JENNIFGER MARTINEZ, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Anyone who travels internationally knows how far behind the cutting edge America is when it comes to citizen access to electronic communications. This looks like a hopeful step forward.
President Obama signed a memorandum Monday that would double the current amount of airwaves available for wireless devices over the next 10 years, a move intended to create jobs and boost investment in the mobile phone market.
The availability of more wireless spectrum will allow faster delivery of data and video onto smart phones and other next-generation devices.
The memorandum calls for 500 megahertz of government and commercial spectrum to be made available over the next 10 years. The Federal Communications Commission made the same recommendation in its National Broadband Plan released in March. In the nation’s largest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, local TV stations use only about 150 MHz, according to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.
‘The initiatives endorsed today will spur economic growth, promote private investment and drive U.S. global leadership in broadband innovation,’ FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. ‘Spectrum is the oxygen of wireless, and the future of our mobile economy depends on spectrum recovery and smart spectrum policies.’
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said Monday that he would introduce a bill to make the 500 MHz available.
Wireless telecommunications companies will be able to acquire some of this public spectrum in a government auction. Some of the […]
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MATT GUTMAN and BRADLEY BLACKBURN, - ABC World News
Stephan: It is fascinating to watch conservatives who blather on about how we don't need a strong government immediately tack their sails, when some crunch comes. Then they start whining about getting more Federal government support and money. Haley Barbour is one of the most obvious of these sanctimonious hypocrites but he is far from alone.
Just weeks ago, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour claimed that oil was not a big threat to the people of the Gulf Coast. Now, with oil hitting his state’s beaches for the first time since the start of the BP spill, the Republican governor says his state isn’t prepared for the spill and needs more help.
Earlier in June, Barbour said, ‘Once [oil] gets to this stage, it’s not poisonous,’ though he said it probably wasn’t a good idea to brush one’s teeth with it.
With black gobs of oil now sullying Mississippi’s white beaches, the governor is taking a more serious tone, asking for more resources to combat the problem he had dismissed.
‘We have to be honest with the public. Right now we don’t have enough skimming capacity if everything that’s off our shores continues going north,’ Barbour said.
On day 70 of the spill, local officials say they’re sorely lacking in supplies to fight the oil. The mayor of Ocean Springs, Miss. told ABC News they’re not seeing the response they need from state and federal officials to an urgent problem.
When told that significant amounts of oil were hitting shore, authorities ‘didn’t react at all,’ said Mayor Connie Morgan. ‘They […]
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PETER SPIEGEL and MATTHEW ROSENBERG, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: At the end of this week, thanks to the Republicans, we will cut off benefits to 1.7 million out of work Americans, and we have hundreds of thousands of children who go to bed hungry, and millions more who will no longer have access to libraries when the new school year starts. But we have plenty of money to underwrite the corruption in Afghanistan. How does that make you feel?
WASHINGTON and KABUL — The chairwoman of the House subcommittee responsible for foreign aid said she was stripping from pending legislation $3.9 billion in funding for Afghanistan following revelations that billions of dollars, including large amounts of U.S. aid funds, were flowing out of the country through Kabul’s main airport.
Rep. Nita Lowey (D., N.Y.) called the revelations ‘outrageous,’ and Capitol Hill aides said she had the backing of Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.), the chairman of the full House Appropriations Committee.
American soldiers near Kandahar carry a wounded comrade to a helicopter for evacuation on Monday. Combat operations have begun to escalate.
‘I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that U.S. taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan government officials, drug lords, and terrorists,’ Ms. Lowey said.
At least $3.18 billion in cash has been flown out of Afghanistan since 2007 after being legally declared to customs officers, according to documents reported Monday in The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Monday that the Afghan government has gradually improved its ability to monitor the flow of money in and out of the country, and […]
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JUSTINE GILLIS, - The New York Times
Stephan:
Many debates about global warming seem to boil down to appeals to authority, with one side or the other citing some famous scientist, or group of them, to buttress a particular argument. The tone is often, ‘My expert is better than yours!’
Against this backdrop, some analysts have been trying for several years to get a firm handle on where climate researchers come down, as a group, on the central issues in the global-warming debate: Is the earth warming up, and if so, are humans largely responsible?
Now comes another entry in this developing literature. William R.L. Anderegg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, and his fellow authors compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers. They then focused on scientists who had published at least 20 papers on climate, as a way to concentrate on those most active in the field. That produced a list of 908 researchers whose work was subjected to close scrutiny.
The authors then classified those researchers as convinced or unconvinced by the evidence for human-induced climate change, based on such factors as whether they have signed public statements endorsing or dissenting from the big United Nations reports raising alarm about the issue. Then the authors analyzed how often […]
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Stephan: It becomes clearer and clearer how mad this venture really is.
WASHINGTON — CIA Director Leon Panetta said on Sunday there may be less than 50 al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan, with ‘no question’ that most of the terrorist network is operating from the western tribal region of Pakistan.
Panetta’s remarks came as President Barack Obama builds up U.S. forces in Afghanistan to prop up the government and, in his words, ‘disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda.’ About U.S. 98,000 troops will be in Afghanistan by fall.
Asked by ABC’s Jake Tapper to estimate the number of al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan, Panetta said, ‘I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda is actually relatively small. At most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity.’
Panetta told ABCs’ ‘This Week’ that the CIA is heavily focused on killing the al Qaida leadership in Pakistan, and he defended CIA drone strikes against ‘dead wrong’ claims that they violate international law. He said Osama bin Laden is hiding amid the region’s rough terrain with ‘tremendous security around him.’
Asked to describe what an American victory would look like in Afghanistan, Panetta said: ‘Our purpose, our whole mission there, is to make sure that Al Qaeda never finds another safehaven from which […]
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