Author Archives: Sheeritwern

Liam Neeson Joins UNICEF’s Campaign To Stop Violence Against Children, Citing “Taken” As Inspiration

Mother Jones

Actor Liam Neeson—recently famous for playing a good-natured CIA torturer who massacres ethnic stereotypes who’ve kidnapped his daughter—has a long history of working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In 1997, Neeson was the celebrity face of Change for Good, a partnership between UNICEF and international airlines. Since then, he has traveled to Mozambique in support of HIV and AIDS prevention programs, and became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2011.

And this week, UNICEF began promoting their new public service announcement starring Neeson. The PSA is part of a campaign to combat violence against children around the world, from gang rape to cyber-bullying. “As a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, I have long followed the issue of violence against children and the devastating impact it has on children, families and communities,” Neeson said. “It was a topic that became increasingly real to me as a child growing up in Ireland and during the filming of Taken, which focuses on one aspect of violence and abuse against children in the form of trafficking and sexual exploitation.” (Neeson has lent his time and celebrity to a number of causes and charities, including that time he stripped almost completely naked to raise money for breast cancer research.)

Watch the PSA here:

“By generously giving his time and talent…Liam Neeson helped garner attention to UNICEF’s #ENDviolence initiative,” Marissa Buckanoff, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, told Mother Jones in an email. “His compassion and dedication to the issue will make a real difference in children’s lives as this powerful video message is one more way to urge everyone…to join forces and make the invisible visible and help stop violence against children.”

Other celebrity Goodwill Ambassadors include “Twitter Nazi hunter” Mia Farrow and Orlando Bloom. UNICEF works with famous entertainers on a regular basis; for instance, pop singer Katy Perry traveled with the organization to visit slums and villages in Madagascar earlier this year.

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Liam Neeson Joins UNICEF’s Campaign To Stop Violence Against Children, Citing “Taken” As Inspiration

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The Coal Industry Knows That Enviros Are Winning

Mother Jones

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The coal industry is worried about environmental threats. Not threats like climate change, superstorms, or wildfires. Threats posed by environmentalists.

In May, the American Coal Council—an industry group whose membership includes the biggest coal producers and consumers in the US—hosted a webinar called “What Environmental Activists Are Planning for Coal in 2013.” As the invitation put it, “Using social media and community organization tactics, these groups are savvy, motivated and may be off your radar.” The industry has begun to refer to this kind of strategy as a “war on coal” that aims to stop pollution from coal-fired power plants.

Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a New York-based marketing firm that works with businesses like Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America, put together the presentation on the “environmental threats” posed by groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and Organizing for America (the activist group spun off from Obama’s election campaign). Mother Jones obtained a copy of their slideshow. Using newspaper headlines and promotional materials from environmental groups, MXM’s presentation points out all the ways environmental activists have found success in taking on coal.

One slide points out the “strength in the environmental narrative” and lists headlines from stories on the decline of coal and the rise of renewables.

The next slide notes enviros’ “ability to drive national attention.” Another slide notes that recent efforts to get universities to divest from fossil fuels are “a potent form of publicity.”

Ross Parman, who put the presentation together, told Mother Jones by email that MXM doesn’t do work for ACC; he just put this presentation together for the council. “I was asked to pull together this really top-level overview of some of the messaging and specific campaigns that have targeted the coal industry,” said Parman. “The presentation wasn’t intended to focus on environmental activists or messaging about climate change, just the campaigns and messages from 10,000 feet.”

What’s interesting about this is that it shows that anti-coal activists are winning—and that the coal industry is worried. The industry has used the allegation that government regulators and environmentalists are waging a “war on coal” to fight off any and all attempts to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants. But it’s not working.

Luke Popovich, the vice president for communications at the National Mining Association, penned an op-ed in the industry magazine Coal Age on a recent court decision upholding the EPA’s regulatory authority on Clean Water Act permits that noted as much. “Anyway, ‘war on coal’ never resonated with much conviction among ordinary Americans,” he wrote. “For them, the EPA keeps the air and water clean, their kids safe.”

But Popovich’s piece, as Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette pointed out last month, goes on to call for a doubling down on the rhetorical strategy.

And then, when President Obama announced his climate plan last week, the industry and its allies in Congress, launched into the “war on coal” cries once again. I guess some people never learn.

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The Coal Industry Knows That Enviros Are Winning

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A Couple of Graphical Lessons From the Government’s Huge Hospital Chargemaster Data Dump

Mother Jones

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Today the government released data showing how much different hospitals charge for the same procedure. I’ve been struggling since last night to figure out what to say about this, since in one way there’s no news here. The fact that there are huge disparities has been well known for quite a while. This new data simply lays it out in more mind-numbing detail than usual. For now, then, I’m just going to offer up a couple of good graphical presentations that I’ve seen. The first is your basic map, courtesy of the New York Times. I zoomed in on Los Angeles here:

Take a look in the hospitals in the middle. There’s a disparity of 2-4x in pricing between hospitals that are only a couple of miles apart. Why? Some is probably due to the nature of the cases they take, and the amount of unpaid work they do. But 2-4x? What accounts for this? Part of the answer comes from the chart below, courtesy of the Washington Post:

This doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a fair amount. The private sector, we’re told, is always more efficient than the public sector. Competition, you understand. But that doesn’t seem to be the case in the healthcare industry. I will allow you to draw your own conclusions.

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A Couple of Graphical Lessons From the Government’s Huge Hospital Chargemaster Data Dump

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Will the Boston Bombings Kill the Public Police Scanner?

Mother Jones

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Tens of thousands of people were tracking the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects on Friday morning when the police scanner went dark.* City officials had taken to Twitter to chide social-media users for publicizing unverified reports and key details, such as the location of police units. But the decision to shut the scanner down ultimately fell to Broadcastify, a company that offers a free online scanner app. “Boston area law enforcement feeds are temporarily offline to protect law enforcement resources and their efforts during the manhunt underway in the Boston Metro area,” a statement on the firm’s website informed users.

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What These Tweets Tell Us About Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Stunned Reactions From Former Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Did Boston Bombing Suspect Post Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube?


Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Charged With Using WMD

The suspension of the scanner feed was temporary, and by no means comprehensive; it was just a little bit harder to find. But that could soon change. Over the last few years, an increasing number of municipalities have ditched their old scanners for encrypted channels. That, in turn, has left reporters and transparency advocates scrambling to keep up. Given the post-manhunt focus on scanner traffic, Watertown could be the beginning of a big switch. As Breaking News‘ Cory Bergman tweeted, “Safe bet that every major police force in the country will encrypt their radios after this is over.”

Police scanners have been accessible to private citizens and shortwave hobbyists for years, but things have come to a head over the last decade, as technological advancements have made it possible for almost anyone to listen in—and from anywhere.

For now, regulation is fairly weak. In 1997, after a Florida couple secretly recorded a meeting of top House Republicans, Congress considered the Wireless Privacy Enhancement Act, which would have made it illegal for reporters to use scanners to monitor police and fire activity. (The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.) A handful of states, such as Indiana, prohibit the possession of police scanner smartphone apps due to concerns that criminals will use them to better avoid detection when they’re on the run—somewhat redundant, given that it’s already a crime to use police scanner information to aid and abet a crime.

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Will the Boston Bombings Kill the Public Police Scanner?

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Louisiana Judge Rules That Violent Felons Have Gun Rights Too

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A New Orleans judge ruled last Thursday that a law forbidding felons from owning firearms infringes their rights to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the state’s newly amended constitution.

Although Louisiana already had extremely permissive gun laws (and second highest gun-murder rate in the country), last November voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative backed by the National Rifle Association that made gun ownership a fundamental right with the same levels of protection as the freedoms of religion and speech.

The amendment requires judges to review gun-control legislation using “strict scrutiny,” the most stringent standard of judicial review. In his decision, Judge Darryl Derbigny wrote that statute RS 14:95.1, which bars firearm ownership for people convicted of violent crimes, such as murder, assault, rape and battery, and certain misdemeanors, is “unconstitutional in its entirety.”

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Louisiana Judge Rules That Violent Felons Have Gun Rights Too

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North Dakota Passes Ban on Abortions After 6 Weeks of Pregnancy

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The North Dakota legislature approved the most restrictive abortion laws in the United States on Friday, cutting off abortion access as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The bill, HB 1456, makes it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion if a heartbeat is detectable in the fetus—something that can happen as little as six weeks after conception. It passed the Senate by a vote of 26 to 17, and will now head to the desk of Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple.

North Dakota lawmakers have been considering a variety of anti-abortion bills. While this wasn’t their most extreme option—another bill would have outlawed all abortions, period—it does mean that North Dakota now has the most restrictive abortion law in the country. This comes just over a week after Arkansas claimed the crown for most restrictive abortion laws, passing a twelve-week ban.

The law will almost inevitably be challenged in court, as it takes a clear shot at Roe vs Wade‘s protection of a right to an abortion up until the point the fetus is viable. But legal groups challenging state restrictions have a lot on their hands as states undertake what Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, called a “state-by-state race to the bottom on women’s health” in an email after the North Dakota vote.

Mother Jones
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North Dakota Passes Ban on Abortions After 6 Weeks of Pregnancy

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MAP: Is the Next Fukushima in Your Backyard?

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Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world’s big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.

But here in the United States, there’s no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry’s top federal regulator, and found that, in 2012, 12 different nuclear power plants experienced “near miss” events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to “failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas”; in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One California plant already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.

In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:

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MAP: Is the Next Fukushima in Your Backyard?

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5 Natural Laundry Detergents + A Recipe to Make Your Own

Julie F.

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5 Natural Laundry Detergents + A Recipe to Make Your Own

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