View Articles by Category
Locate an Article by Date
Source: http://tmcaznews.com/2013/02/06/allergic-rhinitis/
lotto Illinois Lottery texas lottery Dell Levis Fireman Ed Allegiant Air
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Congress considers putting limits on drone strikes
FILE - This Oct. 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. A Justice Department document says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans. (AP Photo/Muhammad ud-Deen, File)
FILE - This Oct. 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. A Justice Department document says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans. (AP Photo/Muhammad ud-Deen, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Uncomfortable with the Obama administration's use of deadly drones, a growing number in Congress is looking to limit America's authority to kill suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens. The Democratic-led outcry was emboldened by the revelation in a newly surfaced Justice Department memo that shows drones can strike against a wider range of threats, with less evidence, than previously believed.
The drone program, which has been used from Pakistan across the Middle East and into North Africa to find and kill an unknown number of suspected terrorists, is expected to be a top topic of debate when the Senate Intelligence Committee grills John Brennan, the White House's pick for CIA chief, at a hearing Thursday.
The White House on Tuesday defended its lethal drone program by citing the very laws that some in Congress once believed were appropriate in the years immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks but now think may be too broad.
"It has to be in the agenda of this Congress to reconsider the scope of action of drones and use of deadly force by the United States around the world because the original authorization of use of force, I think, is being strained to its limits," Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said in a recent interview.
Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said Tuesday that "it deserves a serious look at how we make the decisions in government to take out, kill, eliminate, whatever word you want to use, not just American citizens but other citizens as well."
Hoyer added: "We ought to carefully review our policies as a country."
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee likely will hold hearings on U.S. drone policy, an aide said Tuesday, and Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, both have quietly expressed concerns about the deadly operations. And earlier this week, a group of 11 Democratic and Republican senators urged President Barack Obama to release a classified Justice Department legal opinion justifying when U.S. counterterror missions, including drone strikes, can be used to kill American citizens abroad.
Without those documents, it's impossible for Congress and the public to decide "whether this authority has been properly defined, and whether the president's power to deliberately kill Americans is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards," the senators wrote.
It was a repeated request after receiving last June an unclassified Justice Department memo, which fell short of giving the senators all the information they requested.
First detailed publicly by NBC News late Monday, the memo for the first time outlines the Obama administration's decision to kill al-Qaida terror suspects without any evidence that specific and imminent plots are being planned against the United States.
"The threat posed by al-Qaida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat," concluded the document.
The memo was immediately decried by civil liberties groups as "flawed" and "profoundly disturbing" ? especially in light of 2011 U.S. drone strikes in Yemen that killed three American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old-son and Samir Khan. Al-Awlaki was linked to the planning and execution of several attacks targeting U.S. and Western interests, including the attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 and the plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010. His son was killed in a separate strike on a suspected al-Qaida den. Khan was an al-Qaida propagandist.
White House spokesman Jay Carney, echoing comments Brennan made in a speech last April, called the strikes legal, ethical and wise and said they are covered by a law that Congress approved allowing the use of military force against al-Qaida.
"And certainly, under that authority, the president acts in the United States' interest to protect the United States and its citizens from al-Qaida," Carney said Tuesday.
"It is a matter of fact that Congress authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida," Carney said. "It is a matter of fact that al-Qaida is in a state of war against us and that senior leaders, operational leaders of al-Qaida are continually plotting to attack the United States, plotting to kill American citizens as they did most horrifically on September 11th of 2001."
Three days after 9/11, Congress approved a law authorizing the military to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against al-Qaida and other groups believed to be helping or harboring the global terror network, including the use of drone strikes. In the decade since the attacks, U.S. intelligence officials say, al-Qaida has splintered into a number of affiliates and allied sympathizers. That means the current laws could allow military force against thousands of extremists across the Mideast and North Africa who have limited or no ability to strike the United States.
Currently, both the CIA and the U.S. military are authorized to remotely pilot unmanned, missile-carrying drones against terror suspects. It's unknown exactly how many strikes have been carried out, but experts say that drone attacks in Pakistan are conducted by the CIA, while those in Yemen and Somalia, for example, are by military forces.
The drones have strained diplomacy between the U.S. and the nations where the strikes are carried out, as civilians have been killed alongside the targeted terrorists, even though most nations have given Washington at least tacit agreement to carry out the attacks.
A Middle Eastern diplomat said that in Yemen, for example, an uptick of U.S. drone strikes last month have killed dozens of people and upset the local public, leading some leaders in Sanaa to reconsider how often they should be used. The diplomat spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity to avoid political retribution from the Obama administration.
The Pentagon is also considering basing surveillance drones in Niger to monitor on burgeoning extremist violence in North Africa, but it's not clear if they will be armed. Scaling back the use of drones also would hamper war plans in Afghanistan after combat troops are scheduled to withdraw in 2014. Drones represent a major thrust of the post-troops campaign to help the limited number of special forces units that remain there keep the Taliban from regrouping.
Brennan, who currently serves as the White House counterterrorism czar, has signaled he is prepared to turn the CIA from carrying out lethal drone strikes and hand over those missions to the U.S. military. Sen. Ron Wyden, a senior Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence panel, declared himself unsatisfied Tuesday with the Justice memo and said he will press Brennan at the confirmation hearing about the administration's current policy.
The drone debate puts Obama ? himself a former civil rights lawyer ? in the awkward position of carrying out lethal attacks in secret and bucking his political allies in the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers were incensed by the refusal of the Republican administration of President George W. Bush to hand over classified Justice Department opinions justifying the use of waterboarding, the harsh interrogation tactic that critics call a form of torture. Obama repudiated those methods ? and released those opinions ? when he took office in 2009. The use of drones proved to have no political cost to Obama in his re-election campaign.
House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., defended the use of deadly drones, calling it "a lawful act of national self-defense."
"When an individual has joined al-Qaida ? the organization responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans ? and actively plots future attacks against U.S. citizens, soldiers, and interests around the world, the U.S. government has both the authority and the obligation to defend the country against that threat," Rogers said in a statement.
But Rep. Keith Ellison, said the new Justice memo could spur lawmakers into taking a fresh look at deadly drones, and what he called an outdated policy guiding them.
"We are sort of running on the steam that we acquired right after our country was attacked in the most horrific act of terror in U.S. history," said Ellison, D-Minn. "We have learned much since 9/11, and now it's time to take a more sober look at where we should be with use of force."
__
Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP
Associated Pressjohn kerry eastbay Samantha Steele Dec 21 2012 doomsday Is The World Going To End Mayans
The last big bump before a supernova explodes
Feb. 6, 2013 ? An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars -- specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions.
Digging through the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) data archive housed at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), astronomers have found the first causal evidence that these massive stars shed huge amounts of material in a "penultimate outburst" before final detonation as supernovae.
A focused search for Type IIn SN precursor bursts, conducted by Eran Ofek of Israel's Weizmann Institute and the PTF team, led to this finding. Their results were published in the February 7, 2013 issue of Nature. PTF is an international collaboration that brings together researchers, universities, observatories and Berkeley Lab to hunt for supernovae and other astronomical objects.
The Causal Link
Massive stars -- somewhere between eight and 100 times the mass of our Sun -- spend much of their lives fusing hydrogen (the lightest element) into increasingly heavier elements, like helium, oxygen, carbon and so on. In the end, there is almost nothing left but an iron core. Eventually, that core collapses, releasing a tremendous amount of energy as neutrinos, magnetic fields and shock waves and destroying the star in the process. From Earth, this explosive event is observed as a supernova. If astronomers detect hydrogen, the event is classified as a Type II supernova. And if the hydrogen-emission line is narrow, the event is classified as a Type IIn (for "narrow").
In the case of Type IIn events, scientists suspected that the narrow emission line occurs as light from the event passes through a thin sphere of hydrogen that was already surrounding the star before it went supernova. Some believed that the dying star might have shed this shell of material before it self-destructed, but until recently there was no evidence to link such an outburst to an actual supernova.
That's where PTF comes in. For almost four years, the PTF team has relied on a robotic telescope mounted on the Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin Telescope in Southern California to scan the sky nightly. As soon as observations were taken, the data traveled more than 400 miles to NERSC -- via the National Science Foundation's High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network and the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) -- where computers running software called the Real-Time Transient Detection Pipeline screened the data and identified events for astronomers to follow up on. NERSC also archived this data and allowed collaborators to access it over the Internet through a web-based science gateway, called DeepSky.
On August 25, 2010 the PTF pipeline detected a Type IIn supernova half a billion light years away in the constellation Hercules. Shortly after, Ofek led a search of previous PTF scans of the same stellar neighborhood -- using a high-quality pipeline developed by Mark Sullivan, of the University of Southampton -- and found the supernova's likely precursor, a massive variable star that had shed a huge amount of mass only 40 days before the supernova was detected. They labeled the event, SN 2010mc.
"After NERSC tools found SN 2010mc, we went back through the archives and found evidence of a previous outburst in the same location and knew that it blew some material out of the star before the final supernova," says Brad Cenko, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the paper. "We've seen evidence of this happening before, but there have been only one or two cases where we've been able to conclusively say when the previous outburst happened."
Ofek and the PTF team developed a scenario and tested it against competing theoretical ideas, using evidence from several sky surveys that were triggered to observe SN 2010mc once it was detected by the NERSC pipeline. They concluded that the "penultimate outburst" had blown off a hundredth of a solar mass in a shell expanding 2,000 kilometers per second, already 7 billion kilometers away from the supernova when it exploded. Earlier ejecta were detected 10 billion kilometers away, having slowed to a hundred kilometers per second.
After the supernova explosion, high-velocity ejecta passing through shells of earlier debris left a record of varying brightness and spectral features. The observations pointed to the most likely theoretical model of what happened: turbulence-excited gravity waves drove successive episodes of mass loss, finally culminating in the collapse and explosion of the core. Because the stellar outburst occurred very shortly before the supernova, the astronomers suspected that the events were causally linked. Cenko notes that this could have important implications for what processes trigger a supernova.
"I think it is a very interesting object we found, and the way we do our survey and the search at NERSC made it something we were in the unique position to find," says Peter Nugent, a Berkeley Lab senior staff scientist and member of the PTF collaboration.
The Future
Once the team found SN 2010mc's precursor, the team used Sullivan's pipeline to sift through stellar neighborhoods in the PTF archival data where other Type IIn supernovae had previously been detected. According to Nugent, this exercise helped the team identify several other similar cases.
"Although the PTF project is no longer collecting data every night, we are still relying on NERSC resources to sift through our archival data," says Nugent. "This recent discovery shows us that there is still a lot that we can learn from the archival data at NERSC, and gives us some insights into how we may design future experiments to further investigate these events."
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- E. O. Ofek, M. Sullivan, S. B. Cenko, M. M. Kasliwal, A. Gal-Yam, S. R. Kulkarni, I. Arcavi, L. Bildsten, J. S. Bloom, A. Horesh, D. A. Howell, A. V. Filippenko, R. Laher, D. Murray, E. Nakar, P. E. Nugent, J. M. Silverman, N. J. Shaviv, J. Surace, O. Yaron. An outburst from a massive star 40?days before a supernova explosion. Nature, 2013; 494 (7435): 65 DOI: 10.1038/nature11877
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/ON3XsLCjQKs/130206131124.htm
the misfits hook troy miracle andy whitfield kennedy demi moore
Green Blog: Study Slams Nuclear Waste Practices at Hanford
Management and disposal of radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State, marred by problems for more than two decades, is the focus of a harsh new assessment by the Government Accountability Office.
?By just about any definition,? the auditing agency says, ?Hanford has not been a well-planned, well-managed or well-executed major capital construction project.?
Hanford opened in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and operated almost continuously through 1987 as the country?s largest manufacturer of weapons-grade plutonium. Left behind at the 586-square-mile site are 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste in aged and corroded underground storage tanks.
In 1989, the Department of Energy assumed responsibility for safely disposing of this waste, which threatens to leak into the bordering Columbia River and affect downstream industry, habitat and human health.
After attempting and abandoning three cleanup plans, the Energy Department in 2000 awarded a management contract to Bechtel National. The core of the project is a waste treatment and immobilization plant consisting of three buildings: a single pretreatment facility to sort high-radioactivity waste from the low-radioactivity kind and separate vitrification plants for each stream in which the waste will be combined with molten glass and then cooled for stable storage.
Plant operations under Bechtel were initially scheduled to begin by 2011 with total projected costs of $4.3 billion. The budget has since swollen to an estimated $13.4 billion, and the plant?s opening has been delayed until 2019. Many see this revised timeline as hopelessly, even recklessly, optimistic.
Such delays, escalating costs and daunting technical challenges ?raise troubling questions as to whether this project can be constructed and operated successfully,? the audit warns. It presents a long list of concerns about the operation, from a negligent safety culture onsite to ineffective monetary incentives for progress.
The Government Accountability Office recommended a halt to construction on the core facility until the design meets nuclear industry guidelines, a new incentive structure to avoid premature reward payments, and an investigation into potentially erroneous payments.
Reports on Hanford from the G.A.O. in 2006 and 2009 expressed many of the same concerns, a pattern that raised red flags for those involved in the audit.
Of particular concern has been the use of a ?design-build? protocol, in which construction is carried out as the design unfolds. Whereas standard nuclear guidelines call for designs to be at least 90 percent complete before breaking ground, Hanford?s construction is 55 percent complete with only 80 percent of the facility designed.
This approach has ?led to significant cost increases and schedule delays? while also threatening the plant?s ability to operate safely once completed, the report said.
Some officials involved in the project cast its unparalleled complexity rather than mismanagement as the source of the setbacks. In his resignation letter last week, the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, described Hanford as ?the most complex and largest nuclear project in history.?
One problem identified in the latest audit is that over 40 years of plutonium production involving many different processes, little priority was given to keeping a detailed waste inventory. As a result, engineers now face a severe dearth of information about the waste contained in each of the 177 underground tanks ? knowledge essential to separation of the waste streams.
Nor is sampling the waste a straightforward operation. Most tanks contains many waste products that tend to separate as oil and water do, meaning that a sample from one part of a tank indicates little about its overall contents.
What is more, the pretreatment plant requires ?black cell? technologies, so called because once the plant is put into operation the high levels of radioactivity will preclude maintenance from taking place. These must operate continuously and flawlessly for up to 40 years.
Similar technologies are being installed at the Sellafield nuclear cleanup site in England, which was the subject of a similarly critical report published on Monday by the British Parliament. Sellafield has so far cost the British government $106 billion, with ?no indication of when that cost will stop rising,? according to Margaret Hodge, the chairwoman of the Committee of Public Accounts.
Yet another complication for Hanford is the shelving of the Energy Department?s plan for a geological waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, where the highly radioactive waste was to have been stored. This waste must therefore remain onsite.
In light of these challenges, Dr. Chu assembled a team of eight preeminent nuclear advisers on the issue. He wrote in his resignation letter that their technical assistance over the past six months could ?avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs over the coming decades.?
But that view is not widely shared. Gary Brunson, the Energy Department?s director of engineering for the treatment plant until his own resignation last month, recommended in a memo memo to Dr. Chu in December that construction should ?be stopped to avoid further nuclear safety compromises and substantial rework.?
In an earlier memo, Mr. Brunson cited 34 actions and technical issues to argue that Bechtel ?is not competent? to follow through as the design authority at Hanford.
After reviewing a draft of the report, the Department of Energy supported many of its conclusions and provided a four-page letter detailing work either planned or under way that addresses many of the outstanding challenges.
Just last month, after a brief hiatus, construction resumed.
betty white ed reed football schedule jo paterno dead south carolina tuskegee airmen mike james
Monday, February 4, 2013
THE RESET: March 1 spending cuts now seem likely
President Barack Obama waves as he prepares to board Air Force One before his departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Monday, Feb., 4, 2013, enroute to Minnesota. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
President Barack Obama waves as he prepares to board Air Force One before his departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Monday, Feb., 4, 2013, enroute to Minnesota. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta speaks to a person on the field before the NFL Super Bowl XLVII football game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens, Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gene Puskar)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., speaks with reporters after a weekly Democratic strategy session, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
A month has passed since Congress and President Barack Obama narrowly averted a New Year's "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes and spending cuts. Another fiscal crisis is less than a month away. But while the earlier cliff drew mounting levels of fear and panic, the massive spending cuts due March 1 are being viewed with resignation by many lawmakers.
There no longer seems much doubt that the spending cuts, known in the nation's capital as "the sequester," will occur in some form.
The sides seem too far apart to find much common ground in a budget deal. So it's now mostly a matter of how ? and if ? the formula can be modified to safeguard national defense and/or attach some higher taxes.
"There is no doubt we need additional revenue, coupled with smart spending reductions, in order to bring down our deficit," Obama told CBS in a pre-Super Bowl interview Sunday.
He would close loopholes enjoyed mostly by the wealthy rather than further increase tax rates.
In a similar vein, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats "without question" will demand more tax revenue if any attempt is made to alter the spending-cut formula. "There are a lot of tax loopholes that should be closed," he told ABC.
Many GOP lawmakers see the cuts as the surest way to reduce federal spending ? but oppose pairing them with higher taxes.
The cuts are portrayed as across-the-board but would fall hardest on military programs since the sequester formula generally exempts "entitlement" payments such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and veterans' benefits.
They would follow an earlier round of deep Pentagon spending cuts.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta argues it would be "shameful and irresponsible" for Congress to allow mandatory cuts that he says could jeopardize U.S. readiness. "In a world of responsible politics, it would not happen."
Obama agreed: "Washington cannot continually operate under a cloud of crisis."
___
Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum
Associated Pressextreme makeover home edition coachella 2012 constitution day constitution day dolly parton stephen colbert running for president
Suicide bomber, gunmen kill 33 in Iraq's Kirkuk
KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide bomber driving a car and gunmen disguised as police killed at least 33 people in Iraq's Kirkuk on Sunday when they tried to storm a city police headquarters, police sources said.
Kirkuk, a religiously and ethnically mixed area of Arabs, Kurds and Turkman, is at the heart of a dispute over oil and land between Baghdad's central government and the autonomous Kurdistan enclave in the north.
The Sunday morning blast wounded at least 70 more people and police said there were still bodies trapped under the collapsed debris of buildings after the attack in Kirkuk, 170 km (105 miles) north of the capital Baghdad.
"Two gunmen wearing explosive vests tried to storm into the Kirkuk police directorate, but guards at the main guard engaged them and killed them," a police source inside the compound said.
Several armed groups are active in Kirkuk, and Sunni Islamist insurgents tied to al Qaeda often attack security forces in an attempt to undermine Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and stoke sectarian tensions.
Last month a suicide bomber disguised as a mourner killed at least 26 at a funeral at Shi'ite mosque in another city near Kirkuk, and days earlier a suicide bomber driving a truck killed 25 in an attack on a political party headquarters in Kirkuk.
(Reporting by Baghdad staff, writing by Patrick Markey)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-bomber-gunmen-hit-police-hq-iraqs-kirkuk-073241488.html
woody guthrie benson henderson 2012 dunk contest edgar vs henderson berkshire hathaway ufc 144 james jones
Gusts Of Popular Feeling: The Imjin River hockey game recreation
As I mentioned the other day, today the Imjin River hockey games involving Canadian troops during the Korean War were recreated at City Hall. MBC did a report which has video footage of the game which I'd never seen before. Yonhap took some photos, including a few which compared today's scenes to those of the past:
I had a chance to see the photo exhibition at the Canadian Embassy the other day and was able to read the captions for the photos, which revealed something amusing about the one below. The soldiers in it are actually crawling onto the ice, because it's a game between Australian and New Zealand soldiers - who don't know how to skate:
?Meanwhile, in Gangneung today, there was a demonstration of floor hockey in connection with the Special Olympics (with the Yonhap article titled "Floor Hockey is Fun").
I had a chance to see the photo exhibition at the Canadian Embassy the other day and was able to read the captions for the photos, which revealed something amusing about the one below. The soldiers in it are actually crawling onto the ice, because it's a game between Australian and New Zealand soldiers - who don't know how to skate:
?Meanwhile, in Gangneung today, there was a demonstration of floor hockey in connection with the Special Olympics (with the Yonhap article titled "Floor Hockey is Fun").
Source: http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-imjin-river-hockey-game-recreation.html
Psy fergie minnesota vikings looper New Years Eve new years washington redskins
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)