Sunday, September 7th, 2014
RYAN MCNEILL, DEBORAH J. NELSON and DUFF WILSON, - Reuters Investigates
Stephan: Here is a quite thorough assessment of what is happening along our sea coasts. Of the 315 million people in the U.S., in excess of 124 million live in counties directly on the shoreline. You may be one of them and, if so, this is what lies ahead on your timeline.
Click through to see the several videos, as well as the charts and images.
Image Credit: Reuters
WALLOPS ISLAND, VIRGINIA — Missions flown from the NASA base here have documented some of the most dramatic evidence of a warming planet over the past 20 years: the melting of polar ice, a force contributing to a global rise in ocean levels.
The Wallops Flight Facility’s relationship with rising seas doesn’t end there. Its billion-dollar space launch complex occupies a barrier island that’s drowning under the impact of worsening storms and flooding.
NASA’s response? Rather than move out of harm’s way, officials have added more than $100 million in new structures over the past five years and spent $43 million more to fortify the shoreline with sand. Nearly a third of that new sand has since been washed away.
Across a narrow inlet to the north sits the island town of Chincoteague, gateway to a national wildlife refuge blessed with a stunning mile-long recreational beach – a major tourist draw and source of big business for the community. But the sea is robbing the townspeople of their main asset.
The beach has […]
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Sunday, September 7th, 2014
HANNAH K. GOLD , - Vice News
Stephan: This is the latest in the rise of the American police state. What in the world does a campus police force need with an armored vehicle and grenade launchers? What are we becoming?
Campus police at Ohio University. Photo via Wikimedia
In 1968, students at Columbia University staged a mass uprising other college campuses in protesting not just the war in Vietnam, but their school’s collaboration with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Defense Department affiliate that researches weapons technologies. Today, weapons produced by that institute are used by the US military throughout the world-and by campus police forces across the country. The war has come home.
The Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to unload its excess military equipment onto local police forces, has quietly overflowed onto college campuses. According to documents obtained by the website Muckrock, more than 100 campus police forces have received military materials from the Pentagon. Schools that participate in the program range from liberal arts to community colleges to the entire University of Texas system. Emory, Rice, Perdue, and the University of California, Berkeley, are all on the list.
In 1990, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act, including the magnanimous section 1208, which […]
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Saturday, September 6th, 2014
TRAVIS GETTYS, - The Raw story
Stephan: One of the nastiest aspects of the War on Drugs has been the rise of forfeiture laws, and their linkage to the funding of police departments. It is an inherently corrupted model.
(Raw Story)
Three Philadelphia homeowners have sued the city, which targeted their homes for civil forfeiture after their relatives were picked up on minor drug charges.
Law enforcement has seized $64 million in property between 2002 and 2012 from thousands of residents – many of whom were never charged with any crimes – in the most aggressive forfeiture unit in the nation.
The city’s revenue generated from seized property dwarfs amounts from similar programs in other cities, reported Forbes.
Philadelphia collects nearly $6 million a year from forfeiture, while Kings County, New York, generated $1.2 million in 2010 and Los Angeles County grabbed $1.2 million in property that same year – although each municipality has far more people.
The city applies about 40 percent of the seized property to law enforcement payroll, including salaries for prosecutors who run the civil forfeiture program.
Chris and Markelos Sourovelis were evicted from their home for more than a week in March after their son was caught selling $40 in heroin outside, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The couple was allowed to return if […]
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Saturday, September 6th, 2014
ANDY COGHLAN, - New Scientist (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is a fascinating new study on aging that looks like a serious new vector for science.
Journal reference: Genome Research, DOI: 10.1101/gr.162131.113
Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper reached the ripe old age of 115 (Image: Continental/AFP/Getty Images)
Death is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world’s oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.
Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.
Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.
What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that […]
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Saturday, September 6th, 2014
PAUL KRUGMAN, - The New York Times
Stephan: As usual Paul Krugman has the right take.
On Thursday, the European Central Bank announced a series of new steps it was taking in an effort to boost Europe’s economy. There was a whiff of desperation about the announcement, which was reassuring. Europe, which is doing worse than it did in the 1930s, is clearly in the grip of a deflationary vortex, and it’s good to know that the central bank understands that. But its epiphany may have come too late. It’s far from clear that the measures now on the table will be strong enough to reverse the downward spiral.
And there but for the grace of Bernanke go we. Things in the United States are far from O.K., but we seem (at least for now) to have steered clear of the kind of trap facing Europe. Why? One answer is that the Federal Reserve started doing the right thing years ago, buying trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds in order to avoid the situation its European counterpart now faces.
You can argue, and I would, that the Fed should have done even more. But Fed officials have faced fierce attacks all the way. Pundits, politicians and plutocrats have accused them, over and over again, of ‘debasing” the dollar, […]
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