tagged w/ The New York Times
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Apple the leader in innovation, technology, and the creation of Chinese sweat shops..
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”Apple the leader in innovation, technology, and the creation of Chinese sweat shops..... more
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By HIROKO TABUCHI and MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 4, 2011
TOKYO — At least 45 tons of highly radioactive water have leaked from a purification facility at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, and some of it may have reached the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator said Sunday.
Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said.
The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.
The trouble on Sunday came in two stages, a Tepco statement said. In the morning, utility workers found that radioactive water was pooling in a catchment next to a purification device; the system was switched off, and the leak appeared to stop. But the company said it later discovered that leaked water was escaping, possibly through cracks in the catchment’s concrete wall, and was reaching an external gutter.
In all, as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the facility, according to a report in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun that cited Tepco officials.
The company said that the water had about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level set by the government, but appeared to have already been cleaned of radioactive cesium before leaking out. Both elements are readily absorbed by living tissue and can greatly increase the risk of developing cancer.
Tepco said a check on Saturday had found no sign of the leak, suggesting that it began Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The company said it was exploring ways to stop any more water from escaping.
Since the disaster in March, workers have been struggling to cool the stricken plant’s reactors by flooding them with water, which is contaminated with radioactivity in the process and becomes a problem of its own.
Tepco installed a new circulatory cooling system in September with filters that decontaminate and recycle the cooling water. But the company acknowledges that some water has already leaked into the ocean, and thousands of tons of water remain in the flooded basements of the plant’s reactor buildings.
The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimates that between March and mid-July, the amount of radioactive cesium 137 that had leaked into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi plant amounted to 27.1 petabecquerels, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A becquerel is a frequently used measure of radiation, and a petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.)
http://www.thehindu.com/multimedia/dynamic/00856/JAPAN_INSIDE_FUKUSH_856341f.jpgBy HIROKO TABUCHI and MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 4, 2011
TOKYO — At... more
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Audio interview (and transcription) with Washington Post reporter Philip Shenon, who discusses his 9/11 book, The Commission. http://www.mrmedia.com/?p=375Audio interview (and transcription) with Washington Post reporter Philip Shenon, who... more
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The New York Times...
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November 25, 2011
Tom Wicker, Times Journalist, Dies at 85
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
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PART ONE...
Tom Wicker, one of postwar America’s most distinguished journalists, who wrote 20 books, covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for The New York Times and became the paper’s Washington bureau chief and an iconoclastic political columnist for 25 years, died on Friday at his home near Rochester, Vt. He was 85.
The cause was apparently a heart attack, said his wife, Pamela Wicker.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a brilliant but relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of The Times’s Washington bureau, was riding in the presidential motorcade as it wound through downtown Dallas, the lone Times reporter on a routine political trip to Texas.
The searing images of that day — the rifleman’s shots cracking across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in the open limousine, the blur of speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and the nation’s anguish as the doctors gave way to the priests and a new era — were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. It filled two front-page columns and the entire second page, and vaulted the writer to journalistic prominence overnight.
Nine months later, Mr. Wicker, the son of a small-town North Carolina railroad conductor, succeeded the legendary James B. Reston as chief of The Times’s 48-member Washington bureau, and two years later he inherited the column — although hardly the mantle — of the retiring Arthur Krock, the dean of Washington pundits, who had covered every president since Calvin Coolidge.
In contrast to the conservative pontificating of Mr. Krock and the genteel journalism of Mr. Reston, Mr. Wicker brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian’s perspective to his column, “In the Nation,” which appeared on the editorial page and then on the Op-Ed Page two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991. It was also syndicated to scores of newspapers.
Riding waves of change as the effects of the divisive war in Vietnam and America’s civil rights struggle swept the country, Mr. Wicker applauded President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but took the president to task for deepening the American involvement in Southeast Asia.
He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for covertly bombing Cambodia, and in the Watergate scandal accused him of creating the “beginnings of a police state.” Nixon put Mr. Wicker on his “enemies list,” but resigned in disgrace over the Watergate cover-up. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew upbraided Mr. Wicker for “irresponsibility and thoughtlessness,” but he, too, resigned after pleading no contest to evading taxes on bribes he had taken while he was governor of Maryland.
The Wicker judgments fell like a hard rain upon all the presidents: Gerald R. Ford, for continuing the war in Vietnam; Jimmy Carter, for “temporizing” in the face of soaring inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis; Ronald Reagan, for dozing through the Iran-contra scandal, and the elder George Bush, for letting the Persian Gulf war outweigh educational and health care needs at home. Mr. Wicker’s targets also included members of Congress, government secrecy, big business, corrupt labor leaders, racial bigots, prison conditions, television and the news media.
In the 1970s, Mr. Wicker, whose status as a columnist put him outside the customary journalistic restrictions on advocacy, became a fixture on current-events television shows and addressed gatherings on college campuses and in other forums. Speaking at a 1971 “teach-in” at Harvard, he urged students to “engage in civil disobedience” in protesting the war in Vietnam. “We got one president out,” he told the cheering crowd, “and perhaps we can do it again.”
A Prison Uprising
Mr. Wicker had many detractors. He was attacked by conservatives and liberals, by politicians high and low, by business interests, labor leaders and others, and for a time his activism — crossing the line from observer to participant in news events — put him in disfavor with many mainstream journalists. But his speeches and columns continued unabated.
His most notable involvement took place during the uprising by 1,300 inmates who seized 38 guards and workers at the Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971. Having written a sympathetic column on the death of the black militant George Jackson at San Quentin, Mr. Wicker was asked by Attica’s rebels to join a group of outsiders to inspect prison conditions and monitor negotiations between inmates and officials. The radical lawyer William M. Kunstler and Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, also went in, and the observers took on the role of mediators.
Mr. Wicker, in a column, described a night in the yard with the rebels: flickering oil-drum fires, bull-necked convicts armed with bats and iron pipes, faceless men in hoods or football helmets huddled on mattresses behind wooden barricades. He wrote: “This is another world — terrifying to the outsider, yet imposing in its strangeness — behind those massive walls, in this murmurous darkness, within the temporary but real power of desperate men.”
Talks broke down over inmate demands for amnesty and the ouster of Russell G. Oswald, the state corrections commissioner. Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller rejected appeals by the observers to go to Attica, and after a four-day standoff, troopers and guards stormed the prison. Ten hostages and 29 inmates were killed by the authorities’ gunfire in what witnesses called a turkey shoot; three inmates were killed by other convicts, who also beat a guard to death. Afterward, many prisoners were beaten and abused in reprisals.
Mr. Wicker wrote a book about the uprising, “A Time to Die” (1975). Most critics hailed it as his best book, although some chided him for sympathizing with the inmates. “Attica,” a television movie starring Morgan Freeman as a jailhouse lawyer and George Grizzard as Mr. Wicker, was made by ABC in 1980.
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CONTINUED...
.The New York Times...
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November 25, 2011
Tom Wicker, Times Journalist, Dies at... more
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From The New York Times: Environment
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: November 18, 2011
It is likely that greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity have already led to more record-high temperatures and fewer record lows, as well as to greater coastal flooding and possibly to more extremes of precipitation, the report said.
Whether inland flooding is getting worse because of greenhouse gases is murkier, the report said. Nor, it found, can any firm conclusion be drawn at this point about a human influence on hurricanes, typhoons, hail storms or tornadoes.
The findings were released at a conference in Kampala, Uganda, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a high-profile United Nations body assigned to review and report periodically on developments in climate research. They come at a time of unusual weather disasters around the globe, from catastrophic flooding in Asia and Australia to blizzards, floods, heat waves, droughts, wildfires and windstorms in the United States that have cost billions of dollars.
“A hotter, moister atmosphere is an atmosphere primed to trigger disasters,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist and a principal author of the new report. “As the world gets hotter, the risk gets higher.”
The I.P.C.C. won the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007 for its efforts on climate change, but later became a focus of controversy related to minor factual errors in a large report that it had issued that year. It has tightened its procedures in the hope of preventing future errors.
The new report on extreme weather, one of a string of reports that the panel is issuing on relatively narrow issues, did not break much ground scientifically, essentially refining findings that have been emerging in climate science papers in recent years.
Indeed, the delegates meeting in Kampala adopted scientifically cautious positions in some areas. For instance, some researchers have presented evidence suggesting that hurricanes are growing more intense because of climate change, but the report sided with a group of experts who say that such a claim is premature.
Nonetheless, the report predicted that certain types of weather extremes will grow more numerous and more intense as human-induced global warming worsens in coming decades.
“It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes and decreases in cold extremes will occur in the 21st century on the global scale,” the report said. “It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe.”
By the end of the century, if greenhouse emissions continue unabated, the type of heat wave that now occurs once every 20 years will be occurring every couple of years across large areas of the planet, the report predicted.
Even as such extremes are projected to increase, human vulnerability to them is growing as well, the report said. Rising populations and flawed decisions about land use, like permitting unchecked coastal development, are putting more and more people in harm’s way, the report said.
“Rapid urbanization and the growth of megacities, especially in the developing countries, have led to the emergence of highly vulnerable urban communities, particularly through informal settlements” — meaning slums — “and inadequate land management,” the report said.
Increases in population density and in the value of property at risk, rather than changes in the climate, are the likeliest explanation for rising disaster losses in many countries, the report said. It called on governments to do a better job of protecting people and heading off catastrophes before they strike.
The report, approved in its final form on Friday morning, is a 29-page summary of a larger document with more scientific detail that is not expected to be ready until the spring. The group’s next all-encompassing review of climate science is due in 2013.
In two weeks, negotiators from many countries are to convene in Durban, South Africa, to try, as they have been doing for nearly 20 years, to come up with more effective ways of reining in the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are causing the climate to change.
Analysts are not optimistic about any major breakthrough at those talks. At the same time, some countries that had long held out are starting to adopt stronger domestic policies on climate change, with Australia being a notable example. It passed a carbon tax earlier this month.
Some groups that have long attacked mainstream climate science did so again Friday in response to the new report. David Whitehouse, an astrophysicist working for a London organization called the Global Warming Policy Foundation, declared that “the I.P.C.C. scientists are speculating far beyond any reasonable scientific justification.”
But advocates of climate action, particularly American groups stymied in their efforts to win aggressive measures in Washington, welcomed the new report.
“I think it really provides an opportunity to shift the conversation away from just changes in global averages to the kinds of extreme weather that people are seeing in their back yards,” said Juanita Constible, who follows scientific issues for the Climate Reality Project, founded by Mr. Gore.
http://www.whataretheywaitingfor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Global-Climate-Change.jpgFrom The New York Times: Environment
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: November 18, 2011... more
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TOKYO — In a direct act of rebellion against Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the local government in Tokyo is moving swiftly to build a huge natural gas facility that would generate as much electricity as a nuclear reactor.
The plant would ensure a stable supply of electricity for the capital in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdowns in March at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But more important, the city government says, it could spur desperately needed change in Japan. By weakening Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, reformers hope to finally break the linchpin of the collusion between business and government that once drove Japan’s rapid postwar rise, but that now keeps it mired in stagnation.
“Now’s our chance,” said Naoki Inose, Tokyo’s vice governor, invoking an ancient proverb about attacking a wild dog only after it has fallen into a river: “On March 11, Tepco became the dog that fell into the river. Only then can you fight against such a formidable foe.”
So formidable a foe, in fact, that just eight months after Japanese leaders vowed the nuclear disaster — like the end of World War II — would lead to a kind of rebirth, the chances for fundamental change are rapidly slipping away.
Already, the reformers have lost a crucial ally: Naoto Kan, who as prime minister had called for an end to nuclear power and major changes to the power industry. He was eased out of office with the help of Japan’s most powerful corporate lobby, a faithful Tepco supporter that, like many members of Japan’s establishment, has benefited from the company’s largess.
And Mr. Kan’s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, whose party came to power promising to build a new Japan, instead joined the old guard to rally around nuclear power, and Tepco.
It is difficult to overstate the influence of Tepco, which rivals the American defense industry in its domestic reach.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And the rest of the world holds it's breath.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/11/18/world/jp-tepco/jp-tepco-popup.jpgTOKYO — In a direct act of rebellion against Tokyo Electric Power Company, which... more
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Thomas Edison’s direct current technology is gaining popularity as engineers are finding that it can carry electricity over long distances with less loss of power than alternating current.
The revival of DC for long-distance power transmission began in 1954 when the Swedish company ASEA, a predecessor of ABB, the Swiss maker of power and automation equipment, linked the island of Gotland to mainland Sweden with high-voltage DC lines.
Now, more than 145 projects using high-voltage DC, known as HVDC, are under way worldwide.
While HVDC equipment remains expensive, it becomes economical for high-voltage, high-capacity runs over long distances, said Anders Sjoelin, president of power systems for North America at ABB.
Over a distance of a thousand miles, an HVDC line carrying thousands of megawatts might lose 6 to 8 percent of its power, ABB said. A similar AC line might lose 12 to 25 percent.
Direct-current transmission is also better suited to handle the electricity produced by solar and wind farms, which starts out as direct current.
In most situations, solar or wind energy has to be converted, and sometimes reconverted, into AC before it can be used. With HVDC, conversions can be reduced. DC grids can also more easily manage the variable output that occurs, say, when a storm hits or the wind dies.
http://www.siemens.com/about/pool/business/energy/e_hvdc_458px.jpgThomas Edison’s direct current technology is gaining popularity as engineers are... more
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Reporters touring the Japanese nuclear facility damaged by a March earthquake and tsunami see the damage and the extensive work performed over the past eight months.
Entering the disaster center was a time-consuming process because of the radioactivity precautions. In the first room, we took off the booties. The room is lined with pink plastic sheets. In the next room, teams of workers cut off our protective suits with scissors, removed our gloves and our masks.Reporters touring the Japanese nuclear facility damaged by a March earthquake and... more
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Paul Krugman exposes the dangerous cult that threatens to destroy America, but it isn't the one you might think about first. It's centrists, and the myth that "both sides" are equally to blame for America's debt problem and equally responsible and interested in solving it. "What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on," he writes.
See the full article at nytimes.comPaul Krugman exposes the dangerous cult that threatens to destroy America, but it... more
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ctv
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On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that the U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoena yesterday for the testimony of a New York Times reporter in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA operations officer accused of leaking classified information, highlighting a trend of government attempts to use journalists’ testimony in cases against government employees who reveal government information in exchange for anonymity.On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported... more
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Like one would promote dressing this way more than once?
Prom: Short for promenade, which refers to when guests march around at the beginning of a ball or cotillion. Proms took their cue from the exclusive debutante balls; so what we now refer to and obsess on as Prom is in essence a down-market version of the Crillon Ball of Paris.
Teen Prom, Adult Prom, both concepts elude me. Seems as though there is this rising trend in Adult Proms, which they are referring to as Do-Overs. Since I did not go to my high school prom (*see below), I guess there is nothing for me to do-over. And if I was to “do-over” anything, I would not start with prom. The New York Times has an article called A Second Shot to Have the Best Night of Their Lives, and the title makes me wonder, “Could prom have been better than Watkins Glen or Studio 54 circa 1977?” As one of the core club kids at Studio 54, I hardly doubt that looking at sherbert colored dressed on chubby girls can compare to doing Quaaludes with Liza Minelli and Stephen Burrows. Prom is everywhere, starting with the movie, Prom, by Disney coupled with the recent episode of Glee, where the honor of Prom Queen was bestowed upon an actual queen, Chris Colfer, the gay guy. My client Roy Teeluck‘s daughter was featured in Seventeen getting her prom locks locked in and Donate My Dress, the organization that recycles used, unwanted party dresses to under-served teens makes me wonder if there’s a spin-off movie in them there hills called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Prom Dress.
Don’t get me wrong, many of these Adult Proms are actually fundraisers for good causes, but as a seasoned event producer, any time you promote bad dresses as the key ingredient to your event, well, let’s just say that on my list of “Will Never Dos” are weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and now Proms (adult or otherwise). * Why I Did Not Go To Prom I went to Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey. What is otherwise a lovely hamlet nestled in the Palisades, my particular school–which I was bussed t0–was quite a rowdy place. In those four years, we went through four different principals, each chased off the campus, running for dear life, one clutching her pearls. We were constantly on the news for muggings and beatings and if you wonder how I survived without getting my ass kicked, well, I became a Quaalude dealer and was surely one of the more popular guys around. Did I need to go to prom? No. Was my house a good after-party? Yes.
Read more from I Mean...What?!?: http://imeanwhat.comLike one would promote dressing this way more than once?
Prom: Short for promenade,... more
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Latest Complete News Updates Today In the New Yorker, well-known writer Malcolm Gladwell has an article presenting his own law school ranking system. Love him or hate him — and there are plenty of people on either side — Malcolm Gladwell is provocative. By devising big, here’s-how-the-world-works theories, and supporting them with lively anecdotes, Gladwell has forged a remarkable career for himself, as a New Yorker writer and best-selling author.Latest Complete News Updates Today In the New Yorker, well-known writer Malcolm... more
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Be careful.
http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/laptop-can-cost-your-life/
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