations. Greece appears to be on the brink of ungovernability as a result of a messy election triggered by the euro crisis. The stock market suffered its worse fall since 2008, losing as much as 8% of its value before closing 6.7% down. The country’s banking index was 13% lower.
Market analysts shortened the odds against the country’s chances of surviving in the single currency.
“The irresistible force of German austerity has clashed with the immovable object of Greek popular resistance,” said Tristan Cooper, sovereign debt analyst at Fidelity Worldwide Investment. “The eurozone’s weakest link just got weaker. Although it should be no surprise that Greeks are spurning the bitter medicine, the violence of the rejection is a shock. A Greek eurozone exit is now firmly on the cards.”
Fullerton: Video of Kelly Thomas Beating Death Released
May 8th, 2012Via: pixq:
The city surveillance video that shows a group of Fullerton police officers beating a homeless mentally ill man to death last year was finally released today, laying to rest any argument that Kelly Thomas was a threat to officers.
The shocking video, which was combined with an audio recorder worn by one of the police officers on the night of July 5, 2011, was shown in court today, then later released to the media.
“Now you see my fists?” Fullerton police officer Manny Ramos asked Thomas while slipping on a pair of latex gloves.
“Yeah, what about them?” Thomas responded.
“They are getting ready to fuck you up,” said Ramos, a burly cop who appears to outweigh Thomas by 100 pounds.
…
Last year, Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County Sheriff’s deputy, said the City of Fullerton offered him $900,000 to just go away, which would have allowed the two cops to remain on the force unpunished for killing his son.
Thomas was pronounced dead on July 10, five days after the beating that left him in a coma.
U.S. Army Wants Magic 8 Ball Watching Over All of Its Computer Users
May 8th, 2012Via: Army Times:
In the wake of the biggest dump of classified information in the history of the Army, the brass is searching for ways to watch what every soldier is doing on his or her Army computer.
The Army wants to look at keystrokes, downloads and Web searches on computers that soldiers use.
Maj. Gen. Steven Smith, chief of the Army Cyber Directorate, said the software was one of his chief priorities, joking that it would take the place of a lower-tech solution: “A guy with a large bat behind every user as they go to search the Internet.”
“Now we’ve been in the news — I don’t know if you’ve seen it — with a little insider threat issue,” Smith continued.
Smith did not mention Pfc. Bradley Manning by name. However, the effort comes in the wake of the former intelligence analyst’s alleged leak of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. Manning faces a military trial on 22 counts, including aiding the enemy.
According to Smith, the Army will soon shop for software pre-programmed to detect a user’s abnormal behavior and record it, catching malicious insiders in the act. Though it is unclear how broadly the Army plans to adopt the program, the Army has more than 900,000 users on its computers.
Related: Companies Pass IT Staff Emails Through Monitoring Software Designed to Spot ‘The Enemy Within’
Research Credit: ms
JPMorgan Chase Whistleblower: ‘Essentially Suicide’ to Stand Up to Bank
May 8th, 2012Via: Huffington Post:
When Linda Almonte alerted her boss at JPMorgan Chase about potential fraud in a major deal she was helping to close, she expected him to applaud her great catch.
Instead, he fired her.
“We went down fast,” said Almonte, 41, about her family. She had been making $100,000 a year as a division vice president at Chase, enough to support her stay-at-home husband, their four kids, ages 12 to 22, and rent a three-bedroom house in San Antonio, Texas.
Her move at Chase amounted to “essentially suicide,” Almonte told The Huffington Post. No bank in town would hire her after word spread that she had stood up to the banking giant, she said. After more than a year of fruitless job hunting, Almonte and her family left town, landing at a hotel near Disney World, paying $300 a week for a two-bedroom with a kitchenette.
