Author Archives: cuppyteen

Google Doodle Goes Gay For Sochi Olympics, Sticks It To Russia

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, Google publicly addressed Russia‘s anti-gay policies. To coincide with the Sochi Winter Games, the Google homepage was updated to depict a rainbow flag (an image associated with LGBT movements) on its Olympics-themed doodle. Check it out:

Google.com

And if Vladimir Putin goes to Google’s homepage in Russia, this is what he’ll see:

Google.ru

And when you’re not on the homepage, here’s the search bar:

Google.com

“Google has made a clear and unequivocal statement that Russia’s anti-LGBT discrimination is indefensible,” Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “Now it’s time for each and every remaining Olympic sponsor to follow their lead. The clock is ticking, and the world is watching.”

For those keeping count, the Guardian is another “G” that recently modified its logo to resemble a rainbow flag to mark the start of the Sochi Olympics this week.

The Google doodle has been used to deliver political messages before. For example, the company once censored its logo to protest controversial anti-piracy bills.

Google did not respond to Mother Jones‘ requests for comment.

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Google Doodle Goes Gay For Sochi Olympics, Sticks It To Russia

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Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

NRC

Construction efforts at Yucca Mountain were abandoned in 2010, leaving an empty tunnel in a mountainside.

So long as the U.S. government is going to stand around shrugging its shoulders over the nation’s growing nuclear waste stockpile, it must stop charging nuclear power plant owners $750 million a year in waste-storage fees.

That was the ruling of a federal appeals court on Tuesday. It’s the latest twist in a decades-long saga over the fate of the plutonium and other radioactive waste that’s piling up at nuclear plants across the country — more than 70,000 tons so far.

In 1987, Congress directed the federal government to prepare a nuclear waste dump site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The government has collected about $30 billion in fees from nuclear power plants to fund the project since then, and spent $15 billion on the controversial project, Bloomberg reports.

But for some reason the plan to dump all that waste in the Nevada countryside is not popular among Nevadans, most notably Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D). He helped convince the Obama administration in 2010 to abandon planning and construction efforts for the Yucca Mountain waste repository.

In August, a federal appeals court declared that decision illegal, saying it ignored the 1987 law, and ordered the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume the Yucca planning efforts. The NRC says it lacks the needed funds, but it has begun begrudgingly moving forward with “an incremental approach.”

Meanwhile, power plant operators have been suing the U.S. government, successfully forcing it to pay their nuclear waste storage bills. That’s because the government has been collecting fees to pay for a solution to the waste problem but has failed to provide one. Last week alone, courts ordered the U.S. Department of Energy to compensate three power plant owners to the tune of more than $200 million for waste storage costs.

And now, Tuesday’s ruling threatens to cut off funding that could be used to pay for an eventual solution, if one is ever forthcoming. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Department of Energy was ordered by a federal appeals court to move toward ending a fee utilities pay for nuclear waste disposal because the government has no alternative to the canceled Yucca Mountain repository. …

Because the agency hasn’t come up with a legally adequate fee assessment, it was ordered to send Congress a proposal to change the fee to zero until it “chooses to comply with the act as it is currently written, or until Congress enacts an alternative waste management plan,” the court ruled.

The decision today was hailed by the utilities and nuclear power-plant operators who brought the suit and have been frustrated with the Obama administration’s decision to stop work on Yucca without providing an alternative.

Nobody in the administration seems to want to think about the country’s nuclear waste problem — even though they’re all too happy to promote the construction of new reactors.

Some members of Congress, meanwhile, are trying to establish a new bureaucracy to give the waste conundrum the attention it deserves. The Nuclear Waste Administration Act [PDF], sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and currently before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, would create a nuclear waste administration and a process for finding sites where the waste could be stored.

Finding such sites would, of course, be a most unenviable task.


Source
Summary of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, U.S. Senate
Nuclear Reactor Waste Fees Ordered to Zero by Appeals Court, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

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What Leading Scientists Want You to Know About Today’s Frightening Climate Report

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The polar icecaps are melting faster than we thought they would; seas are rising faster than we thought they would; extreme weather events are increasing. Have a nice day! That’s a less than scientifically rigorous summary of the findings of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this morning in Stockholm.

Appearing exhausted after a nearly two sleepless days fine-tuning the language of the report, co-chair Thomas Stocker called climate change “the greatest challenge of our time,” adding that “each of the last three decades has been successively warmer than the past,” and that this trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

Pledging further action to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “This isn’t a run of the mill report to be dumped in a filing cabinet. This isn’t a political document produced by politicians… It’s science.”

And that science needs to be communicated to the public, loudly and clearly. I canvassed leading climate researchers for their take on the findings of the vastly influential IPCC report. What headline would they put on the news? What do they hope people hear about this report?

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What Leading Scientists Want You to Know About Today’s Frightening Climate Report

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The Happy-Sad Tales of Tom Barbash

Mother Jones

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“If this was only the start of the darkest part of his life, Timkin marveled at what he’d already been able to make of it.”

Thus concludes Balloon Night, one of the sad yet joyous stories in Stay Up With Me, a new collection out this week from Tom Barbash, former small town reporter turned fiction writer.

Timkin, the protagonist of Balloon Night, faces an onslaught of holiday revelers streaming into his Manhattan apartment for the Thanksgiving blowout party he hosts with his wife every year. Except she left him for good two days ago, with no way to cancel the festivities on such short notice. So he endeavors to drown her absence in booze and friends until, at the climax of the night, the desperate realization that she isn’t coming back sets in with an inexplicable wave of euphoria. “To Amy!” he calls out, toasting the poignancy of his pain.

The characters that populate Barbash’s stories are all hurting—some of them quite badly. But it doesn’t diminish their capacity for wonder. They collide with life, losing siblings and spouses, parents and children. They suffer bad stepfathers and endure the exploits of their sexually active offspring. The magic of the stories comes in the small, transcendent moments when the world crushing in doesn’t seem so bad.

Barbash has published two books previously: the award-winning novel The Last Good Chance, based on the years he spent reporting in upstate New York, and the New York Times bestseller On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11, a nonfiction account of the revival of the financial services firm after it lost nearly seven hundred employees in the Twin Towers. He teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts and lives in Marin County, Calif.

I caught up with Barbash to ask about class, clueless New Yorkers, and JD Salinger’s lost works.

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The Happy-Sad Tales of Tom Barbash

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Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq War Architect, Is Skeptical of Intervening in Syria

Mother Jones

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Donald Rumsfeld weighed in yesterday on the Obama administration’s possible plans to intervene militarily in Syria. He is skeptical and expressed confusion about the whole situation during an interview with Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto:

There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation.

You remember Donald Rumsfeld. He was the 13th and 21st United States Secretary of Defense, first under President Gerald Ford and then President George W. Bush. His hobbies include playing squash and roping cattle. He has championed wrestling as an Olympic sport. He is one of the greatest unintentional poets of the 21st century. And he tweeted this last March:

There are, in fact, many reasons to be skeptical and cautious about bombing Syria; even if many of Rumsfeld’s neoconservative brothers in arms haven’t gotten that memo, yet. US intervention in the bloodshed in Syria may or may not work out, but Rumsfeld has zero credibility here. As a member of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld gave strong indication that it was in our, and everybody else‘s, national interest to—because of those weapons of mass destruction, of course—send ground troops to Iraq.

Right… That. Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley/US Army

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Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq War Architect, Is Skeptical of Intervening in Syria

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Internal Documents Reveal How the FBI Blew Fort Hood

Mother Jones

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Our Yearlong Investigation Into the Program to Spy on America’s Muslim Communities


How the Bureau Enlists Foreign Regimes to Detain and Interrogate US Citizens


When Did Lefty Darling Brandon Darby Turn Government Informant?


Charts from Our Terror Trial Database


Watch an FBI Surveillance Video


Documents: FBI Spies and Suspects, in Their Own Words

Last Thursday, as the jury in the trial of Nidal Hasan was deliberating, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared on CBS News and discussed a string of emails between the Fort Hood shooter and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric with ties to the 9/11 hijackers. The FBI had intercepted the messages starting almost a year before Hasan’s 2009 shooting rampage, and Mueller was asked whether “the bureau dropped the ball” by failing to act on this information. He didn’t flinch: “No, I think, given the context of the discussions and the situation that the agents and the analysts were looking at, they took appropriate steps.”

In the wake of the Fort Hood attacks, the exchanges between Awlaki and Hasan—who was convicted of murder on Friday—were the subject of intense speculation. But the public was given little information about these messages. While officials claimed that they were “fairly benign,” the FBI blocked then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s efforts to make them public as part of a two-year congressional investigation into Fort Hood. The military judge in the Hasan case also barred the prosecutor from presenting them, saying they would cause “unfair prejudice” and “undue delay.”

As it turns out, the FBI quietly released the emails in an unclassified report on the shooting, which was produced by an investigative commission headed by former FBI director William H. Webster last year. And, far from being “benign,” they offer a chilling glimpse into the psyche of an Islamic radical. The report also shows how badly the FBI bungled its Hasan investigation and suggests that the Army psychiatrist’s deadly rampage could have been prevented.

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Internal Documents Reveal How the FBI Blew Fort Hood

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"Uncertainty" Is Gone, But the Sluggish Recovery Is Still With Us

Mother Jones

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Why has the economy recovered so sluggishly since the 2008-09 recession? Reasonable people can point to lots of reasons: debt overhang, the zero lower bound on interest rates, loss of housing wealth, and too little fiscal stimulus, among others. But if none of those actual reasons suit your political agenda, you can always just make something up. Republicans, for example, found it convenient to blame “uncertainty.” The business community was just so stonkered by the blizzard of new rules and regulations from the Obama administration that it was unwilling to invest in the future.

Never mind that business investment has actually recovered fairly nicely. Never mind that outside the financial sector (which is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch), Obama hasn’t introduced any more regulations than other recent presidents. Never mind that lack of consumer demand was more than enough to explain whatever reluctance businesses might have had to build new factories.

Never mind all that. Republicans wanted to blame the sluggish recovery on mountains of red tape from the business-hating Obama administration, and the press played along. This means that “uncertainty” got a lot of media attention, which in turn means that if you have an “uncertainty index” based partly on media mentions, it would have shown persistent elevation during 2010-12, the heyday of the uncertainty campaign. Sure enough, that’s exactly what it showed:

Amazingly enough, the index suggests that economic uncertainty was higher in mid-2012 than it was during mid-2008, when the entire global financial system was collapsing around our ears. And just as amazingly, it’s plummeted ever since. Today it’s only barely higher than its 2000-07 average.

On a substantive basis, the fact that uncertainty spiked during the debt ceiling crisis (labeled with an N on the chart) makes sense. The rest of the high level of uncertainty between 2010 and 2012 really doesn’t. However, if instead you read the last few years on this chart as basically measuring the strength of the Republican campaign to pretend that Obama was strangling business growth with his tsunami of rules and regulations, then it makes perfect sense. Republicans had plenty of incentive to promote that theme during campaign season, and now that it’s over they don’t. So the index goes down.

This comes via Jim Tankersley, who points out that if uncertainty really was driving the sluggish recovery, we’d expect to be seeing a hiring boom now that it’s declined. But there’s really been no sign of this. As we knew all along—and as the media should have known all along—”uncertainty” was just an invented partisan talking point. It no longer serves any purpose, so now it’s gone. But the sluggish recovery is still with us.

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"Uncertainty" Is Gone, But the Sluggish Recovery Is Still With Us

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The Senate Avoids the Nuclear Option—and Saves the Filibuster

Mother Jones

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The US Senate doesn’t appear to be going “nuclear,” after all.

On Tuesday morning, senators were close to a deal, brokered in part by Republican John McCain of Arizona, to prevent Majority Leader Harry Reid from changing the rules of the Senate with a simple majority vote—a tactic called the nuclear option. For years, Reid has been frustrated by Senate Republicans, who have used filibusters to block votes on 16 of President Barack Obama’s nominees for executive-branch positions. (Only 20 executive-branch nominees were filibustered under all previous presidents combined.) Unless Republicans allowed votes on Tuesday on a handful of key nominees, Reid threatened to use the nuclear option to change Senate rules so that nominees could be approved with just 51 votes instead a filibuster-proof 60.

But it looks like there will be no nuclear option. Instead, Senate Republicans say they’ll drop their opposition and allow votes on five nominees, including Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Tom Perez to the Department of Labor, Gina McCarthy to the Environmental Protection Agency, Fred Hochberg to the Export-Import Bank, and current National Labor Relations Board chairman Mark Gaston Pearce. In exchange, Obama will toss out two other NLRB nominees, Richard Griffin and Sharon Block, and replace them with two new people. Labor unions will reportedly get a say on who Obama nominates.

On the status of deal, Reid said at noon on Tuesday: “We have a few little Is to dot and Ts to cross. Everything’s doing well.”

The Senate’s compromise comes after days of brinkmanship, nasty rhetoric, and intense talks between Democrats and Republicans. On Monday night, all 100 members of the Senate met in the Old Senate Chamber to hash out some sort of deal to avoid using the nuclear option. No specific deal was reached then, but those talks appeared to have laid the groundwork for Tuesday’s compromise. “I hope that everyone learned the lesson last night: that it sure helps to sit down and talk to each other,” Reid said on Tuesday.

This is not the first time senators have threatened to go nuclear. In 2005, a group of 14 senators cut a deal to vote on several of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees after the GOP leadership threatened to use the nuclear option.

In an appearance at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank Monday, Reid chalked up the GOP obstruction to wanting to gum up the government while also undercutting agencies like the NLRB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “We have a situation where Republicans have created gridlock, gridlock, gridlock,” he said. “And it has consequences. It’s not only bad for President Obama; it’s bad for the country. The status quo won’t work.”

With a compromise in the works, the Senate moved ahead to vote on the Obama administration’s nominees. The Senate voted 71 to 29 to allow a full vote to confirm Richard Cordray, whom Obama nominated to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during a recess period two years ago. That’s a good sign that Cordray’s nomination will be approved. It’s also a tough vote for Senate Republicans, 43 of whom pledged to block any nomination—including Cordray’s—to run the CFPB because they oppose how the CPFB functions.

So where does this leave the Senate? Reid may have backed down from using the nuclear option this time, but there’s nothing stopping him from threatening to use it again. And if—really, when—Republicans retake control of the Senate, they can threaten to use it, too. As Ezra Klein at the Washington Post explains, “This will be the new normal.”

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The Senate Avoids the Nuclear Option—and Saves the Filibuster

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Former EPA chief Lisa Jackson takes a job at Apple

Former EPA chief Lisa Jackson takes a job at Apple

Chesapeake Bay Program

Lisa Jackson has a sweet new job.

Apple, after getting hit with criticism for using dirty energy at its data centers, has been increasingly drawing on green power — wind, solar, geothermal, and, now, former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Tuesday that Jackson, who served as Barack Obama’s top environmental official during his first term, will join the company as vice president for environmental initiatives.

From The Washington Post:

Cook, who made the announcement at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital D11 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., said Jackson will be reporting directly to him and is “going to be coordinating a lot of this activity across the company.”

After coming under fire from environmental groups such Greenpeace for powering its data centers with fossil fuel energy, the company vowed to switch over to renewable sources. In March it announced that all of its data centers now run on solar, wind or geothermal energy.

Jackson said in an email that she is “incredibly impressed” with Apple’s green tinge:

“Apple has shown how innovation can drive real progress by removing toxics from its products, incorporating renewable energy in its data center plans, and continually raising the bar for energy efficiency in the electronics industry,” she said. “I look forward to helping support and promote these efforts, as well as leading new ones in the future aimed at protecting the environment.”

Maybe Jackson can help the company avoid stumbles like it had last year when it withdrew from a green electronics certification program, got roundly bashed, then did a quick about-face and rejoined the program.

Read a Grist interview with Jackson from last year. 

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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Former EPA chief Lisa Jackson takes a job at Apple

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What’s The Greenest Way To Get Where You’re Going?

Isabel Araujo

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What’s The Greenest Way To Get Where You’re Going?

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