“Putin Puts Out Two Wildfires in Central Russia”
August 10th, 2010This is hilarious, Soviet style propaganda. Better than the tiger incident, in my opinion.
Click through to see the photo of ole’ Vlad himself at the controls. HAHAHA.
Via: Ria Novosti:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday took part in extinguishing forest fires in Ryazan Province on board an amphibious firefighting airplane.
The Russian head of government was the co-pilot for half an hour aboard a Be-200 plane scooping up water from the nearby Oka River and dumping it on raging forest fires some 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
He dumped approximately 12 tons of water on each of two fires, extinguishing both completely.
Putin initially sat in the cabin in front of a thermal imaging monitor together with Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu and Ryazan Governor Oleg Kovalev.
However, shortly after takeoff Putin suddenly entered the cockpit and sat in the co-pilot’s seat.
He received a quick briefing from Emergency Situations Ministry aviation chief Rafail Zakirov.
It took the Be-200 a mere 11 seconds to fill up its water tanks.
During the flight, Putin observed the operation of another Be-200 that was also dousing fires from a minimum height.
He also spotted a fresh steppe fire in dangerous proximity to two villages.
Governor Kovalev, still airborne, immediately issued instructions to the local authorities to take measures to extinguish it.
Proposed Law Would Put Video Cameras In Cars
August 10th, 2010I’m sure the FBI wouldn’t access these cameras, like they access the microphones on the cell phones that people are carrying around. Oh no. Never.
Via: CBS:
Lawmakers are considering controversial new legislation this week that would allow vehicles to be equipped with dashboard cameras to record the moments leading up to accidents.
The proposed law, AB1942, would promote safer driving habits and reduce accidents by permitting video recorders to be installed on the windshield.
The bill currently allows devices to record video, audio, how fast and which direction the vehicle is traveling, a history of where your car has been, steering and brake performance and seat belt usage.
The devices would record in a continuous loop and would only save information if there is unusual vehicle motion or a crash. They could also be capable of transmitting the information to a central control center the moment of the accident.
Proponents say there are enough safety measures to avoid an invasion of privacy, but others call the proposal a huge overreach of government power.
Plane Carrying Former Senator Ted Stevens Crashes in Alaska
August 10th, 2010Update: Ted Stevens Killed In Plane Crash
Via: CBS News:
Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history who lost his seat after a corruption conviction that was later dismissed, was killed Tuesday in a small plane crash in Alaska. He was 86.
A family friend said Stevens was among five people killed in the crash in southwest Alaska.
—End Update—
Update: Sean O’Keefe, CEO of EADS and Former Head of NASA, Also Aboard
Via: Reuters:
The head of plane manufacturer EADS North American unit, Sean O’Keefe, and former Republican U.S. Senator Ted Stevens were aboard a plane that crashed in Alaska, and it was not immediately known if they survived, EADS and a congressional source said on Tuesday.
“Local authorities are reporting that there are survivors and a rescue operation is under way,” EADS North America spokesman Guy Hicks said in a statement, adding that no further details were available.
O’Keefe is the former head of NASA and worked for Stevens for many years in Congress. His son was also aboard the plane.
—End Update—
Stevens was a company man! Here’s one in mind from 2009: BP Gives $1 Million to UAF to Process Ted Stevens Papers:
British Petroleum is donating $1 million to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to catalog the papers from Ted Stevens’ four-decade political career.
Stevens sent more than 4,500 boxes of documents to the university’s library. Without the BP grant, the Rasmuson Library told The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner it would have taken decades to sort.
The library plans to hire additional staff to catalog and digitize materials. The library plans an online exhibit and electronic catalog.
Via: Cleveland Leader:
Former Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was amongst eight people believed to be on board a plane that crashed Monday night in a remote area of Alaska about 325 miles southwest of Anchorage. According to the Alaska National Guard, there are possible fatalities but there were some good Samaritans on scene helping the crash victims.
A spokesman for the Alaska Air National Guiard, Maj. Guy Hayes, said:
“They’re not out there alone right now. There’s people that are providing support. From what I’m told, there are survivors on this aircraft. I don’t know how many could be fatalities at this point.”
The aircraft is a 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter registered to the Anchorage-based communications company GCI. According to friends of Stevens, he was due to travel Monday to Agulowak Lodge, which is owned by GCI.
Possibly Related: Matt Simmons Dead “Of An Apparent Heart Attack”
U.S. Electricity Blackouts Skyrocketing
August 10th, 2010Via: CNN:
Throughout New York City, about 52,000 of ConEd’s 3.2 million customers lost power during the heat wave. Triple-digit temperatures forced residents like 77 year-old Rui Zhi Chen, to seek shelter at one of the city’s 400 emergency cooling centers. “It felt like an oven in my home and on the street,” Chen said.
Should Americans view these kinds of scenarios as extraordinary circumstances — or a warning sign of a darker future?
Experts on the nation’s electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.
During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent — up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.
In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.
“It’s hard to imagine how anyone could believe that — in the United States — we should learn to cope with blackouts,” said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.
Many Girls Now Begin Puberty at Age 7, 8
August 10th, 2010See: Child Diabetes Blamed on Food Sweetener:
Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fueling the obesity crisis.
Fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.
It has increasingly been used as a substitute for more expensive types of sugar in yoghurts, cakes, salad dressing and cereals. Even some fruit drinks that sound healthy contain fructose.
Experts believe that the sweetener — which is found naturally in small quantities in fruit — could be a factor in the emergence of diabetes among children. This week, a new report is expected to claim that about one in 10 children in England will be obese by 2015.
Previous studies of the potentially adverse impact of fructose have focused on rats, but the first experiment involving humans has now revealed serious health concerns.
Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.
…
Fructose bypasses the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of abnormal reactions, including the disruption of mechanisms that instruct the body whether to burn or store fat.
Via: Health Day:
The onset of puberty is continuing to drop among American girls, with many girls as young as 7 and 8 now showing the beginnings of breast development, new research shows.
Rising rates of childhood obesity — long linked to earlier sexual development — may be to blame, experts say.
In the study, more than 1,200 girls ages 6 to 8 from Cincinnati, East Harlem, N.Y. and San Francisco were examined on two occasions between 2004 and 2006 by two different female pediatricians or nurse practitioners who felt for the presence of breast tissue.
“We wanted to be careful not to mistake fatty deposits for actual breast tissue,” explained study author Dr. Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital.
Among 7-year-olds, about 10.4 percent of white girls, 23.4 percent of black girls and almost 15 percent of Hispanic girls had started developing breasts, the team report in the September issue of Pediatrics. Among 8-year-olds, 18.3 percent of white girls, about 43 percent of black girls and just under 31 percent of Hispanic girls showed evidence of breast development.
The figures suggest a rise in early-onset puberty compared to similar studies conducted earlier.
For 7-year-old white girls, especially, they show a doubling of the rate from as recently as a decade ago, Biro said. One study found that about 5 percent of white 7-year-old girls and 10.5 percent of 8-year-olds were showing breast development.
For black girls, the rate of breast development in that study was 15.4 percent for 7-year-olds and 36.6 percent for 8-year-olds.
The earlier data did not include information on Hispanic girls.
Experts called the findings alarming. In terms of women’s health, early puberty, including younger ages at menarche, or first menstrual cycle, is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer throughout the life span, Biro said.
…
What’s driving the earlier maturation? Increasing weight at a young age seems to be a main culprit, Biro said. Girls who developed breasts early tended to have a higher body-mass index (BMI) than those who didn’t. Though much is still unknown about how high BMIs kick start puberty, fat cells produce leptin, a hormone involved in the onset of pubertal maturation, Biro noted.
Related: Many Foods Consumed by Poor People Cause Brain Damage
U.S. to Sell $30 Billion Worth of Fighter Jets to Saudi Arabia
August 9th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration plans to sell advanced F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia but won’t equip them with long-range weapons systems and other arms whose inclusion was strongly opposed by Israel, diplomats and officials said.
The proposed $30 billion, 10-year arms package, which would be one of the biggest single deals of its kind, has been a source of behind-the-scenes tension during months of negotiations. Israeli officials have repeatedly conveyed their concerns in private that the U.S. risks undermining its military advantage by equipping regional rivals with top-flight technologies.
U.S. officials say they provided “clarifications” in recent weeks about the deal to help damp Israel’s qualms. Two officials close to the negotiations said Israel still had some reservations, but that the country isn’t expected to challenge the sale by lobbying Congress, which can hold up the deal or push for assurances of its own. The administration is expected to formally notify Congress of its plans as early as next month.
Goldman Sachs Involved with Despicable Bucket Shop Education Scams
August 9th, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.
These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”
Like many investors, Goldman, owner of 38 percent of the Art Institute’s parent, Education Management Corp., was drawn to for-profit colleges by their rapid growth and soaring stock prices, reports Bloomberg Businessweek in its Aug. 9 issue. Now Goldman, which recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle U.S. civil-fraud charges related to the subprime mortgage meltdown, is invested in an industry under attack from Congress, the Obama Administration and dissatisfied students.
The Senate held a hearing Aug. 4 featuring a Government Accountability Office undercover probe that found recruiters at EDMC’s Argosy University in Chicago and 14 other for-profit colleges misled investigators posing as potential students about the cost and quality of their programs.
Germany: ‘Radioactive Boars’
August 9th, 2010Via: AFP:
Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still poisoning Germany’s boars nearly 25 years on, with authorities fighting to keep toxic meat off the market as the wild boar population rockets.
The boars feed off mushrooms, truffles and wild berries which still contain high levels of caesium-137, carried in the radioactive cloud that spread across Europe following the 1986 accident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant.
“In some regions, especially in the south, the radioactivity found in boars is 10 times higher than normal,” Florian Emrich, spokesman for the Federal Agency for the Protection Against Radioactivity, said on Saturday.
A sharp increase in wild boar numbers has meant more boar meat — prized as a delicacy in Germany on a par with venison — is ending up on diners’ plates, raising concerns for human health.
“The U. S. patent code was never meant to cover your genes, your cells, your blood, or the marrow in your bones. But it does.”
August 9th, 2010Via: Esquire:
Like, for example, the gene called BRCA1. There’s a chance you have that gene. There’s an even better chance your wife has it, or your sister or your mom, because that’s the gene for breast cancer. If you could test yourself for BRCA1 right now, or if you could test your wife or your sister or your mom, you probably would, right? Just to be on the safe side. But you can’t test yourself because you don’t know how, and your doctor can’t test you because he’s not allowed–at least, not without permission from the person who owns the gene. And that person isn’t you. It might be in your body, but it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to a company called Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. So if you want to know whether you have the gene for breast cancer, you’re going to have to call somebody for permission. Then you’re going to have to pay for the cost of the doctor’s visit, plus a $2,500 fee to Myriad Genetics just to access its gene, the gene inside your body. Those are the rules of the patent game. That’s what a patent means: exclusive access. And the last time somebody broke those rules, the last time somebody ran a test for BRCA1 without permission, Myriad Genetics went after them. And Myriad Genetics made them stop. And that was a university.
And that’s just BRCA1. There are about a thousand other human genes that have been patented. Some of them are in your body, and many of them are important, like the one for Alzheimer’s disease and the one for epilepsy and the one for brain cancer. If you happen to have one of those genes , it might interest you to know that researchers are paying to access them, too, sometimes millions of dollars just to continue the work of looking for a cure.
It’s not just genes , either. There’s a patent on the blood inside every human umbilical cord. So if, by chance, your newborn baby needs that blood, don’t expect to get it for free. There’s also a Swiss company called Novartis that has a patent on the stem cells in your American bone marrow. Don’t expect to access those cells if you ever need a transplant, either, unless you’re prepared to pay.
Some companies have patents on entire species of animals, like the species of mice and pigs that belong to DuPont. You can patent people, too, and not just John Moore. These days, you can get a patent on just about anybody; a patent issued in 1995 to the U. S. Department of Health covered the cell line of an unsuspecting member of the Hagahai tribe in Papua, New Guinea, whose resistance to certain diseases made him valuable to researchers. Other patents filed by the U. S. government at around the same time covered indigenous people from the Solomon Islands and from the Guaymi tribe in Panama.
As a matter of constitutional law, all of this is highly suspect. There’s never been a vote by Congress to approve the patenting of human or animal life, there’s never been an executive order by any president, and there’s never been a decision by the U. S. Supreme Court on the patenting of any animal larger than a microorganism. In fact, just twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t patent any of it: genes , cells, blood, marrow, even a clipped fingernail. Back then, the U. S. patent code looked a lot more like the code Thomas Jefferson wrote, the code that was designed to protect inventions–think cotton gins, whoopee cushions, Twinkies!–made on American soil. But that hasn’t slowed down the patent code, which not only applies to U. S. soil but now lays claim to ninety foreign countries, and even to “any object made, used, or sold in outer space.”
If you’re starting to get the impression that the U. S. patent laws have gotten out of hand, if you’re starting to wonder how they got that way, how they stretched so wide so quickly without any public debate or government approval, the first question you ought to ask yourself is why you never thought about it before. The answer, most likely, is that you didn’t know. You didn’t know because nobody knew. Nobody knew because nobody cared. Life went on, oblivious.
And that’s how it happened.
Appeals Court Rules Against Secret Police GPS Tracking
August 9th, 2010Via: Wired:
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the police can’t covertly track a suspect’s car using a GPS device for an extended period of time without getting a warrant.
The ruling in the D.C. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of a suspected cocaine dealer, saying that the use of a secret GPS tracking device on the man’s vehicle for two months violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend of the court brief supporting the challenge.
