Saturday, June 29th, 2013
Irene Klotz, - The Raw Story/Reuters
Stephan: This story has received almost no attention even though it describes an extraordinary achievement on the part of those who conceived, created, and operate the Voyager space probes. It is a wonderful mystery.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Reports last summer than NASA’s long-lived Voyager 1 space probe had finally left the solar system turned out to be a bit premature, scientists said on Thursday.
Rather, the spacecraft, which was launched in 1977 for a five-year mission to study Jupiter and Saturn, has found itself in a previously unknown region between the outermost part of the solar system and interstellar space.
It is an unusual and unexpected thoroughfare, a place where charged particles from the sun have virtually disappeared and those coming from galactic cosmic rays beyond the solar system are plentiful.
By that measure alone, scientists initially thought Voyager 1 did indeed finally reach interstellar space on August 25, 2012, becoming the first man-made object to leave the solar system.
But one key measurement killed that theory. The magnetic field in which Voyager 1 traveled was still aligned like the sun’s. If the probe were truly in interstellar space, scientists expect that the direction of the magnetic field would be different.
‘You can never exclude a really peculiar coincidence, but this was very strong evidence that we’re still in the heliosheath
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Saturday, June 29th, 2013
Stephan: The foundation upon which our democracy is based is the vote of the citizens. The Republican Party, recognizing that it is increasingly a party defined by race, religion, and region, has two options if they wish to survive at the national level. One, adopt policies which attract the widest group of voters. Two, restrict access to voting and gerrymander voting districts so that only Republicans have easy access to voting. We all know which choice they have made, but I don't think people fully appreciate how cynical and pervasive this policy really is. Here is a report that will give you some sense of what is happening. It also shows just how partisan the conservative activist Supreme Court has become, and how truly damaging their gutting of the Voting Right Act obviously is to a healthy democracy.
Like gleeful children released from detention, officials in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and other states vowed to enact new voting restrictions just hours after the Supreme Court did their bidding and neutered the Voting Rights Act (pdf).
Free at last, they might as well have said.
‘[Attorney General] Eric Holder can no longer deny Voter ID in Texas,’ tweeted Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott soon after Tuesday’s decision.
Indeed, states like Texas and hundreds of communities nationwide now have unfettered authority to impose the kitchen sink of conservative-bred election changes that potentially disenfranchise minority voters, which is why the measures had been blocked by the Voting Rights Act before the court stripped the law of its key enforcement tool on Tuesday.
New voter-identification requirements, cuts in early balloting, the end of same-day registration and Sunday voting before Election Day (‘souls to the polls’), gerrymandered districts, relocated polling places and more are now all in play.It’s all happening in this open season on minority voting power.
How did America’s greatest civil rights achievement, a law that had never lost a court challenge in 48 years, become vulnerable?
It began in June 2009. While many of us were still distracted by the wonderment of America’s first black president, […]
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Saturday, June 29th, 2013
LANE KENWORTHY, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: This is a sobering analysis of one of the principal myths we tell ourselves about America.
In its decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, which was handed down yesterday, the Supreme Court kicked the affirmative action can down the road. In the case, two white students who had applied to the University of Texas at Austin and were denied admission claimed that the university had discriminated against them on the basis of race. The Court ruled that a lower court should reexamine its initial decision in the case.
Some observers had expected the Supreme Court to use the case to further restrict or altogether forbid consideration of race in college admissions decisions. Although that didn’t happen, the story isn’t over, as the Court may revisit the issue in another case as early as next year. In any event, the use of race-based affirmative action has already been declining for more than a decade. In some states, that is due to judicial rulings and in others to legislation or public referendum. That trend is likely to continue.
But affirmative action may have a new life ahead of it. As I wrote in ‘It’s Hard To Make It in America,’ the biggest obstacle to equality of opportunity in the United States today is family background, not race. Over the […]
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The Oregonian Editorial Board, - The Oregonian
Stephan: 50,000 bumblebees had to die in a parking lot to get this point across: Pesticides and herbicides are killing bees, upon whose work the world's food supply depends.
The recent discovery by shoppers of 50,000 dead bumblebees in a Target parking lot was pure B-movie material, as if the sky had rained death. But the carcasses were especially concentrated beneath some 55 European linden trees recently treated to resist infestations of aphids, which issue the clear sticky liquid droplets that can mar windshields and perhaps a satisfying shopping experience.
Bee carcasses were collected and cut open by Oregon Department of Agriculture investigators. They were found to carry high levels of the popular, unregulated insecticide Safari. Agriculture officials quickly announced that bee-proof netting would wrap the canopies of the trees, at the Wilsonville Target near I-5, to ‘keep additional bees from blooms that have been attracting the pollinators.’
Soon enough, reports surfaced of hundreds of dead bumblebees beneath linden trees in downtown Hillsboro, and state officials quickly responded to take samples. It turns out the Hillsboro trees had been treated with Safari as well, though no link was announced between the chemical and the bee deaths. And the time between application and reported die-off was much greater than it was in Wilsonville.
State agriculture officials told The Oregonian’s editorial board on Tuesday that they expect to take up to two months in […]
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, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: If you read my essay, A Sense of Proportion. (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephan-a-schwartz/surveillance-national-security_b_3436083.html) you know that I think this is the important unasked question. The answer though, as I have already published on this site, is that the terrorism argument is a cover for a deeper purpose, controlling society in the face of breakdown resulting from climate change. Here is a take from Germany, and you can see that other countries take considerable umbrage at the U.S.'s hubris. And have begun, as this report spells-out, to ask the right question.
In Germany, a country with a long, troubled history of state surveillance, the revelation that British and American intelligence agencies have been spying en masse on European data communications has not gone over easily.
Last Friday, London’s Guardian newspaper published the contents of leaked documents confirming that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have been tapping directly into fiber-optic cables to collect vast stores of information that they can then access as needed. Among these cables was the TAT-14, which carries a large share of data communication in and out of Germany, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and public radio station NDR reported on Tuesday after viewing documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
According to media reports, neither the German government nor the country’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, was apparently aware of the British surveillance operation, dubbed ‘Tempora,’ which was reportedly made possible with the cooperation of two telecommunications companies: Vodafone and British telecoms giant BT. Vodafone released a statement saying it abides by the laws of the countries in which it operates, but it declined to give further information, citing ‘national security.’ BT has refused to comment.
The ongoing surveillance controversy, which began last month […]
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