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bluekoenig

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: In the Wake of Disaster | Retro Report | The New York Times - Y... - 0 views

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    The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill occurred when an oil tanker tore open its hull on a reef outside of Valdez Alaska. This was the biggest oil spill so far and no one, not even the spill relief teams knew how to respond. Only 15 percent of oil was recovered and the response was embarrassingly slow. It turns out the oil companies were to blame for the spill for resisting safety precautions, and they didn't learn from their mistakes of not employing enough money and resources by the time of the BP Gulf Spill of 2010. Valdez Alaska never recovered and the environmental effects persist.
Javier E

Book Review - A Sea in Flames - By Carl Safina - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Oil companies basically own the whole gulf region,” Safina writes, viewing American addiction to petroleum, indifference to greenhouse gases and political genuflection to the oil lobby as more disturbing than the failure of supposedly foolproof devices to prevent the blowout.
  • Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another. In his book “Normal Accidents,” the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that when complex technology meets large corporate and government hierarchies, lack of accountability will lead inexorably to destructive failures of systems that might have been operated safely. The gulf oil spill surely was that.
  • As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.
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  • By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it.
  • Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use — “That spill is invisible” — are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.
gaglianoj

BP's maximum fine for Gulf of Mexico oil spill is cut by billions | Business | The Guar... - 0 views

  • BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.
  • Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.
  • A simple negligence ruling, which BP sought, caps the maximum fine at $1,100 per barrel.
Grace Gannon

Oil Company Struggles To Clean Up China Spill - 0 views

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    ConocoPhillips' offshore wells in Bohai Bay, China have experienced severe oil leaking, posing both technical and political challenges for the company to overcome. ConocoPhillips, while on a lesser scale than the oil spill crisis of BP Oil Company, faces similar political issues. Cleanup of shores in China still continues, highlighting the danger of our dependence on oil, as it can have such a detrimental effect on wildlife if it is not collected correctly.
andrespardo

'Of course it could happen again': experts say little has changed since Deepwater Horiz... - 0 views

  • A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.
  • Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.
  • “Of course it could happen again, and I think one of the things of most concern is that our ability to control a spill is pretty much the same as it was 10 years prior,” Beinecke said.
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  • Outside of safety concerns, the scientific community is also increasingly encouraging world leaders to consider that any new oil development is unwise, as emissions from fossil fuels exacerbate global heating, threatening human civilization.
  • Trump has pushed an agenda of “energy dominance”, which critics say encourages industry to take risks. A constant ally of fossil fuels, Trum
  • “BSEE is transitioning from an era of isolation to cooperation, from creating hardships to creating partnerships,” the bureau director, Scott Angelle, said at an industry symposium in August 2017.
  • “BSEE is committed to its mission to promote safety, protect the environment and conserve offshore resources through vigorous regulatory oversight and enforcement,” said Day, adding: “Safety is a top priority for the Trump administration’s oversight of OCS [outer continental shelf] operations, and BSEE has significantly increased safety performance in comparison to the Obama administration through increased inspections and more effective use of data.”
  • “Offshore drilling is going after bigger and bigger wells that have more and more oil,” said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council who co-wrote a book on the BP disaster. “These are being drilled in deep water and they’re being drilled in high pressure wells that are harder to control. And they’re being drilled in more complex geology.”
  • Deans called the current regulatory approach “an honor system” that “smacks of exactly the kind of self-enforcement that the independent commission found to be a fatal flaw” in the BP blowout.
  • “Many steps have been taken by both government and industry since the accident 10 years ago … I felt comfortable – not that the risk was reduced to negligible – but that we were in better shape now than we were,” Boesch said. “I’ve frankly been made more concerned about how the safety issues are being treated under the Trump administration.”
  • Wesley Williams, a petroleum engineering professor at Louisiana State University, who was awarded a nearly $5m research grant from a fund BP was forced to pay into, said the “real motivator” for industry was “the image issue that happened and the financial cost of what happened to BP”.
  • “The next major oil spill, when it happens, will catch us off guard … like every previous one has, unless we decide that this time it’s going to be different,” Amos said.
  • Those companies work with large networks of contractors, and smaller independent operators are active in the Gulf of Mexico too. Williams said they did not always have the resources for extensive safety training.
marleymorton

Iowa oil spill underscores pipeline risks day after Trump revives major projects - 0 views

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    Just a day after Donald Trump signed executive orders to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects, a pipeline rupture spilled 138,600 gallons of diesel fuel in northern Iowa.
B Mannke

BBC News - West Virginia chemical spill creates water warning - 0 views

  • About 300,000 people in the US state of West Virginia have been warned not to drink tap water after a chemical spill into a river near the state capital.
  • President Barack Obama has accepted West Virginia's request for a disaster declaration, which allows federal aid to be used.
  • Freedom Industries has said the chemical, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, could be harmful if swallowed and cause skin and eye irritation.
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  • The spill was first found after the state's environmental protection department received a report of a strange odour near the Elk river on Thursday.
  • While the leaking container held at least 40,000 gallons (182,000 litres), state environmental official Tom Aluise said they were "confident" that no more than 5,000 gallons escaped.
draneka

Sweden Reinstates Conscription, With an Eye on Russia - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Late last year, Christer Stoltz, chief of contingency planning for Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, got an unusual letter from the central government in Stockholm, telling him to get ready for war.
  • “increase their ability to resist an armed attack against Sweden from a qualified opponent,”
  • The planning was also intended to respond to natural disasters, oil spills or cyberattacks that could disrupt power and water supplies
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  • “I think Russia tries to have an impact on the Swedish debate and political decisions,” he said. “That’s what I think.”
knudsenlu

Trump meeting Kim Jong-un is a half-baked idea - and a dangerous one | Richar... - 0 views

  • One is an egomaniacally unhinged, nuclear-armed neophyte, who scares his allies and enemies alike. So is the other. The extraordinary prospect of direct talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un would be a delicious moment of karma among kooky world leaders. If it weren’t for their ability to destroy half the planet.
  • One thing is already clear about this half-baked idea: Trump is more likely to spill his guts about classified intelligence than he is to get the upper hand with any kind of meaningful deal.
  • We have some recent history to underscore that point. It was only on Saturday that our dear leader spilled his guts about this North Korean deal at the Gridiron dinner.
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  • For those new to the North Korean brief, including those in the West Wing, it’s worth pointing out that the North Korean deal during the Clinton years was supposed to halt nuclearization. Then it turned out Pyongyang had a secret nuclear program.
  • In case we didn’t get the news, he continued: “I would not rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-un,” he said. “I just won’t. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.” Some people thought he was joking: others were just plain confused. South Korean officials later pointed out that Trump had not talked to the North Koreans, but instead had talked to them. So foreign policy experts naturally assumed that Trump had confused the two Koreas.
  • Needless to say, Trump is very pleased with this state of affairs. “Kim Jong-un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean representatives, not just a freeze,” he tweeted. “Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached.”
  • It’s like a diplomatic version of the Art of the Deal, but with war and peace in place of luxury condominiums.
  • There was a time when an idealistic new president campaigned against the establishment, promised to talk to America’s adversaries, like the mullahs in Iran and the communists in Cuba. For years the Republicans ran the emotional gamut from disdain to disgust at his weak foreign policy. But that president’s name was Barack Obama, and we all know what the world thought of him. Now we have a president in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, who is also busting sanctions to help Kim Jong-un. So this summit is less a meeting of adversaries and more a get-together of subsidiaries. Nationalists of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shame.
knudsenlu

Keystone XL pipeline decision: what's at stake and what comes next? | Environment | The... - 0 views

  • Nebraska regulators are expected to decide on Monday whether to approve or deny an in-state route for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It’s the last major regulatory hurdle facing project operator TransCanada Corp.
  • The five-member Nebraska public service commission is forbidden by law from factoring pipeline safety or the risk of spills into its decision, because pipeline safety is a federal responsibility. So, it will not take into account a spill of 210,000 gallons of oil on the existing Keystone pipeline in South Dakota announced on Thursday.
  • “It’s not as simple as a ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ verdict,” said Brian Jorde, an attorney for Nebraska landowners who are fighting the project. No matter what the commission decides, any group that presented arguments at an August hearing could appeal the decision to a state district court.
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  • The commission’s vote could play a pivotal role in whether TransCanada moves ahead with the pipeline. After years of lobbying for the project, TransCanada acknowledged in a July conference call that executives won’t decide until late November or early December whether to begin construction.
  • At the same time, Texas refineries face uncertainty because of political instability in Venezuela, one of their top oil sources, and a slowdown in Mexican production. “Western Canada has been held captive by geography and hasn’t been able to cheaply access the markets,” Rogers said. “Any opportunity for them to get better access will buoy their margins.”
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
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  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
Megan Flanagan

WikiLeaks hack collateral damage can be deeply personal - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • type your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • ype your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • the emails include the private information of a large number of bystanders, ranging from email addresses to financial data.
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  • Because you say that to your friends, you confide in your friends, and who knows what's in there of your personal life and your professional life."
  • The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of any of the emails
  • The website has faced criticism in the past for its tendency not to screen releases for personally identifiable information or security sensitivities,
  • Podesta emails -- which go back to the 2008 race -- have contained personal email addresses and even cellphone numbers for a wide range of DC personalities,
  • including personal security and financial fraud.
  • information introduces these peripheral individuals to a range of risks.
  • sensitive financial information was contained in the emails published online.
  • the possibility that they may be targeted by phishing or scams to try to lure them into further traps.
  • the dangers can increase to identity theft and the risk extended to family, friends and professional contacts.
  • I've got all kinds of new security provisions, new computers, and I'm changing how I use email.
  • "I hired a cybersecurity firm and I'm not rich," he added. "I've spent for me what's an enormous amount of money."
  • I figured out that a new batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, had been released, including a note I wrote to Podesta with my cell number.
  • all the contents of your emails for 10 years dumped out into public, think about how that feels.
  • saying the First Amendment freedom trumps personal privac
  • 'It's like somebody robbed a bank and as they're running away the money is spilling out of the backpack and instead of catching the criminal everyone is stopping to chase the money.'
cjlee29

Bernie Sanders Wins Oregon; Hillary Clinton Declares Victory in Kentucky - The New York... - 0 views

  • Senator Bernie Sanders prevailed over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday in the Oregon primary
  • a state that she won easily in 2008
  • 1,900 votes
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  • less than half a percentage point
  • The close result meant that she and Mr. Sanders would effectively split the state’s delegates.
  • With a lead in delegates that is almost impossible for Mr. Sanders to overcome, Mrs. Clinton is moving closer each week to claiming the Democratic nomination.
  • Last weekend, bitter feelings from Mr. Sanders’s supporters spilled into view at Nevada’s state convention, which descended into chaos, prompted death threats against Nevada’s Democratic chairwoman and raised the prospect of discord at the national convention in July in Philadelphia.
  • With Mr. Sanders pressing on with his campaign and Mr. Trump now the presumptive Republican nominee, Mrs. Clinton has been campaigning against two opponents at once, trying to defeat Mr. Sanders in state after state while also building an argument against Mr. Trump.
  • where she warned about Mr. Trump while urging voters to support her on Tuesday.
  • she faulted Mr. Sanders for voting against the auto industry bailout, a claim that is not as clear-cut as she suggested it was.
  • He, too, looked toward the general election, arguing that he, not Mrs. Clinton, was the more formidable candidate to take on Mr. Trump, citing polls of hypothetical matchups.
  • “There are a lot of people out there, many of the pundits and politicians, they say, ‘Bernie Sanders should drop out. The people of California should not have the right to determine who the next president will be.’”
  • “We are in till the last ballot is cast.”
  • With her overwhelming support from superdelegates, the party leaders who can vote as they wish, Mrs. Clinton could clinch the nomination by June 7, when six states
  • California and New Jersey
  • based on his strength against Mr. Trump.
  • In this year’s campaign, Mr. Sanders has been embraced by white working-class voters and young people in many places
  • Kentucky is one of the nation’s biggest coal-mining states, and Mrs. Clinton stressed her commitment to coal miners.
Cecilia Ergueta

'The Art of the Qur'an,' a Rare Peek at Islam's Holy Text - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.
  • So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged
  • When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,
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  • Spilling out of books onto wall tiles, ceramic vessels, glass lamps, textiles, mosque domes and building facades, it was both a sensual and ideological unifier, totalizingly utopian
  • Symbols were introduced to orchestrate the all-important recitation of its contents: indicators of where to pause, where to place emphasis, how to pronounce words.
  • Material preciousness became an end in itself, turning Qurans into prestige objects and political currency, valued as diplomatic gifts, as war booty and as pious, grace-earning donations to mosques and mausoleums.
  • I watched them as they looked intently at the manuscripts arrayed around us, and I knew they were seeing things I couldn’t see, and feeling things I couldn’t feel, because they could read the words.
  • I was aware — and this is an easy perception — of the larger barriers of unknowing that stand between art and understanding, and of the barriers that stand between cultures
Javier E

Let's Not Pretend We Didn't Know This - 0 views

  • The intelligence briefing Senators got back in September was not definitive on this point of intention. But to suggest otherwise is to believe you can intend to knock over the bottle but be agnostic on spilling the milk. Of course, they were trying to elect Trump.
  • In fact, I'm not sure the two purported aims are even contradictory since, as we have already seen, electing Trump is one of the most disruptive things imaginable a foreign power could do not only to the American domestic political process but to the still largely America dominated global order.
  • One secondary revelation of the Post story is the apparently considerable role Mitch McConnell played in blocking any effort to make a bipartisan statement about the Russian campaign prior to the election - indeed to threaten the White House that he would attack them as playing partisan politics if they did more to publicize the intelligence assessment of Russia's role in the election.
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  • the hacking campaign certainly had a major effect on the progress of election. There's no question about that. But we knew all this months ago. Let's not pretend we didn't.
draneka

Trump Has 'Total' Confidence in Jeff Sessions; Lawmakers Seek Recusal - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The partisan furor that broke out with the Justice Department’s acknowledgment of the contacts late Wednesday began to take on a bipartisan sheen as the controversy spilled into Thursday morning.
  • “There is no longer any question that we need a truly independent commission to investigate this issue,” Mr. Cummings said.
grayton downing

Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes Cited in Report - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In the telling of some American officials, the C.I.A. drone campaign in Pakistan has been a triumph with few downsides
  • and the pace of the strikes, which officials frequently describe as “surgical” and “contained,” has dropped sharply over the past year.
  • Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare,
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  • “The drones are like the angels of death,” said Nazeer Gul, a shopkeeper in Miram Shah. “Only they know when and where they will strike.”
  • Their claims of distress are now being backed by a new Amnesty International investigation that found, among other points, that at least 19 civilians in the surrounding area of North Waziristan had been killed in just two of the drone attacks since January 2012
  • And on Friday, the drone debate is scheduled to spill onto the floor of the United Nations, whose officials have recently published reports that attacked America’s lack of transparency over drones.
  • Even when the missiles do not strike, buzzing drones hover day and night, scanning the alleys and markets with roving high-resolution cameras.
  • In theory, the Pakistani security forces should be in charge.
  • Unusually for the overall American drone campaign, the strikes in the area mostly occur in densely populated neighborhoods. The drones have hit a bakery, a disused girls’ school and a money changers’ market, residents say.
julia rhodes

Russia Is Quick to Bend Truth About Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Blood has been spilled in Ukraine again,” wrote Mr. Medvedev, once favored in the West for playing good cop to the hard-boiled president, Vladimir V. Putin. “The threat of civil war looms.”
  • It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.
  • In a report released Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that threats to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, cited repeatedly by Russian officials and in the Russian news media as a potential rationale for Russian military action, were exaggerated and that some participants in the protests in the region came from Russia.
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  • . “The Russia leadership doesn’t care about how it’s being perceived in the outside world, in the world of communication, in the world where we have plurality of information and where information can be confirmed and checked. This is a radical change in attitude toward the West.”
  • Adding to the public frenzy about imminent Kiev-ordered violence, Life News, a pro-Kremlin tabloid television station, offered a bounty of 15,000 rubles, or slightly more than $400, for video of Ukrainian military forces mobilizing in eastern Ukraine — suggesting that such activity was secretly underway.
  • Russia has flatly denied any role in the unrest in eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Foreign Ministry, which normally champions the authority of the United Nations, dismissed the new humans rights report as biased. In a statement, Aleksandr Lukashevich, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called it “one-sided, politicized and unobjective.”
  • Still, he said the propaganda was strikingly effective in Crimea, throwing the West off-balance and buying Russian forces just enough time to solidify their control over the peninsula.
  • Mr. Putin said in a phone call Tuesday with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that Ukraine was on the brink of civil war, a point Mr. Medvedev also made at a news conference later in Moscow, adding that the government in Kiev was to blame. Mr. Medvedev also repeated the Kremlin’s frequent assertion that Russian speakers were under threat in Ukraine — the very claim United Nations officials rejected in their report.“The only way to preserve Ukraine and calm the situation,” Mr. Medvedev said, requires “recognizing that Russian citizens are the same as Ukrainians and, therefore, can use their own language in everyday life.”
Javier E

Big Soda Makers Agree on Effort to Cut Americans' Drink Calories - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The three largest soda companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — have pledged to cut the number of sugary drink calories that Americans consume by one-fifth in about a decade, through a combination of marketing, distribution and packaging.
  • was an acknowledgment by the companies of the role their products play in the country’s obesity crisis and the escalating rates of diabetes and heart disease that accompany it.
  • in low-income communities, sugary sodas may account for a half or more of the calories a child consumes each day. Sugary soft drinks account for about 6 percent of the average consumer’s daily calories.
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  • They will expand the presence of low- and no-calorie drinks, as well as drinks sold in smaller portions, and use their promotional skills to educate consumers and encourage them to reduce the calories they are drinking.
  • The program will cover company-owned vending machines and coolers in convenience stores, as well as fountain soda dispensers like those found in fast-food restaurants and movie theaters. The companies control almost all of those machines, in addition to about one-third of vending machines and 80 percent of coolers.
  • It also will spill into grocery stores in end-of-aisle promotions and other marketing. “We’ll use the most critical levers we have at our disposal, and the focus really will be on transforming the beverage landscape in the U.S. over the next 10 years,”
  • “While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.
  • From 2000 to 2013, calories consumed through sugary drinks fell 12 percent, according to Beverage Digest, attributed to declining soda sales and increased consumption of water and low-calorie drinks.
  • “I suspect they’re promising what’s going to happen anyway,” said Kelly Brownell, an expert on obesity and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “All the trends are showing decreased consumption of high-calorie beverages, and so what better way to get a public relations boost than to promise to do what’s happening anyway?”
Javier E

Eli Pariser on the future of the Internet - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

  • Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.
  • What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.
  • The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days
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  • So there's this enormous flood of bits, and we need help trying to sort through it. We turn to these personalization agents to sift through it for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in. At the end, it's a set of code, it's not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don't think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you're interested in investments.
  • change happens on a bunch of levels, and the first is on an individual level. You can make sure that you're constantly seeking out new and interesting and provocative sources of information. Think of this as your information diet. The narcissistic stuff that makes you feel like you have all the right ideas and all the right opinions -- our brains are calibrated to love that stuff because in nature, in normal life, it's very rare. Now we have this thing that's feeding us lots of calories of that stuff. It takes some discipline to forgo the information junk food and seek out stuff that's a little more challenging.
  • the second piece is we've had institutions that have been mediating what we get to know for a long time. For most of the last century they were newspapers that produced about 85 percent of the news in that model. They were always commercial entities. But because they were making so much money, they were able to afford a sense of civics, a sense that the New York Times was going to put Afghanistan on the front page, even if it doesn't get the most clicks. So newspapers found this kind of happy medium that didn't always work perfectly, but it worked better than the alternative. I think now the baton is passing to Google, to Facebook, to the new filters to develop the same kind of sense of ethics about what they do. If you talk to the engineers, they're very resistant because they feel like this is just code, it doesn't have values, it's not a human thing. But of course they're writing code, and every human-made system has a sense of values.
  • the Internet was built on the principle that it would carry all different types of data. And it didn't really care what kind of data it was carrying. It was going to make sure that it got from Point A to Point B. That's the Internet: There's kind of a social contract between all the machines on the Internet that says, "I'll carry your data if you carry my data, and we'll leave it to the people on the edges of the network -- to your home PC or the PC that you're sending something to -- to figure out what the data means." That's the net neutrality principle.
  • big companies like Verizon and Comcast are looking at how the Internet is eroding their profit margins. They're saying to themselves, what can we do to get a piece of this growing pie? They want a tiered Internet where you can pay them to go to the front of the line with your data. That will really erode that amazing thing we all know the Internet facilitates: that anyone with an idea can reach the world. You talk to venture capitalists and they're scared. They say a new start-up is just never going to be able to buy the speed that a Google or a Microsoft will be able to. Incumbent industries will be able to get their data to you quickly and new start-ups won't have a chance. And as a result, you'll have a drying up of the entrepreneurialism that's happened on the Internet. And you'll have a drying up of the Wikipedias, the nonprofit projects. Wikipedia works because it's just as fast as Google. When Wikipedia starts to slow way down relative to Google, you're more likely to just go to Google
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