The recent flap over Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s attempt to require a new vaccine for schoolgirls highlighted his relationship with a former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, who lobbied on behalf of the company that makes the drug.

But the ties between Toomey’s lobbying business and the Republican governor go far deeper than the vaccine case, according to new data compiled by a Texas watchdog group.

Toomey’s lobbying clients have given more than $5.5 million to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns over the past decade, either through their political action committees or as donations from executives, according to data from Texans for Public Justice.

During that same period, Toomey earned as much as $17.4 million from his lobbying practice, which is focused on influencing the policies of the state government in Austin, records show.

The political careers of the two men have been closely entwined since they first roomed together as young state legislators in the mid-1980s. Toomey helped arrange a lucrative land deal for Perry in the 1990s that has frequently come under scrutiny, and he later worked as Perry’s chief of staff at the governor’s mansion.

Toomey is a co-founder of Make Us Great Again, a super PAC that plans to raise $55 million or […]

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A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that freed corporations to spend unlimited money on elections.

Sponsored by Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Donna Edwards (D-Md.), the proposal would amend the Constitution to empower Congress and the states to limit corporate spending on political activities.

‘Last year, the Supreme Court overturned decades of law and declared open season on our democracy,

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When the largest economy in the European Union derives 20% of its energy from renewable sources, it is a milestone worthy of international attention. Germany’s renewable energy consumption jumped 2.5% within the last year, sending the total consumption of green power in that country to 20.8%. Since 2000, Germany’s use of renewable energy has increased 15 percentage points.

Driving this change is government action. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the German government reversed its policy of supporting nuclear power and declared it would work to phase out all of its nuclear energy by 2022. Along with the demotion of nuclear power, there has been a promotion of renewable power via a feed-in tariff mechanism. Germany’s feed-in tariff was established in 2000 under the Renewable Energy Sources Act. The Act encourages investment in renewable energy by providing companies with long-term contracts and defraying the higher implementation costs green technologies require.

The majority of German citizens support the increased taxes needed to finance feed-in tariffs. Germany plans to achieve 35% renewable electricity use by 2020.

Solar power has become the driving force in the growth of renewable energy in Germany. Solar’s 3.5% of total electricity production is 76% higher than it was last year, and […]

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Defense giant Lockheed Martin is applying Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ to a far-out concept for a ‘quantum radar’ that would be a (forgive the pun) quantum leap over current radar technology. The company filed a patent on the idea in Europe, according to this article in the U.K. Guardian:

Radar

The company has designed and patented a scanner based on the principle of quantum entanglement – a far out concept, even by the weird standards of the quantum world. It says the device could penetrate any type of defence, to identify hidden weapons and roadside bombs from hundreds of miles away.

Quantum entanglement says that two particles can be joined so that whatever happens to one must also happen to its partner, however far apart they are.

Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’. Lockheed Martin prefers: ‘Quantum radar is capable of providing information about targets that cannot be provided using classical radar systems.’

European patent number EP1750145 describes ‘radar systems and methods using entangled quantum particles’. It says such a device could ‘visualise useful target details through background and/or camouflaging clutter, through plasma […]

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LOS ANGELES — Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found.

Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubled in the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes. By contrast, traffic accidents have been dropping for decades because of huge investments in auto safety.

Public health experts have used the comparison to draw attention to the nation’s growing prescription drug problem, which they characterize as an epidemic. This is the first time that drugs have accounted for more fatalities than traffic accidents since the government started tracking drug-induced deaths in 1979.

Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma. One relative newcomer to the scene is Fentanyl, a painkiller that […]

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