JUDSON PARKER, - San Francisco Examiner
Stephan: Finally, we may get GMO labelling, thanks to what happens in California. Because the state is so large, and is such a big market, if California compels GMO labelling, it will become nationwide, despite what the Congressional lackeys of Big Agra do to protect their masters. The alternative would be different labelling for virtually all processed foods, and much produce -- one for California, one for the rest of the country. That would cut into profits, so it is not going to happen.
California’s Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act will be on November’s ballot as Proposition 37, according to proposition numbers released late yesterday by the California Secretary of State’s office. The Right to Know measure calls for labeling genetically engineered foods and, if passed, would be the first law in the United States requiring labeling of a wide range of genetically engineered foods.
‘Prop 37 is about our fundamental right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed our children,
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REBECCA JACOBSON, - PBS Newshour - The Rundown
Stephan: It is amazing to watch a society choose to destroy the very things that make it desirable or functional. Yet profit like heroin will make a person or a society commit strange and self-destructive acts.
On the NewsHour this week, we will be covering how rising sea levels are threatening people who live on the fragile Louisiana Delta. Hari Sreenivasan spoke with Torbjörn Törnqvist, a coastal geoscientist at Tulane University who studies the evolution of low-lying coastal wetlands, about the dilemma in Louisiana.
Törnqvist said over the past 100 years, the sea level rise associated with climate change has crept up on the Gulf Coast. But rising oceans aren’t the only reason the Delta is disappearing. Man-made levees, diversions along the Mississippi River and oil drilling along the coast have contributed to rapid subsidence, sinking the marshlands without new silt to replace it. He said the problem has increased to a rate where the delta loses roughly a football field worth of land every half hour to an hour.
HARI SREENIVASAN: When it comes to sea level rise and subsidence, these are massive shifts that have been happening for quite some time. And is there a climate connection to it at all?
TORBJÖRN TÖRNQVIST: The thousand-year period prior to the industrial revolution, the rates of sea-level rise along the Gulf Coast, this larger area from the Florida Panhandle to East Texas, was about five times lower than it […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2012
SUSAN GUYETT, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: The Episcopal Church, once the denomination of aristocracy, has transformed itself into a genuinely socially progressive institution, and Bravo! to them. I think this will probably be the final brick on the scale leading to the American Episcopal Church severing its connection with the world Anglican community. Many national communions are bitterly anti-gay and the U.S. Church's decision a few years back to create women bishops almost caused the schism. This may well do it.
NDIANAPOLIS — The U.S. Episcopal Church on Tuesday approved a liturgy for clergy to use in blessing same-sex unions, including gay marriages in states where they are legal, becoming the largest U.S. religious denomination to approve such a ritual.
Delegates to its triennial convention voted 171-50 to approve the liturgy, titled ‘the Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant.’ Episcopal bishops had voted overwhelmingly on Monday in favor of the text.
The U.S. Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is the 14th largest U.S. religious denomination, with about 2 million members, according to the National Council of Churches.
The proposed blessing will be introduced in early December and will be evaluated over the next three years, according to a church spokeswoman, Nancy Davidge.
The resolution does not mention the word ‘marriage’ and it does not alter the church’s standard liturgy for a marriage between a man and a woman, but offers an alternative liturgy for blessing same-sex couples.
The measure also gives bishops of the church discretion in the use of the liturgy and says no one should be punished for choosing not to use it.
Reverend Bonnie Perry of Chicago, who supports marriage between same-sex couples, said she was pleased by the decision. […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2012
NATHANIEL POPPER, - DealB%k
Stephan: You may not have heard about it, but there is another financial crisis brewing. Like all its predecessors it arises because of unregulated predatory profiteering.
As unemployment climbed and tax revenue fell, the city of Baltimore laid off employees and cut services in the midst of the financial crisis. Its leaders now say the city’s troubles were aggravated by bankers’ manipulation of a key interest rate linked to hundreds of millions of dollars the city had borrowed.
Baltimore has been leading a battle in Manhattan federal court against the banks that determine the interest rate, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which serves as a benchmark for global borrowing and stands at the center of the latest banking scandal. Now cities, states and municipal agencies nationwide, including Massachusetts, Nassau County on Long Island, and California’s public pension system, are looking at whether they suffered similar losses and are weighing legal action.
Dozens of lawsuits filed by municipalities, pension funds and hedge funds have been consolidated into a few related cases against more than a dozen banks that are involved in setting Libor each day, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Barclays. Last month, Barclays admitted to regulators that it tried to manipulate Libor before and during the financial crisis in 2008, and paid $450 million to settle the charges. It said other banks […]
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Thursday, July 12th, 2012
MATT ROUSH, - CBS (Detroit)
Stephan: In the midst of the rising denierism concerning science, researchers continue to pull back the veil revealing how the world actually works. It is both wonderful and sad.
The paper is titled 'A filament of dark matter between two clusters of galaxies.
ANN ARBOR — Scientists have, for the first time, directly detected part of the invisible dark matter skeleton of the universe, where more than half of all matter is believed to reside.
The discovery, led by a University of Michigan physics researcher, confirms a key prediction in the prevailing theory of how the universe’s current web-like structure evolved.
The map of the known universe shows that most galaxies are organized into clusters, but some galaxies are situated along filaments that connect the clusters. Cosmologists have theorized that dark matter undergirds those filaments, which serve as highways of sorts, guiding galaxies toward the gravitational pull of the massive clusters. Dark matter’s contribution had been predicted with computer simulations, and its shape had been roughed out based on the distribution of the galaxies. But no one had directly detected it until now.
‘We found the dark matter filaments. For the first time, we can see them,
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