“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” —U.S. senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall
There's a sign tacked to the tree where Hastings crashed that night, reading, “This was not an accident.” Taken down several times, it always gets put back up. Another sign says, “Didn't have to know you to know the truth of what happened.”
After the Fourth of July, someone gathered up about 30 mini American flags and planted them around the memorial site.
Syria: Syrian opposition elements claim that a Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the outskirts of Damascus killed hundreds up to 1,000 people. The Syrian government denied such an attack took place and claimed the opposition fabricated the allegations and the video to hide its recent losses.
Comment: As yet there is no independent, direct evidence of the attack. The videos posted to the web were done by amateurs. One shows rows of what appear to be wrapped corpses, but the upright people in the video are not wearing protective gear. No decontamination equipment or measures are evident. One man is shown walking through a makeshift morgue of wrapped bodies that supposedly are contaminated with chemical agents. His only protection is a light surgical mask. None of it can be confirmed.
A major concern is the timing. The UN chemical investigation team is in Damascus with the permission of the Asad government. The opposition has a strong interest in attracting the attention of the UN tea, or any potential outside source of assistance, any way it can.
On the other hand, it is hard to credit the opposition's allegations because it means that the Syrians used chemical weapons during the investigation by the UN team, when government forces are inflicting setbacks on the opposition. That contention is not credible.
5.0 out of 5 starsA unique and timely integrative overview with many original insights, August 22, 2013
I received this book as a gift, and am glad that I did as I normally would not have noticed it, bought it, or reviewed it. I hope my review will inspire others to buy the book, and if not, provide a summary of some of the highlights that I consider quite timely, original, and useful.
This is a manifesto of sorts, on CRITICAL INFORMATION, or stated another way, on public decision-support needs and the urgency of restoring both integrity (tell the truth) and holistic soundness (report on everything, and on the cause and effect cost and consequences of everything in relation to everything). Of course modern media fails this test, and the author should be credited with providing a manifesto and high-level handbook of how we might proceed.
Kyodo reports that 300 tons of radioactive water have leaked from a 1,000 ton tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. That led Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority to consider raising the incident from a Level 1 nuclear event to a Level 3 (a “serious incident” with radioactive exposure 10 times the limit for workers) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the first time an incident has been serious enough to be reported on the INES scale. The most extreme nuclear events on the scale are considered Level 7, a level only reached by Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl.
The latest incident is the worst (at least, so far) of a long list of mishaps this month in the cooling system, from rats chewing through exposed wires causing a blackout of the cooling system to Tepco, the company in charge of the cleanup, failing to stop leaks of contaminated water from flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Earlier this month Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to assist Tepco with the cleanup, not that it seems to be helping yet.
Tokyo (CNN) — The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has said they need help from outside Japan to stabilize and safely decommission damaged reactors at the facility.
This follows the news that regulators are poised to declare a fresh toxic water leak at Fukushima a level 3 “serious incident,” the gravest warning since the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami that sent three reactors into meltdown.
Changes in the news industry are making headlines and according to New York University professor and author Clay Shirky, it might be time to stop the presses.
“The newspaper model is going away, and there is no obvious single replacement for it,” says Shirky.
When it comes to what’s in newspapers today, Shirky says it’s not just the news format that is changing – it’s the origin of news contents. In the digital age, people are able to choose their own news rather than having journalists and editors select it for them and similarly, anyone, can report on the news that they see by posting it on social networks.
So when anyone can report on news and hand-select what stories and topics they want to learn about, what does that do to the conventional news machine?
Clay Shirky
In short, Shirky says it forces it to upgrade, not disappear.
“It took decades from the invention of the penny press, the first popular newspaper in the 1830s, for the kind of idea of what would constitute the news and how we would treat certain stories to kind of get worked out,” he says. “We’re far, far from that yet on the Internet with citizen journalism.”
How do you get your news? Here more about how your news contributions and selections are shaping the future of what is news from Clay Shirky in his interview, “The End of Newspapers and the Future of News.”
Redox says that it plans to bring to market a fuel cell that is about one-tenth the size and one-tenth the cost of currently commercial fuel cells by 2014.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The breakthrough solid oxide fuel cell technology is the brainchild of Eric Wachsman, the director of the University of Maryland’s Energy Research Center.
Redox says that it will provide safe, efficient, reliable, uninterrupted power, on–site and optionally off the grid, at a price competitive with current energy sources.
