Scientists have discovered what may be the least inhabited place in the ocean. The seafloor sediments in the middle of the South Pacific have fewer living cells than anywhere else measured, a new study found. Oceanographer Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island and colleagues took a boat out to the middle of the ocean and collected cores, or cylindrical samples of sediment, from the bottom of the sea about 2.5 to 3.7 miles (4 to 6 km) deep. They found about 1,000 living cells in each cubic centimeter of sediment - a tally that is roughly 1,000 times less than in other seafloor sediments. ‘People were previously just taking cores in parts of the ocean fairly close to shore and assuming their results were typical of the ocean as a whole,’ D’Hondt told LiveScience. D’Hondt suspects that further research will show other areas out in the middle of the ocean may be similarly devoid of life. He and his team detailed their results in the June 22 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The area they explored in the South Pacific is what’s called a gyre, where […]
LONDON and NEW YORK — Wall Street names that have been among the most buffeted in recent months – Merrill Lynch, UBS and Citigroup – are hiking pay for their top investment bankers in an attempt to stop an exodus of talent. Rivals report that poaching the best people from troubled banks has become far trickier. ‘Since the middle of May it has got far more difficult to get the people we want, said one senior banker. Between late 2008 and May, expansionist banks such as Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank had plundered hundreds of senior bankers from those groups that were laid low by the financial crisis, in particular Merrill and UBS. ‘I would say UBS and Merrill have each lost 25 per cent of their best people, said Patrick Field, chairman of London-based financial headhunter Hanover Search. In spite of the troubled environment, market rates for bankers have been running close to the boom-time highs of two years ago. ‘In some cases we’ve been paying up to 80 per cent of 2007, admitted one senior executive at an expanding bank. But the environment changed four or five weeks ago, bankers say. […]
America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change. The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993. And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans - Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! - hoping that someone still cares. The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that […]
Welfare rolls, which were slow to rise and actually fell in many states early in the recession, now are climbing across the country for the first time since President Bill Clinton signed legislation pledging ‘to end welfare as we know it’ more than a decade ago. Climbing Caseloads See the increase in welfare cases for the 30 most populous states, year-over-year. Looking Back at Welfare Reform Journal articles on the Nixon administration’s attempted overhaul of the welfare system * Overhauling Welfare: Administration Intends To Seek Broad Changes In Assistance Programs (March 4, 1969) * Nixon Budget Problem Puts Crimp in His Plan For Social Legislation (Aug. 7, 1969) * Import Quotas, Welfare Plans Killed by Senate (Dec. 29, 1970) * A House Divided: Nixon Is Likely to Get Tax Cuts, but Congress Will Push Own Program (Sept. 3, 1971) * Many States Reduce Benefits to the Poor To Ease Cash Squeeze (Dec. 31, 1971) Twenty-three of the 30 largest states, which account for more than 88% of the nation’s total population, see welfare caseloads […]
As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding ‘secret energy meetings’ with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s ‘clean coal’ policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged ‘presidential communications.’ The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a ‘new era’ of openness, ‘nothing has changed,’ says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. ‘For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.’ The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama’s much-publicized Jan. 21 ‘transparency’ memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
