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This was covered yesterday on NPR Radio.

Morning Edition July 2, 2007 Some 62 illegal immigrants in Beardstown, Ill., who worked for a company that cleans a pork processing plant, are preparing for deportation following an immigration raid. One family anticipated problems and has a house waiting in Mexico. Illegal Immigrants Anticipate More Raids

Do you want to hear a recital of all the stories like this that can be found in a one-minute search through Google?

As the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is primarily a law enforcement agency. In addition to the core law enforcement occupations, there are also hundreds of professional and administrative functions that support the ICE mission. ICE has approximately 15,000 employees working in 400 offices nationwide and over 50 locations internationally. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Why does it always surprise the Geek that law enforcement multi-tasks? That the game of life hasn't dealt him a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card?

You've got your pronouns/inventors mixed up. Dean Kamen's Segway was known as "It." "They" is the legal name of the guy that invented ground-effect lighting and sunglasses with shades over them.

I remember him from an NPR interview.

I agree, especially when there are people who are sabotaging flight equipment! Who would do that and why??

Here is a link to the story.

They have a bit more relaxed laws when it comes to family planing than they did, but forced abortion all the way up to 9th month.... That is MADNESS no mater what your stand is on the matter of abortion...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=9766870
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-6-22/43051.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IE31Ad01.html

Boikot the Beijing Olympics you say? We'll I'm for sure not buying anything from any one calling them self an official sponsor of the 2008 games....

http://www.npr.org/about/growth.html

"The audience for NPR programming has doubled in the last ten years to 26 million weekly listeners."

They still play classical around here tho.

Why would cats fund something that nature has already invented? ;)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=9560048

"But scientists have recently discovered that sometimes the main actor is actually a tiny parasite in the rat's brain that makes the normally fearful rat think "oh how nice" when it smells a cat."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=11989055

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4660781

Basically, the students aren't doing any better with the laptops.

some of these people are even telling the press exactly how to "anonymously" describe them: Cheney, for example, always demands to be quoted as "a senior Bush administration official."

The third source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity,

Sure would be nice if the US Press Core grew a pair. Everywhere else in the world, officials put their name to their comments because the press won't print comments without any name; there's no accountability, so people have no incentive to tell the truth, so there's no point in printing the comments. I'm so fed up with US politicians and officials covering their asses with "anonymous" comments, and the press core lapping it up.

For chrissakes, some of these people are even telling the press exactly how to "anonymously" describe them: Cheney, for example, always demands to be quoted as "a senior Bush administration official."

Yes, absolutely true.

Audio here from Ted Koppel on the same subject today.

But seriously, does this surprise anyone? At all? Evil, yes, but it's just more of the same and there's not a damned thing anyone is going to do about it. Welcome to democracy in the US. Defeat all that doesn't equal more power and money for those that have an abundance already. Gotta love right wing politics dontchya!

*grumble grumble*

My understanding of it is that his treatment was a little different.

• Satcher got slapped for advocating public policy, namely allowing drug addicts to exchange their used hypodermic needles for clean ones, no questions asked, at public health clinics.
• Elders got slapped, and eventually fired, for advocating a certain manner of sex education, a particularly outlandish one (and quite unnecessary).
• I heard Carmona on the radio yesterday, and he was told that he was forbidden from even appearing at events. He was not advocating allowing fetal stem cell research, he just wanted to hold "town hall meetings" where he explained what a fetal stem cell was, and he was still forbidden. Particularly telling, Carmona was forbidden to appear and give a speech at the Special Olympics, because doing a favor for the Special Olympics was considered unallowable, on account of the fact that the Kennedys are strong supporters of it.

It's all in his interview, and the White House doesn't deny a word of it.

• Malaria and other diseases
• heatwave deaths
• water quality

The CIA asked for the investigation, the DOJ got Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to do the investigation. They (the CIA) also were a bit miffed by the outing of not just their agent but the cover company and all their contacts.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1 052798,00.html

See: Sept. 28, 2003: CIA Director George J. Tenet calls on the Justice Department to investigate the leak. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4764919

Really? No mention of it at all on their press releases:

http://www.npr.org/about/press/

I would expect that if they were really doing anything about it, they'd, oh, MENTION IT.

Again, given NPR's behavior against low-power FM stations, I'd be amazed if they did anything to help. They've demonstrated that they have no intention of helping small broadcasters - quite the opposite.

Actually, on the NPR site
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=11382930

"National Public Radio, on behalf of its member stations, have also asked the Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., for an emergency stay of the Copyright Royalty Board's decision".

Very interesting take on a comparison between the LA of Bladerunner and the current LA.

Very interesting take on a comparison between the LA of Bladerunner and the current LA.

Actually, Microsoft is a supporter of Net Neutrality.

Manned space flight is an entertainment issue, and as such gets the public attention and money.

A point trenchantly made on the Simpsons -- what? 15 years ago? -- when Homer went into space. In rod we trust.

The failings of NASA are curmudgeonly summarized by Gregg Easterbrook in this Wired article:

How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)

Or if you'd rather have a break from reading, listen to his NPR radio interview (and the NASA's chiefs response, if you want to end up even more pissed off than Easterbrook.)

Easterbrook is more concerned with the crappy Motel 6 we're committed to building on the moon. But members of the Society for the Preservation of Legislative Language Protecting Missions to Mars just see that as a halfway house to Mars anyway.

I'm on Easterbrook's side here. Leave Mars for Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-half century and get to the real science.

Bush has certainly done worse than publicly bite the heads off kittens. He has killed more than 650,000 Iraqis in a very public scheme to restrict the flow of oil from Iraq, and thus cause oil prices to rise. (Saddam Hussein was selling oil by trucking it through Turkey. Iraq has 20% of the known reserves of oil.)

The truth is much, much worse than any one person can document. But I tried to write a summary: George W. Bush comedy and tragedy.

I'm pretty sure that Tuvalu thinks that warmer won't be better.

to me it seems pretty easy to stimulate a bare slice of brain (which uses electricity to transmit signals) with any kind of electromagnetic field, RF or no. A) those are both in vitro studies. where are the in vivo studies? B) How much of that RF is absorbed by the skin, muscle, bone, and non-hippocampus brain tissue? i don't buy it without better tests and methods.

(-1 offtopic) off the subject, but on the subject of wacky health concerns- today i heard an interview on NPR where people think a 25 microgram dose of mercury, or some similar amount, is causing autism. and they just won't accept that the cause might be something else. sure, mercury is poisonous. oxygen and water are poisonous too, in the right quantities. but 25mcg of mercury? how many times that have we all absorbed by being in the same room as a broken fluorescent light bulb? or my cousin, who broke a mercury thermometer by biting it?

According to this lady, most credit card agreements are deliberately obfuscated, but actually boil down to a very simple statement: "As long as you use our card, we're allowed to impose any interest rate or fee we choose; any claim you think we've made to the contrary is null and void."

You read your credit card agreements? And understand them? Than you're smarter than most lawyers.

Heck, you probably don't read documentation either. You still have that extra set of screws left over from when you built that bicycle that rattles kind of funny?

The two parties are working together to make sure no one else gets in and spoils their "party". For example, there is an excellent article describing how the presidential "debates" are controlled to prevent any other parties from gaining traction. They realized that Ross Perot got 90% of his support after the debates, so they created a system to prevent any other parties from being able to join by raising the bar high enough. The "Commission on Presidential Debates" which runs the debates, is totally run by the two parties. In the article, it quotes Walter Cronkite as calling the CPD an "unconscionable fraud".

The "debates" are also very carefully controlled (according to the article) of presenting the appearance of being a debate without actually being a debate, so as to pose no danger to the candidates, and so that important issues can be avoided.

Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate and member of the Republican party, said recently on the Daily Show that he is only a Republican because he couldn't get elected if he were a member of another party. He wrote an essay on how the two-party system disenfranchises voters.

To be fair, there are some great news outlets here in the US. The top three in my mind would be NPR (Morning Edition and All Things Considered), The Christian Science Monitor (ignore the name... it is a great paper for sectarians), and the New York Times. These stack up nicely to any new source I have seen in my travels. The average news source in other parts of the world are (on average) better than what most americans pay attention to, but we still do have great news organizations (here and there).

And in our defense, I do hear the same silliness from a lot of European new sources. I just had a lot of conversations with Austrian and Germans, and they thought that the US was getting a lot of free oil from Iraq (they are not even producing enough for themselves at this point), and that the 9/11 hit on the Pentagon was by a cruise missile.

You could be right though he seems to be at pains to say that NASA's job is to get good data not to do anything about the data. Engineers work to tolerances rather than seeking to quantify uncertainties. In a way, that means engineers can ignore a whole slew of data. If you've built a levy system to withstand catagory three storms, it is someone elses problem if catagory 4 storms are in the cards. James Hansen's criticism http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=10577221 that Griffin is uninformed could fit more with the engineer's penchant for ingnoring things that don't affects specs than with the servility you imply. In that case, one wants to look at the appointing official's intentions rather than blame the character of the appointee.

To anyone who's got this far without having downloaded the mp3, go listen to it! It is actually quite interesting. And to anyone who's ever been lectured by Turok, don't worry, he isn't that bad when he's actually interested in what he's talking about...

For the lazy

We also can't forget Rosalind Franklin - the "Dark Lady" of DNA, who first pohotographed the DNA molecule.

FrankNputer asked: Hmm...I wonder what happens when you put your drink on the MS table?

Wow, really? I thought he was a big supporter of the poor.

If he's out there killing poor people, I better not vote for the guy after all.

Even selling used CDs hasn't come under fire. There are plenty of record stores that buy and sell CDs.

Reminds me of hearing this yesterday.

Yes, NPR the source that brought us this tidbit.

NPR covered some of the human aspects of the gold farming story a while ago. Audio Link for your listening pleasure.

12 hours a day playing Warcraft, getting beaten up by higher level players. It's sounds like a pretty ugly life.

You mean something like the Pink Martini version of Que Sera Sera? That is an awesome and really friggin' eerie tune done that way.

I'll ignorantly assume, you or your parents can afford reconnection fees.

Don't get me wrong, but it's not like Stanford is known for standing up for high principle.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=6165657

If a monkey throws its crap at you once, then most likely it's going to do it again.

What sort of a brain-dead moron would actually fall for spam? There can't be many people that dumb surely?(I hope....)

Problem is, McKinney never said it.

That's right. The "quote" from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin' made up.

Just in time for a born again Christian to be reincarnated in a born again universe?

Dude--he made $646.6 MILLION dollars last year *AND* he probably won't be paying any of it back or going to jail for that back-dating thing.

He's walking on sunshine.

According to NPR, there are 16 US spy agencies.