Soil Contamination from Fukushima Crisis Comparable to Chernobyl
May 25th, 2011Via: Japan Today:
Radiation released by the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has caused soil contamination matching the levels seen in the Chernobyl disaster in some areas, a researcher told the government’s nuclear policy-setting body Tuesday. ‘‘A massive soil decontamination project will be indispensable before residents in those areas can return,’’ said Tomio Kawata, a research fellow of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, at the meeting of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, which sets policies and strategies for the government’s nuclear power development.
According to Kawata, soil in a 600 square kilometer area mostly to the northwest of the Fukushima plant is likely to have absorbed radioactive cesium of over 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the yardstick for compulsory migration orders in the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
Kawata also said soil in a 700 square km area is likely to have absorbed 555,000-1.48 million becquerels per square meter, which was a criteria for temporary migration during the Chernobyl disaster.
U.S. Government Seeks CIA Leak Source on Iran Nuclear Sabotage Plan, Subpoenas Reporter
May 25th, 2011Via: International Press Institute:
The International Press Institute (IPI) today expressed concern at the United States government’s attempt to force a New York Times reporter to disclose his source of information about a Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.
The newspaper reported yesterday that prosecutors on Monday served a subpoena on reporter and author James Risen, ordering him to appear in court 12 September to testify at the trial of former C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling.
The government alleges that Sterling provided Risen classified information that appeared in Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.” Sterling was charged as part of an Obama administration crackdown on officials accused of disclosing restricted information to journalists.
According to The New York Times, civilian and military prosecutors have charged five people in cases involving leaking information since President Obama took office, more than all previous presidents combined.
Two of those cases – the case against Stirling and a case against former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who faces trial in several weeks on charges of providing classified information to The Baltimore Sun about cost overruns and mismanagement at the agency – began under the Bush administration.
Cases brought under the Obama administration include charges against a former Federal Bureau of Intelligence translator who pleaded guilty to leaking classified documents to a blogger, and the case against former soldier Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking a massive trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
IPI Director Alison Bethel McKenzie condemned news of the subpoena against Risen.
“It is completely unacceptable that journalists might not be able to protect the source of information they obtain in the process of gathering news,” she said. “The U.S. government, and President Obama, have both a constitutional obligation not to take any steps that infringe upon the freedom of the press, and a moral obligation to fight any attempts – by law, regulation or any other action – that would do so.”
Monday’s subpoena represents the third time the government has tried to compel Risen’s testimony in the Sterling case. A first subpoena, issued in grand jury proceedings, expired while Risen fought a legal battle against it, and the journalist last year managed to convince a judge to quash a second subpoena, also during the grand jury phase.
Risen told The New York Times that he would fight the latest subpoena, commenting that the case was “a fight about the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
France Attempts to “Civilize” the Internet; Internet Fights Back
May 25th, 2011Via: Ars Technica:
For some time, French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy has talked about his dream of a “civilized” Internet, but this dream has long been a nightmare for those who worry that “civilization” is really a code for “regulations favorable to big business and the national security state.” To make his vision a reality, Sarkozy helped to create this week’s e-G8 meeting currently underway in the Tuileries Gardens next door to the Louvre—and the critics are fuming.
“I was invited to the e-G8 and declined,” said author and activist Cory Doctorow recently. “I believe it’s a whitewash, an attempt to get people who care about the Internet to lend credibility to regimes that are in all-out war with the free, open ‘Net. On the other hand, I now have a dandy handwriting sample from Sarkozy should I ever need to establish a graphological baseline for narcissistic sociopathy.”
Risk From Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is Greater in U.S. Than in Japan
May 25th, 2011Via: New York Times:
The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday by a nonprofit institute.
The report, from the Institute for Policy Studies, recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event.
“The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future,” the report’s author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. “In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.”
Pentagon Wants 80 to 100 Long Range, Nuclear-Capable Bombers That Can Operate With or Without a Pilot in the Cockpit
May 24th, 2011Via: Los Angeles Times:
Deep in the Mojave Desert, surrounded by tiers of barbed-wire fence, the nation’s largest defense contractors work in secrecy designing and building the latest military aircraft at Air Force Plant 42.
The military’s top weapons buyer quietly visited the Palmdale facility this month to talk with leading aerospace executives about plans to build a fleet of radar-evading bombers that the military hopes to have ready for action by the mid-2020s.
The plane would be the first long-range bomber built in the U.S. since the last of the 21 bat-winged B-2 stealth bombers by Northrop Grumman Corp. rolled off the assembly lines at Plant 42 more than a decade ago. The Air Force owns the 5,800-acre industrial park and leases space to aerospace contractors.
Now on the Pentagon wish list is a proposed fleet of 80 to 100 nuclear-capable bombers that could operate with or without a pilot in the cockpit.
Pentagon weapons acquisition chief Ashton Carter met separately with representatives of Northrop, Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said. These companies are expected to vie for the estimated $55-billion contract that is expected to provide jobs and decades of work for Southern California’s aerospace industry.
Libya: British and French Attack Helicopters to be Deployed
May 24th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
British attack helicopters will be deployed in Libya within days in a significant expansion of the military mission against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces.
The Daily Telegraph has learned that Apache helicopters will fly into Libya from a Royal Navy warship, in a joint operation with the French.
As many as 18 British and French helicopters will be deployed to support rebels trying to consolidate gains against Gaddafi’s forces.
The helicopter operation – expected to be supported by Special Forces troops – will take the allies closer still to a full ground operation in Libya.
Whitehall officials said that later this week, the Apaches will begin flying missions in from HMS Ocean, a helicopter carrier in the Mediterranean.
Their use was authorised by David Cameron at a meeting of the National Security Council after the Prime Minister asked military chiefs for new ways to increase the pressure on the Libyan regime.
Obama Regime’s Information Operations: Rapid Response to Unfavorable Stories
May 24th, 2011Via: Huffington Post:
The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community.
Facebook Is Coming for Your Children
May 23rd, 2011Via: Today:
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
Zimbabwe Considering Commodity Based Currency
May 23rd, 2011Via: MineWeb:
Zimbabwe’s central bank governor Gideon Gono on Thursday proposed the introduction of a gold-backed local currency, which was destroyed by hyperinflation and replaced by multiple foreign currencies in January.
A unity government formed by rivals President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in a bid to end a political crisis introduced multiple foreign currencies to stop sky-rocketing inflation and revive the economy.
But Gono, a Mugabe ally whose reappointment last year has been opposed by Tsvangirai, says the shortage of foreign currencies in the country was hurting economic recovery efforts.
In an article he wrote in the state-controlled Herald newspaper, Gono urged the re-introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar to ease the liquidity crunch, but said this was not a call for “a blind return to the money printing press”.
“Rather, what I am calling for is the guarded reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar where such a new currency will be fully backed by credible, tangible and locally available assets, such as gold, diamonds or platinum, among several other possibilities,” Gono said.
NSA Collects as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress Every Six Hours [???]
May 23rd, 2011I try to avoid the black/grey/white propaganda narratives surrounding the alleged Bin Laden assassination. The whole thing is so absurd that it’s just impossible for me to take it seriously at all. However, in my routine monitoring of stories about the NSA, I came across the claim that the agency is processing an amount of data that’s equivalent to what’s stored in the Library of Congress every six hours.
Ok, so I tried to figure out how much data a Library-of-Congress-every-six-hours represents.
It turns out that the claim is completely meaningless! It tells us nothing about how much data the NSA is intercepting/archiving/processing because there are no digital versions of vast portions of the full Library of Congress collection.
Read this: How ‘Big’ Is the Library of Congress?
So it begs the question, just how “big” is the Library of Congress, in terms of our content, but especially if one tried to equate it to the digital realm?
I won’t go into any of the specific claims that are being made, but they’re easy to find out there in the ether, and suffice it to say that the Library would stand behind very few if any of them. There are certain things we can quantify, but far more that are purely speculative.
For instance, we can as of this moment say that the approximate amount of our collections that are digitized and freely and publicly available on the Internet is about 74 terabytes. We can also say that we have about 15.3 million digital items online.
Some may be tempted to extrapolate that those digital items represent a precise percentage of the nearly 142 million items in the Library’s physical collections, and then estimate some kind of digital corollary. But comparing digital and physical items is apples and oranges, at best. A simple example of that fallacy would be represented by a single photograph online depicting several physical objects.
Another source of digital estimates is likely based on the number of books and printed items in our collections, which is currently about 32 million. One could attempt to establish the average length of those items (pages, words, characters, etc.) and extrapolate the digital equivalent of those 32 million physical items.
Assuming one could do that with any degree of accuracy — and that’s a big assumption — it overlooks the fact that those 32 million books represent only about one-quarter of the entire physical collections. The rest are in the form of manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, globes, moving images, sound recordings, sheet music, oral histories, etc. So how does that other three-quarters of the Library equate digitally? Can one automatically assume the digital resolution at which all maps or photographs, for instance, would be scanned? Those are major wildcards indeed.
And then there are our motion pictures, videos and sound recordings alone — around 6 million items stored at our new Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. What is their digital equivalent? Most people who record television programs onto a computer or DVR know that a hard drive with hundreds of megabytes or even a terabyte or more can quickly fill up.
So, there you have it: A nonsensical claim, effortlessly woven into the tapestry of other nonsensical claims, to go with your morning coffee.
Via: The Baltimore Sun:
Parachini of RAND said the rule of thumb has been that every six hours, NSA collects an amount of information equivalent to the store of knowledge housed at the Library of Congress.
“The volume of data they’re pulling in is huge,” he said. “One criticism we might make of our [intelligence] community is that we’re collection-obsessed — we pull in everything — and we don’t spend enough time or money to try and understand what do we have and how can we act upon it.”
