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Of course it isn't newsworthy. Give it a decade. Once the entirety of the story has long since blown over, then they'll issue their official response.

A few months ago, the Treasury Department sent us 237 pages in its latest response to our requests regarding Iran trade sanctions. Nearly all 237 pages were completely blacked out, on the basis that they contained businesses' trade secrets. When was our request? Nine years ago.

That's how the government operates now. Just when you've completely forgotten about your FOIA request, they'll finally respond with hundreds of pages of fully redacted content, because they can't endanger old corporate trade secrets. What an excuse. They don't even bother playing the National Security card anymore, they straight up admit that business trumps all.

Sorry, can't give you any insight into how the government operates, it might jeopardize corporate profits!

Oh, yes! Another quality piece of journalism, but from AP? Really? Link to Article Presumably, the spacecraft will be giving way to traffic coming from the left as well?

... when Obamacare was being shoved down our throats? ObamaCare site sharing data with third parties

The AP covered it in 2013, it is not like we didn't know, we just did not pay attention.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article...

That article you are referencing is about a different topic entirely. There is a difference between having public and private accounts, both residing on the organization's servers, and what Clinton did. Kathleen Sabelius's three email accounts were all @hhs.gov accounts. They would have been subjected to the same security and record keeping requirements as anyone in the administration. This is a common practice in private industry, and I expect it to occur in the public sector as well. A well known public figure wouldn't be able to function with every lunatic sending them emails constantly. Therefore you have the public email address forwarded to a team of assistants, and the private email address to conduct day-to-day tasks.

What Clinton did was use a personal email account, like G-mail, to conduct business.

They didn't care. It is a pretty wide spread practice in this administration:

Lisa Jackson- EPA
Kathleen Sebelius - HHS
Seth Harris - Department of Labor.
and more

The AP covered it in 2013, it is not like we didn't know, we just did not pay attention.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article...
 

Since Judge Overton’s 1982 ruling, the concept of evolution has been covered in the biology textbooks on the Arkansas Department of Education’s approved list and appears, though is not emphasized, in its Science Curriculum Framework. However, there is evidence that despite this, evolution continues to be minimized or even ignored in most of the state’s schools. Many science teachers quietly complain that—given the danger of provoking the anger of parents, administrators, and school board members—they teach little if any evolution. Others shy away from the subject because they themselves have never received the needed instruction on evolution. A survey of the state’s biology teachers conducted by state education officials showed that only fifty percent cover evolution at all, with most of those just glossing over it. The other fifty percent either ignore the subject completely or teach some form of creationism. This persisting situation has raised many questions about Arkansas’s commitment to giving its young people the best possible education in the biological sciences. The state’s struggle over the teaching of evolution, it would appear, is far from over.

Former Arkansas Governor Huckabee wants to run for president and is currently beating the drum denying climate change.

The former Arkansas governor mocked Obama's elevation of climate change as a critical issue. Huckabee says a greater threat is violent radical elements stoking fear around the world.

Arkansas is a state where verifiable scientific facts are ignored in favor of religiously endorsed stupidity. Trying to drop a high technology mandate into such a system will not work. Critical thinking has been replaced by magical thinking. Keeping rational thinking unpolluted by fanatical belief is a loosing battle. The best that they will get is skilled technicians.

Think about it. Would you hire someone who was primarily educated in a madrasa, a place where religion was emphasized over any other subject? Hiring a person who was mostly educated in Arkansas is the American version. No matter how smart a person is, unless they are capable of critical thinking they will never be in the top tier. So unless someone from Arkansas leaves the state and overcomes their bad early training, they are not someone who can be trusted to make rational decisions.

Although this sounds harsh, if you think about it rationally it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.

2010 has a 23% "claim". The chances that another year was hotter is 62%. (That's "more than half".) The AP is now correcting the mistake: http://bigstory.ap.org/article...

Maybe you should explain to them that error bars don't matter.

No one says they were "bad and wrong and evil", you redundant moron. But they obviously need better training, and they need to be held accountable when they do something wrong.

P.S. Your idiotic comment on Eric Garner flies in the face of facts. The coroner's report calls it a homicide, with the cause of death being asphyxiation.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article...

Ignorant twat.

If 75% of a group of people don't riot or loot, then that is most of the people.

What the article points out, is that CNN never showed anybody, who did not riot or loot. Given CNN's obvious desire to show such people, their inability to do so — despite repeated claims, they exist — can only mean one thing: there weren't any.

Which is hardly a wonder, I might add, given who Michael Brown was — a violent thug, who just robbed a store, and attacked (according to variety of witnesses) a policeman confronting him.

Doubly shameful is the fact, that these rioting scum, apparently, have swayed the public opinion elsewhere — such as in Long Island, where grand jury chose to not indict a different killer-cop, who should have been prosecuted for his deadly choke-hold of a non-threatening small-time criminal...

Read the fucking testimony. Read it. Don't armchair quarterback or Monday morning quarterback without watching the fucking game.

AP document collection
PDF of the transcript of the grand jury proceedings

tl;dr : Wilson was in the SUV. His left hand was struggling with Brown. His OC was on his left. His asp was on the back of his belt and he was sitting on part of it. He couldn't extend it and swing inside the car. He didn't have a taser on him and he certainly didn't have a shotgun loaded with bean bags. He had already been threatened and struck when he drew his weapon, which Brown then struggled to turn on him. He fired through the vehicle's door and window the first two shots at _that_ point.

It wasn't an "arbitrary assault" on Brown, and Brown was using force against the officer.

Yeah, because nuclear is real clean and stuff.

The spent fuel is piling up at a rate of about 2,200 tons a year at U.S. power-plant sites. The industry and government decline to say how much waste is currently stored at individual plants. The U.S. nuclear industry had 69,720 tons of uranium waste as of May 2013, with 49,620 tons in pools and 20,100 in dry storage, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute industry group.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent is other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency.

And all of those sites are close to 50 years old with no maintenance and with no fuel storage because of the veto of Yucca mountain, etc....

Yes, there are some nasty by-products of nuclear power. But we have the technology to clean these sites up and store or re-process the waste. The only reason why these sites are left to fester is due to politics. It's pretty bad when the people who complain about these sites and nuclear power are the exact same people who block the solutions....

Yeah, because nuclear is real clean and stuff.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent is other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency.

In what way does it contribute to global warming?

So even if we ignore that you left out that the waste can be reworked for a shorter storage time your post still doesn't address that TFA claims that renewable is insufficient and coal is a big problem. Nuclear switches the problem to a more manageable one.

Yeah, because nuclear is real clean and stuff.

The spent fuel is piling up at a rate of about 2,200 tons a year at U.S. power-plant sites. The industry and government decline to say how much waste is currently stored at individual plants. The U.S. nuclear industry had 69,720 tons of uranium waste as of May 2013, with 49,620 tons in pools and 20,100 in dry storage, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute industry group.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent is other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency.

Just look at what happened to Kim Dotcom in NZ. Or the Russian guy that got "extradited" in Maldives.

The long arm of the USA is long and strong indeed. The US Senators might not be controlling it, but that sure doesn't mean Assange is safe from it. Those US Senators could be delivering a message from whoever is controlling the arm.

intelligence agencies are also under the control of the Executive, with checks and balances from the Legislative Branch (that's the Senate). The Legislative can rein in the intelligence agencies if they so choose, via the oversight and funding process, but they can't issue them marching orders.

Why can they lie to Congress AND more importantly get away with it?
http://bigstory.ap.org/article...
So who really is in control here?

A Republican by his actions and policies.

Oh, no you don't... You keep him. A Republican would not have withdrawn all troops from Iraq — allowing ISIS to bloom and necessitating a painful return.

A Republican would not have encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine by lifting all sanctions imposed over a similar invasion into Georgia.

A Republican would've continued to detain terrorist suspects — in Guantanamo or elsewhere — rather then order extrajudicial killings — most infamously one of Osama bin Laden himself.

No, Obama is an Illiberal Democrat through and through. But such people — yourself included — are famous for inability to recognize each other — so far are their deeds from their proclaimed ideals.

However nobody freaked out, held press conferences, asked the president of the United States about it when a guy killed 3 mounties a few months back.

I wonder why. Oh, because he wasn't a scary muslim and therefore couldn't be used to justify ceding more power to the government to spy on people and bomb stuff.

Several, if they are the old style little vibrating football games.
Seriously, LEDs already light an NFL venue in Arizona:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/06682dfa85e44ab0a98f44001249ea09/sunday-night-lights-super-bowl-be-lit-leds

You probably can't understand that unless you have had some training, but you'll see that there is an inner ring that extends around the airport and out from it for about 10 miles in most directions.

The classes you are referring to are regulations for pilots; they restrict where you can fly, they don't restrict where people can build. And even if you can fly to 0 ft according to the zone, as a pilot, you are still obligated to stay away from man-made obstacles.

Rest assured, I know far more about this than you do.

Knowing how to fly doesn't make you a legal expert on property rights. As a pilot, your obligation is to fly safely and avoid obstacles, and if you don't, you lose your license. But the FAA has no direct legal authority to regulate property owners. As you can see from the below fight about property rights and FAA regulations near airports, the FAA can't even impose height limits on property owners near airport flight paths themselves, they can only hope zoning boards and insurance companies will make people comply.

The US legal system has tried to make some reasonable accommodations to make aviation possible, but that doesn't mean property rights to airspace have just evaporated and pilots and airlines now own the airspace. Generally, if I behave reasonably as a property owner, you as a pilot have to accommodate me, not the other way around.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article...

"Just one flight path could cover hundreds and hundreds of acres in densely developed areas," Bazeli said. "You are going to be bumping up against some very valuable property rights."

The FAA doesn't have the authority to tell owners how high a building can be. But property owners near airports are supposed to apply to the FAA before construction for a determination on whether a proposed building or renovation presents a hazard to navigation. Erecting a building that the FAA says is a hazard is akin to building in a flood plain — insurance rates go up, mortgages are harder to get and property values decrease. Local zoning laws often don't permit construction of buildings determined to be an aviation hazard.

Hope and Change!

One of the more popular requests among business and family groups is a change in the way green cards are counted that would essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year, advocates say.

By comparison, solar power is still the clear winner, according to ecology.com

That sites like "ecology.com" declare solar to be a winner is not surprising. That they even ask a question, however, is a sign, that things aren't as obvious and clear-cut, as some would like the rest of us to believe.

Just twenty years ago we were lead to believe, growing more corn for conversion to ethanol would save the Earth and otherwise make the world a better place. That turned out to be a lie, but you wouldn't find a mention of it on ecology.com. Or, maybe, you would nowadays, but it is hardly trumpeted the way "progressive" politicians were praised for pushing ethanol and the "kkkonservative" ones — lambasted for opposing it.

San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.

Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)

Apple has so far not responded to reports its devices are not hypo-allergenic.

Probably.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article...

You will find stories that this is BS also but there was a parade of flight trainers from all around the world talking about having this problem with their Korean students on all the talking head shows.

See Hobson's Choice.

By the fact that his passport was revoked while transiting Russia, Snowden's choice went from "which country do I seek asylum in" to "do I seek asylum in Russia or not at all?"

Sorry, that's simply not true. Snowden's passport was revoked before he left Hong Kong.

Quoting from the above article:

Edward Snowden's passport was annulled before he left Hong Kong for Russia and while that could complicate his travel plans, the lack of a passport alone could not thwart his plans, the U.S. official said. If a senior official in another country or with an airline orders it, a country could overlook the withdrawn passport, the official said.

Look - the Inspector General of the Treasury Department said it targeted groups for political reasons and that violates the equal protection under the law clause. Not to mention targeted audits of the same donors to those targeted groups. If it didn't do anything wrong, then why did the IRS apologize for its activities?

Apparently you don't have a problem with the politicization of the IRS, to use the Government to attack political opponents. I get that. Most sane and reasonable people do have a problem with it - at least an ethical, if not recognizing that it's illegal and a gross misuse of Government power.

Or do you end up with a system which is heavily skewed to the wishes of a handful of wealthy people -- which is pretty much what you have now.

That's a popular canard but it's not always true. Intensity beats extensity, every time.

This is an example of what I mean, Eric Cantor just lost his primary to a no-name Tea Partier that he outspent 27 to 1.

In local, state and national elections the ability to motivate people is what wins elections.

In 2008, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani out-fundraised McCain by 7 million and 4 million dollars respectively and they both lost.

The Democrats were even more interesting on this front. First when he beat the Clinton machine in the 2008 primary. His campaign employed analytics on a level that hadn't been seen before, especially for a political nobody who was barely on the national stage for 4 years. Hillary out-funraised Barack by over 11 million dollars and he soundly beat her.

Obama out-spent McCain by almost 400 million dollars and had it not been for his running mate, McCain would have faced an embarrassing loss in the general election. Beyond that money, Obama had the organization to win.

Obama out-spent Romney by 250 million dollars. Had the election taken place a year later, his victory wouldn't have been assured. Despite a quarter of a billion dollar advantage, the incumbent nearly lost.

The thread that unites all of these cases is that in every instance, the candidate with the most energetic following won. Money helps but it's only the losers who complain when the game that they chose to play doesn't turn out their way.

LK

Pretty much. I'm sure people are going to froth at the mouth and all the rest until you post stories like this.

Walk yourself through the steps, support structure and equipment that would be required to pull that off balanced against the likelihood of getting caught. Then you might sleep better. Evil ones tend to choose easier paths.

"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"

But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.

But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.

Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.

But that should be obvious too.

I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

From the AP Code of Ethics

The content of a photograph must not be altered in Photoshop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by Photoshop or any other editing tool. Only retouching or the use of the cloning tool to eliminate dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints are acceptable.
Minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into gray- scale, and normal toning and color adjustments that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph. Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of “red eye” from photographs is not permissible.

source

Or the real source, the AP and API news feeds. Look hard enough and you can find pirated feeds online that are not delayed.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/f... for the legitimate but heavily time delayed feed. The paying customers get the news earlier so they can publish it before it goes on the public feed.

It's true that solar and wind aren't very dense, on the other hand you can use the same plot of land indefinitely instead of stripping it and moving on to consume yet more land, and solar can use rooftops that are wasted space (in fact we pay good money to get rid of the heat they collect). This also generates power onsite so their is no long-haul infrastructure. Here in New Mexico a lot of people are putting up solar panels on their homes. It is real.

All I hear is you saying that you don't like the penalties for the crimes he committed.

Yes, because the phrase YOU used "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" makes some sort implication about the reasonablility of the crime.

If not, you might apply the same reasoning to the Jews in Nazi Germany. "Well, if they didn't want to be gassed, they shouldn't have been Jewish." That is clearly ridiculous. If your argument lends itself to ridiculous conclusions then your argument is ridiculous.

resort to ad hominem

You resorted to making up random (incorrect) stuff about my motivations. So, you can now climb down off your high horse.

Probably the biggest misconception you have put forth is that JSTOR had a say in the prosecution.

Where did I make this misconception? Hint: I didn't.

The victim of a crime doesn't decide if a perpetrator is tried, rather the state does.

Yes, and? What's your point? The victim can still tell the state if they want the charges dropped if they wish. It's a very strong indication that the crime was not egregious. 25 years for a crime with no real victims is excessive.

Personally, I have not seen a statement from JSTOR

Here you go:

From http://bigstory.ap.org/article/swartz-death-fuels-debate-over-computer-crime:

JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White â" formerly the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan â" had called the lead Boston prosecutor in the case and asked him to drop it, said Peters, also a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who is now based in California.

You can only vote for the POTUS/VPOTUS, House of Rep and Two Senators. That gives you four choices in control of your representation at the Federal level. That however is counter-balanced by the millions of folks who believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Twitter Feeds and that the Federal Government is this beneficent thing. It's not. It's a large eating machine that feeds other eating machines and fucks with you on so many levels it's astonishing. On important matters it's the slowest mechanism to deliver change but on other matters it's the quickest to jump to conclusions and write poor legislation like the Patriot Act that enabled this shit in the first place. We're supposed to have three branches of government that balance each other out but more often then not they sing from the same choir book especially where them Terrorists are concerned because Terrorism is bad and we must fight it by declaring war on it, never mind the fact that the enemy is in a bunch of caves that a few tactical nukes could handle. And because we've created these new "tools" for the beneficent and powerful government, now we have prosecutors labeling gang members as Terrorists so how much longer before a common speeding ticket gets labeled as such? Future news headline: "Today a Speeding vehicle terrorized other motorists. The Feds have stepped in to charge the man under the special provisions of the Patriot Act."

So sing with me from page 666 of your hymnal... for at least the next three years "We're all fucked.."

Nope, its 45MWe. As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.

Right you are, 160MW thermal 45MW electric, I'm getting too hasty on fact-checking. Still on the small side but perfect for Alaska, especially if your city or town is already piped for steam heating.

NuScale is projecting less than $5,000 cost per KW for these which is comparable to a recent utility sized 2010 capital cost estimate of $5,339/KW. In 2008 Moody's had really spoiled the mood by projecting $7,000/KW as the cost of new nuclear power and warning investors away.

So why is the capital cost of nuclear some 4-5 times the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant (~$1,400/KW)? Aside from the obvious reasons like being dangerous and Atomic.

In 1970-71 Consolidated Edison built the Dresden plant for $146/kW ... still going today like an Energizer Bunny with ~1.7GWe. This is plant was built for ~50 times less than Moody's 2008 cost estimate.

What the hell is going on?

I found no easy answers, but plenty to ponder in Chapter 9 ("Costs of nuclear power plants -- what went wrong?") of The Nuclear Energy Option, a great little book by Bernard Cohen [full text online]. This work is dated [1990] and quaint -- he is bemoaning a plant that cost $3,326/kW in 1986 -- the whiner! But he does a good job describing the NRC practice of "regulatory ratcheting", where standard numeric metrics of safety have been codified, all the tough work is over, and every succeeding generation of regulators gains a round of applause and gets to wear festive party hats if they just plug in new (always higher: click) numbers.

This is an example of what I call "No one ever lost their job" syndrome, a creeping cancer of our society on many fronts. It is a malady that especially affects safety cultures. No one ever lost their job by announcing that things are not quite as safe as they could be, or regulation is strangling essential industries. The NRC has created plug-in metrics like requiring more concrete, more frequent inspections, margins and limits, time-tables and reporting requirements. And heavier fines (announcing a hike in fines works even when there are no infractions or violations, the public imagines this is being done to punish evil corporations who are foaming at the mouth and straining on their leashes this very moment).

Then there is outright abuse and intimidation. The recent yarn, Uneven Enforcement Suspected At [US] Nuclear Power Plants which made my eyeballs pop out on springs when I read it. It seems to say that the NRC is concerned that regulation (by the NRC) might be lacking in some (un-visited) regions for unknown reasons and the NRC is ... crap, no I cannot even summarize it, it's so ridiculous. They are treating better safety record in some plants as something suspicious to be investigated. Then their 'suspicions' are released in a Senate report which the nuke-hysteria press predictably treats as some smoking gun. It should go beyond embarrassment. I feel some one should lose their job over this -- a regulatory agency releasing damaging speculation on an industry on a topic they are supposed to be sure of.

But no one will lose their job, even when they susp

A very current example is the rogue operation in Iraq of CIA contractor Robert Levinson. The White House is quoted in the article as saying "was not a U.S. government employee", which they can do because he was a contractor as opposed to an employee.

You may want to re-read the original AP article about Levinson.
He was "not a U.S. government employee" because at the time of his disappearance, his contract had finished and he was working on spec.

Problem was, Levinson's contract was out of money and, though the CIA was working to authorize more, it had yet to do so.

"I would like to know if I do, in fact, expend my own funds to conduct this meeting, there will be reimbursement sometime in the near future, or, if I should discontinue this, as well as any and all similar projects until renewal time in May," Levinson wrote.

It's a very nuanced position to make and the government should be ashamed for making it, but they're not factually incorrect.

"Six people tested for possible radiation exposure have been released from hospital but remain under detention as suspects in the theft of a truck carrying highly radioactive cobalt-60, officials said Friday. Of the detained men, ages 16 to 38, only the 16-year-old showed signs of radiation exposure and he was in good health

[...] Hidalgo state Health Minister Pedro Luis Noble said earlier Friday the men suffered from skin irritations and dizziness, but that none were in serious condition. Only one was vomiting, a sign of radiation poisoning.

[...] "It's quite an operation and it is in the process of being planned," he said. "It's highly radioactive, so you cannot just go over and pick it up. It's going to take a while to pick it up."

With nothing inhaled or ingested and with proper treatment, even the 16-year old is likely to be fine. So long as the free radicals are mopped up, the infection is cured, the gut bacteria brings out its dead and recovers... and (remote possibility) some bone marrow is transplanted, it is completely survivable.

As to the real chances of this fellow developing a long term cancer or anemia, Marie Curie died in 1934 from radiation induced anemia some 15 years after WWI where she stood at the business end of many mobile X-ray units (invented by her). Some 30 years after she and her husband had stared experimenting with the properties of radioactivity, even hosting "radium lawn parties" at home. The life long exposure Madam Curie received was immeasurably immense, and yet to survive to the age of 66... well, it should put things in perspective about the resilience of the human body AND the remote possibility of fatal cancers.

Much of our data is based on the health effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and those who succumbed soon after. While these poor souls' conditions were very well recorded, it is impossible to accurately gauge the total rad-count received as it was a combination of exposure, inhalation and ingestion, their total dose could have been a magnitude higher than was ascribed to their condition, which leads to over-estimation of radioactive danger.

Chernobyl amazed medical science by the number of people who received intense exposures, and survived.

Madam Curie's husband did not succumb to radiation, he was killed when he was run over by a horse drawn cart. So the moral of the story is, don't go nuts worrying about radiation. Watch out for spooked horses.

While the US Navy's more recent safety record appears much better, one can say the same of most civilian nuclear reactors as well.

Ask the people who have tritium in their water supply about our civilian nuclear reactors.

http://www.ap.org/company/awards/part-ii-aging-nukes

The most recent being this year.

1) don't put yourself in a situation where someone wants a court order for something you have

Like, say, exercising your right to a free press?

Gov't Obtains Wide AP Phone Records in Probe

You do realize that the IRS admitted to targeting Tea Party candidates, right?

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-apologizes-targeting-conservative-groups

Which makes you're whole 'comment' pretty stupid. Because they're exactly like every other government department. Illegally abusing their position of authority.

I think Obama (naively) believed that congress was staffed by reasonable people who wanted to work together for the betterment of society. He "reached across the isle", they took one step back and he fell flat on his face in the middle. Neither side has rushed to help him to his feet.

You should look again -- Obama didn't "reach across the aisle" in any real sense until maybe his second term when he started inviting them to dinners and actually spending time with them. Obama's idea of "reaching across the aisle" in his first term was having them "see the error of their ways" and come over to his side. Seriously, look back and see how the healthcare debates went down. When Obama didn't need the Republicans, he made very little effort to give any credence to any of their suggestions. Just read this story that summarizes Snowe's book: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/snowe-presses-bipartisanship-new-book

She was a reasonably moderate Republican with reasonably moderate-right ideas that Obama simply refused to entertain, simply expecting that she come over to his side and support his bill. It wasn't a discussion or a debate, it was vote buying.

One thing the article didn't mention: the rise of hormones and pharmaceuticals in the water supply, and in the food we eat:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/pharmawater_site/day1_01.html

And there's issue of cattle being given hormones to stimulate growth/milk production; hormones that will be present in the issue we consume. Nobody really understands the ensuing effects on our overall health, as all of this is relatively new. It's speculated that hormones ingested by pregnant women have developmental effects on unborn children. Perhaps both humans and the test animals are seeing a correlative rise in obesity because they are second-or-third generation, after the Great Hormone Floods began...

Obama says phone spying not abused, will continue

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered "appropriate reforms," he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.

In an afternoon news conference, the president acknowledged the domestic spying has troubled Americans and hurt the country's image abroad. But he called it a critical counterterrorism tool.

"I am comfortable that the program currently is not being abused," Obama said. "I am comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, that they would say, 'You know what? These folks are following the law.'"

Because the program remains classified, however, it's impossible for Americans to conduct that analysis beyond the assurances his administration has given.

"Understandably, people would be concerned," the president said. "I would be, too, if I weren't inside the government."

"WTF are they collecting this data for?"

To identify conservatives for "random" IRS audits.

...and non-conservatives as well.

Not that this ever happened under other Presidencies.

when was the last time a major newspaper or network broke a political scandal that wasn't sex.

Do you actually read newspapers, or do you just bitch about them?

Where are they when voter suppression is a fact of life in most of the Southern United states?

Why would I give a rats ass about the Zimmerman trial if I wasn't in that community?

Do you even listen to yourself?

Good response, I have to hand it to you. And you're obviously quite informed. I won't try to address everything you've brought up, but I'll respond to a couple of things:

For the last, I hate the NSA spying programs, but is there any evidence they've specifically went after reporters? I'd love to hear it.

This was a big deal in the news, but it was overshadowed by some of the other stuff going on, not surprised not everyone heard about it. Basically, the justice department obtained months of AP reporters' phone records, a rather huge sweep rather than a targeted investigation, just looking for evidence of leaks. So far, Holder has not been forthcoming about why they did it.

Obama's ATF, at least, was selling the guns to try to track down criminals with an intent to disrupt and arrest them -- not to deliberately support them.

According to them (politicians / liars, but I repeat myself). But, according to some, the real purpose was to supply guns to the largest cartel, allow them to wipe out their rivals, with the theory that a single large cartel could be manipulated better than all the little competing groups. Who to believe? I don't know, but in either case you could claim that there were good intentions involved. But then we know what road is paved with that.

I do, in fact, credit Obama with following up on Iraq and Afghanistan as he said he would (even though I disagree with his decision to escalate / continue the conflict in Afghanistan. But the Middle East strategy is still the same one created during the Bush administration, and so is the domestic spying, secret programs, drug trade, corporate welfare, and other fascist programs, and I condemn him for that, doubly so because he promised MUCH different.

there is a difference between federal law and state law. Murder is not generally considered a federal offense (in one of the civil rights murders it was federal only because it occurred on federal land http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ex-federal-prosecutor-who-led-historic-case-dies)

That is why people entering the country have to say they will not commit a crime while they are here. Any crime they commit is probably only a state issue, but lying on your federal entry form ...

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/sister-wives-family-challenges-utah-bigamy-law

While all states outlaw bigamy, some like Utah have laws that not only prohibit citizens from having more than one marriage license, but also make it illegal to even purport to be married to multiple partners. Utah's bigamy statute even bans unmarried adults from living together and having a sexual relationship.

Well, because of the sequester, they didn't have enough budget ...

Reminds me of after 9/11 when there were so many feds abusing wiretaps they couldn't afford to pay the bills and were getting them shut off.

Wow... I somehow managed to be right without trying.

I addition, the linked article is 2009 - which is closer to the present day than to 9/11.
Also, the linked news piece is AP and is a "dry jurno style" - I (rhetorically) wonder why their present and sudden "emotionally attachment" to the issue?

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-sweet-tooth-survive

Actually, there are shorter cycles as well, kind of like harmonics.

Interesting comment you made there about harmonics.

Harmonics can be deadly: Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse "Gallopin' Gertie"

So, at the moment the Obama administration has the following scandals brewing:

Justice Department: Gov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe
IRS: The IRS’s Tea-Party Targeting
State Department and Office of President: The Benghazi Deception

There are a few other things brewing in the background as well.

It might be a hot summer for the Obama administration regardless of the weather.