Tag Archives: top stories

4 Big Unanswered Questions About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks in Paris

by RevaGavinvb Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, information has slowly emerged about the attackers, their alleged affiliations with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State, and their path to radicalization. But many unanswered questions remain. Here are some key unknowns:

Is a “third suspect” in the Charlie Hebdo shootings still at large?
Following the massacre at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, police were initially searching for three suspects. Two of them were Cherif and Said Kouachi, who were ultimately killed in a dramatic shootout with French police. The third suspect was Cherif Kouachi’s brother-in-law, 18-year-old Mourad Hamyd, initially identified as the getaway driver who spirited the brothers away after the attack. It turned out, however, that Hamyd was never there. He turned himself into the authorities after seeing his name plastered all over the news and was eventually released from police custody last Friday, two days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings took place. Hamyd says he still has no idea why police targeted him, though some media outlets have reported that the cops got his name from an ID card discovered in the attackers’ abandoned getaway car. Left unresolved is the question of whether there was in fact a third suspect who drove the getaway vehicle, as some eyewitnesses to the attack reported. (Eyewitness reports can often be unreliable.) Currently, French authorities are pursuing at least six possible accomplices to the attacks, including Hayat Boumeddiene; she is the common-law wife of Amidy Coulibaly, who killed a French policewoman and massacred four people in a kosher grocery story before he was gunned down by police.

Continue Reading »

Read More: 

4 Big Unanswered Questions About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks in Paris

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4 Big Unanswered Questions About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks in Paris

When "Top Chef" Star Tom Colicchio Went to Washington

by Shelley9010 Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On a fall day in a congressional office bedecked with University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) paraphernalia, Tom Colicchio and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) were getting on like old college buddies.

Up on Alaska’s Mohawk River, the congressman insisted, you can still spear salmon with a pitchfork. “I was in Juneau half an hour and caught 30 fish,” countered Colicchio, the smooth-domed celebrity chef, who’d chosen a navy blazer for the occasion. “I said, ‘Nah, this isn’t fun anymore, this is boring.'” But Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo’s Top Chef and founder of the New York City restaurants Gramercy Tavern, Craft, and Colicchio & Sons (his boys are 3, 5, and 21)—wasn’t here simply for the pleasantries.

More than 700 chefs had already signed a petition supporting a DeFazio-sponsored bill, currently stalled in the House with 67 cosponsors, that would require food manufacturers to disclose their GMO ingredients. A subset of the signatories were on the Hill to lobby legislators and staffers. “As chefs, we know that choosing the right ingredients is an absolutely critical part of cooking,” the petition reads. “But when it comes to whether our ingredients contain genetically modified organisms, we’re completely in the dark.” The chefs were joined by reps from activist groups—including Food Policy Action, the Center for Food Safety, a national campaign called Just Label It, and the Environmental Working Group—to address the issues of transparency, food safety, and the massive amounts of money ($36 million in the last election) the food industry has spent fighting GMO-labeling initiatives.

Invited to observe the meeting with DeFazio, I took advantage of the chance to give Colicchio a light grilling. Here are a few tidbits Colicchio gave me on some of his favorite topics:

On states rights: “We typically label things not because they’re dangerous. If they’re dangerous, we take them out of the food supply. But we believe everything in our processed foods should be labeled.â&#128;¨ Like some labels say “modified food starch.” Why modified? It’s been altered. I’m not asking for a skull and crossbones—simply a line in the ingredient list that says ‘GMO corn.’ That’s it!

“We’re not debating the science of GMOs, but I would say there’s an ever-increasing environmental issue because of the overuse of herbicides. If you look at the health of the soil, if you care about the environment, how much carbon is in the ground, you wanna know what’s in your food.â&#128;¨ This is a recent development, where people in the food industry are starting to care about the policies behind these issues. Typically consumers who care about food, they’re not thinking about policy. Like when they go to a farmers market, they’re probably paying more—there are policies that are keeping those foods more expensive than processed ones. I don’t quite understand how people who care about states’ rights all of the sudden don’t believe states have a right to label. Those same people will say the states have a right to raise animals a certain way. Where did all the states’ rights people go? I want them! They’re somewhere in this building!”

On customer confusion: “I always use this example: It’s summer, and you go into the supermarket and see all the beautiful strawberries. One is labeled local. One is labeled organic and ‘made in Chile’—it’s GMO free, but people don’t know that. People will go, ‘Oh, that one’s local, so I’ll buy that.’ That lack of transparency puts the organic farmer at a competitive disadvantage.”

On getting his kids thinking about (and actually eating) good food: “I find that the trick to get them to eat is to bring them shopping. I started gardening this year, and they are so interested in watching stuff grow. And I want to teach them patience, because they’re so focused on immediate response of hitting a button and something happens. My older son really loves food and really cares about it. He isn’t into policy yet, but we had a food policy booth set up at Lollapalooza, and he manned it this year because I couldn’t get there. I had to entice him with lots of free music.”

On his own childhood dinners: “We had a family that had to be at the table at a certain time every single night. I don’t think I was a picky eater. I don’t remember. The only thing I do remember is my older brother would constantly steal the food off my plate.”

On his earliest cooking mishap:â&#128;¨ “I would bake a lot with my grandmother. I grew up in a four-family home in New Jersey. There were two homes on the plot and my grandparents lived in the other building. So I made this blueberry pie and I had to walk it a couple hundred yards to the side house. We’re on the second floor, and my grandmother insisted that I put it in a brown paper bag and hold it straight. I kept saying, “Oh, it’ll be okay.” I run home, upstairs. I take it out, big moment, and the blueberries all flew out of the pie!”

Visit link:  

When "Top Chef" Star Tom Colicchio Went to Washington

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on When "Top Chef" Star Tom Colicchio Went to Washington

Will West Virginia Schools Have to Teach "False Science"?

by BevRosmanfd Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The West Virginia State Board of Education (SBOE) has drawn the ire of science education groups after voting on standards that encourage students to debate the causes of climate change.

As first reported in The Charleston Gazette, a member of the state board of education requested last year that alterations be made to a blueprint of new science standards, suggesting in particular that climate change not be treated as a “foregone conclusion.” After the state Department of Education drafted those changes and made the standards available for public comment, the SBOE voted in December to officially adopt them.

The science standards are based on guidelines from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of curriculum benchmarks for schools. The NGSS was developed by a consortium of 26 states, including West Virginia, in an effort to make sure students around the country are being taught rigorous coursework.

According to the Gazette, the original standards asked students to assess the reasons for the rise in global temperatures over the past century. The new version, however, asks students to assess the “rise and fall” in global temperatures. Additionally, while the original standards asked students to use data to make an “evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change,” the new standards ask students to assess the credibility of “geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models…for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

In 2013, climate scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that they are 95 percent certain that humans are causing global warming. Similarly, a 2013 report from the Institute of Physics found that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is being driven by humans.

Lisa Hoyos, director and co-founder of the group Climate Parents, a group that advocates for climate change education, told The Huffington Post that she does not think science class should be treated like a “debate club,” since scientific teaching is based on evidence. She said her organization will be putting out a petition to try and “revoke the false science from West Virginia.”

“There’s an ethical expectation that parents have of Board of Education members—that they are committed to ensuring that kids are taught actual, accurate science,” Hoyos told HuffPost this week.

Mark McCaffrey, programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education, also said in a statement that he thinks “a few board members have been allowed to ride roughshod over the scientific consensus on climate reflected in the NGSS.”

Gayle Manchin, president of the state Board of Education and wife of US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), noted that people didn’t seem to take issue with the standards during the public comment period. However, after receiving negative feedback about the standards more recently, she said the board will hold further discussions on them.

“I believe that our board members are motivated to think about what will be best for the students of West Virginia, and I value their expertise in different areas,” Manchin told HuffPost.

She said she does not think the substance of the standards has changed, and she said the new standards “encourage children to think more critically and evaluate all the information that’s out there.”

According to The Charleston Gazette, board member Wade Linger was among the people leading the effort to change the science standards, and was the one to suggest replacing the phrase “the rise,” as in the rise of global temperatures, with “the rise and fall.” However, Linger told HuffPost that he was not the only voice calling for the revisions.

“The press has given me way too much credit for this,” said Linger. “This was a board decision, not a single-person decision.”

Linger said he is pleased with the new standards because they “teach kids how to think, not what to think.”

Still, Marie Hamrick, co-president of the West Virginia Education Association’s Raleigh County affiliate, told The Register-Herald that she thinks the state board ignored scientific evidence when voting to change the standards.

“This group thinks that they are smarter and wiser than the scientific community that designed the questions,” Hamrick said.

The new standards will be implemented in West Virginia schools for the 2016-2017 school year.

Taken from:  

Will West Virginia Schools Have to Teach "False Science"?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will West Virginia Schools Have to Teach "False Science"?

The Keystone XL Pipeline Is One Step Closer to Approval

by DaciaStillings Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a victory for proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the pipeline’s proposed route through the state can go forward.

The decision means that TransCanada, the company seeking to build the pipeline, can build the route that Nebraska’s former governor approved in 2013. The court ruling was split, with four of the court’s seven judges agreeing with a lower court that the 2012 law used to grant TransCanada that permission was unconstitutional. However, Nebraska requires a supermajority of at least five judges to strike down the law. “We believe that Nebraska citizens deserve a decision on the merits. But the supermajority requirement…coupled with the dissent’s refusal to reach the merits, means that the citizens cannot get a binding decision from this court,” the court wrote in the majority opinion.

In 2012, the Nebraska legislature passed a law that gave the governor authority to approve both the pipeline and the use of eminent domain to access land along the pipeline route. In January 2013, then-Gov. Dave Heineman (R) said yes to TransCanada’s proposed route through his state. But some landowners along the route sued, arguing that the legislature’s action violated the state constitution and that the decision should have been left to the Public Service Commission.

The plaintiffs won in county court early last year, and the state appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court, which held oral arguments this past September.

Given the ongoing state-level fight, the Obama administration announced last April that it was delaying a federal decision on the pipeline until after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled.

But the newly Republican-controlled Congress is pushing legislation that would override the Obama administration’s process, which GOP lawmakers say has dragged on too long, and force approval of the pipeline. The House is slated to vote Friday on its legislation, while the Senate plans to vote next week.

The State Department said previously that it would give federal agencies at least 14 more days to comment on the route once Nebraska reached its decision, which the Obama administration would then need to consider before making up its own mind on whether to approve the pipeline. That means a final decision is probably still weeks in the making.

Nebraskans who filed the lawsuit over the route said they want TransCanada to follow state laws.

“We’ve always thought that if the pipeline is going to be built, it has to be built in compliance with Nebraska law and make sure that Nebraska landowners are fully and fairly paid for an easement with reasonable terms,” David Domina, a lawyer representing landowners who sued, told the Huffington Post before the Nebraska Supreme Court decision was issued.

The focus now turns to President Barack Obama for a final decision—for both pipeline supporters and opponents.

“President Obama has no more excuses left to delay or deny the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement.

“Today’s ruling was a loss for propriety rights, and sends the signal that a foreign corporation can buy its way through our state legislature,” Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, which opposes the pipeline, told HuffPost. “We now turn to our president, who knows that this route is too risky to approve.”

UPDATE—The White House announced Friday that it still intends to veto the House Republican bill authorizing Keystone, even after the Nebraska ruling. From spokesman Eric Schultz comes the following statement:

Today, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied a challenge to the validity of the route for the Keystone XL Pipeline under Nebraska law. The State Department is examining the court’s decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest. As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out. Regardless of the Nebraska ruling today, the House bill still conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests, and if presented to the President, he will veto the bill.

Read the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision below:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1392617-nebraska-supreme-court-keystone-opinion.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1392617-nebraska-supreme-court-keystone-opinion”
);

Read article here: 

The Keystone XL Pipeline Is One Step Closer to Approval

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Keystone XL Pipeline Is One Step Closer to Approval

People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

by LillianJacob Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Dozens of demonstrations have been developing around the world in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre in Paris at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where masked gunmen murdered 12 and injured 10 others. French newspaper Le Monde is tracking the growing number of rallies, including those in Berlin, London, New York, and Montreal.

In Paris on Wednesday evening, a crowd reportedly numbering in the thousands gathered at Place de la Republique, rallying in solidarity around the phrase “Je Suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” Some raised pens in tribute to the slain cartoonists.

There was also a stirring tribute from the entire newsroom of Agence France-Presse on Wednesday:

Read the article:

People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

Elizabeth Warren Fights Back Against the "Magical Accounting" of Trickle-Down Economics

by MarioAkehurst Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Elizabeth Warren says “America’s middle class is in deep trouble.” Although general economic indicators are on the rise, the Massachusetts senator argued in a speech Wednesday morning, pay has stagnated for all but the richest Americans—and trickle-down voodoo economics and loose Wall Street regulation are to blame. And although Warren has given every indication that she’s happy to remain in the Senate and pass on liberals’ hopes that she’ll run for president in 2016, her speech—at an AFL-CIO conference on wages—had the tone of a presidential campaign barnstormer.

Warren kicked off her address by noting that the current economic recovery, while real, hasn’t helped most Americans. The stock market’s up, but half the country doesn’t own any stocks. Inflation is low, but that doesn’t matter for millennials burdened by overwhelming student debt. Corporate profits have risen, but that hardly matters to people who work at Walmart and are paid so little that they still need food stamps, Warren said.

This divergence between the rich and the rest has been long in the making, Warren said. Since the 1980s, she noted, wages have actually fallen for everyone outside the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. “All of the new money earned in this economy over the past generation—all that growth in the GDP—went to the top,” Warren said.

The spirit of trickle-down politics is to blame, according to Warren. It’s just “magical accounting scams that pretend to cut taxes and raise revenue.” In the 1980s, President Reagan and his economic swami Arthur Laffer pushed the concept that slashing taxes on the rich will actually benefit the poor; the top 1 percent would have more money to spend and would end up revving the entire economy. “Trickle-down was popular with big corporations and their lobbyists,” Warren said, “but it never really made much sense.” This theory has generally been debunked by economists but is still loved by Republicans. The new House majority has already changed the way Congress does math in order to align with trickle-down theories, and Republican governors have tanked state budgets by lowering taxes on the rich—all while promising those tax cuts will help state economies.

Add in Wall Street deregulation, and you’ve built a powder keg to keep the middle class down. “Pretty much the whole Republican Party—and, if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats—talked about the evils of ‘big government’ and called for deregulation,” Warren said. “It sounded good, but it was really about tying the hands of regulators and turning loose big banks and giant international corporations to do whatever they wanted to do.”

But when it came to laying out an actual vision for how to boost the wages of middle-class workers, Warren remained vague, relying on typical broad strokes of Democratic policy, pushing for more investment in infrastructure and education, higher taxes on the rich, increased opportunities for workers to unionize, and trade policies to favor American manufacturing. Warren didn’t spell out how she’d achieve these goals. The closest she got to a specific policy recommendation was when she called for breaking up Wall Street banks.

Warren closed on a somber note, recalling how, after her father suffered a heart attack, her family got by on her mother’s minimum-wage job at Sears. “I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me,” Warren said, “an America that built opportunities for kids to compete in a changing world, an America where a janitor’s kid could become a United States senator. I believe in that America.” The hushed crowd jumped to its feet in applause. Sure, Warren’s story fit the theme of why wages need to be higher. But it was exactly the sort of personal-as-political tale that wouldn’t sound out of place on the presidential campaign trail.

Visit site:  

Elizabeth Warren Fights Back Against the "Magical Accounting" of Trickle-Down Economics

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren Fights Back Against the "Magical Accounting" of Trickle-Down Economics

BREAKING: President Obama Will Veto Congress’ Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

by VilmaHerrmann Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President Barack Obama is planning to veto a bill that would force approval of the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, according to the Associated Press:

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that the president’s position hasn’t changed since November, when pipeline supporters in Congress last attempted to push through its approval—an effort that fell just one vote shy of the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. Obama was adamant then that approval for the pipeline come not from Congress, but from the State Department, which normally has jurisdiction over international infrastructure projects like this one. A final decision from State has been delayed pending the outcome of a Nebraska State Supreme Court case, expected sometime early this year, that could alter the pipeline’s route.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McDonnell and other Republicans have vowed to make passage of a new Keystone XL bill a top priority for the new year, and they seem prepared to move forward with a vote later this week. The bill is likely to pass. But the challenge for Republicans is to garner enough support from Democratic senators to achieve the 67 votes required to override a presidential veto. Yesterday, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told reporters he had just 63 votes.

Even if Congress fails to override Obama’s veto, it still won’t be the end of what has become the flagship issue for US climate activists; the possibility remains that the State Department could still approve the project. But the Obama administration may be leaning against approval. In December, the president said the pipeline is “not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.”

This post has been updated.

Link to original: 

BREAKING: President Obama Will Veto Congress’ Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BREAKING: President Obama Will Veto Congress’ Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

The World’s Two Richest Men Made $21 Billion Last Year

by RoxannaZiq Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As everyone from Ted Turner to Drake has said, the hardest part of getting rich is making the first million. The rest just comes naturally.

The fact that wealth begets more wealth was illustrated once again last year by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, currently the two richest people on Earth. According to Bloomberg, the pair finished 2014 a combined $21.1 billion richer than when the year began. (Gates‘ fortune rose $8.1 billion to a total of $86.6 billion. Buffett‘s rose $13 billion; he’s now worth $73.8 billion.)

Gates and Buffett are aware of their privilege. They have both advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy. They have also poured billions of their own money into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest funders of charitable causes like infectious disease research, poverty reduction, and (more controversially) education reform.

The Gates Foundation would be a fitting destination for Gates’ and Buffett’s new wealth, but it’s not the only place they could spend last year’s earnings. Here’s a list of some of the things that money could buy:

Humanitarian assistance for the world’s war-ravaged people. Earlier this month, citing “an unprecedented level of crisis around the world,” the UN asked member states for $16.4 billion to help at least 57.5 million people who “have experienced unimaginable suffering” in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Burma, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Chad, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Iraq. With $21 billion, Gates and Buffett could meet that request and still have nearly enough money left over to cover the US response to Ebola.

Food for the year for 3.1 million American families. As of last month, an American family with a toddler and a small child needs at least $566.70 each month in order to eat nutritious food, according to the US Department of Agriculture. But this minimum threshold is out of reach for many families. In 2013, 17.5 million households struggled at some point to get enough food, according to the USDA. Extra help would be especially useful given that Congress cut food stamps by $8.7 billion in February.

College educations for 278,000 students. With tuition, fees, room, and board averaging $18,943 per year, attending a state school for four years is out of reach for many Americans. For students who can’t afford college—or who are paying for it by taking on massive debt—a lot of money here could go a long, long way.

The Chesapeake Bay, restored. The Chesapeake Bay is a major source of tourism and fishing revenue for Maryland and Virginia, but agricultural runoff has turned large swathes of it into a marine dead zone. State and local governments have been working to restore the bay. A recent estimate put the cost of the project at $14.4 billion over 15 years. At that price, Gates’ and Buffett’s 2014 earnings could cover the restoration cost—with enough money left over to match the combined pledges from the US, Japan, UK, and Germany to the United Nation’s Green Climate Fund, a pot of money intended to help poor countries deal with global warming.

The means to save the Amazon. In 2009, then-Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the governments of the world to put $21 billion into a fund to manage protected areas of the Amazon and restore other, deforested areas. Five years later, the fund has raised less than $1 billion, mostly from the Norwegian government.

Five record-setting midterm elections. A flood of dark money made this year’s midterms the most expensive in history. With their 2014 earnings, Gates and Buffett could match all sides’ political spending more than five times over.

An aircraft carrier. The US Navy is currently replacing it’s Nimitz class carriers—already the largest warships in the world—with something larger and more technologically advanced: the Gerald R. Ford class carriers. At just $12.9 billion apiece, Gates and Buffett could buy one and have enough money left over to procure a pair of high-tech destroyers that are nearly invisible to radar.

Read original article – 

The World’s Two Richest Men Made $21 Billion Last Year

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The World’s Two Richest Men Made $21 Billion Last Year

The Pope Thinks Climate Change Is a Major Threat. So Do American Catholics.

by SherryCranford Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Pope Francis, the leader the Catholic Church, is closing out 2014 in his typically headline-grabbing fashion. He used a traditional Christmas address to issue a scathing takedown of the political squabbling that infects Vatican bureaucracy, and he was also credited as a key backroom player in the thawing of US-Cuba relations.

Next on his list? Climate change.

Over the weekend, the Guardian reported that the pope will issue the first-ever comprehensive set of Vatican teachings on climate change, in the form of an encyclical—or “papal letter”—sent to churches worldwide. He will also personally lobby for climate action action in a series of high profile meetings ahead of the all-important UN global warming negotiations in Paris next year. From the Guardian:

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated…by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

A papal letter “is among the highest levels of teaching authority for a pope,” said Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant. These edicts “always make news, because they are rare and comprehensive,” he added.

Singling out climate change is also significant. “It is the first time ever an encyclical letter has been written just on the environment,” Misleh said. “The faithful, including bishops, and all of us who adhere to the Catholic faith, are supposed to read it and examine our own consciences.”

Mobilizing believers to embrace climate action could be a very big deal, given the sheer number of people who identify as Catholic in the US—around 75 million—he said. “If we had just a fraction of those acting on climate change, it would be bigger than the networks of some of the biggest environmental groups in the US,” he said. “That could help change the way we live our lives, and impact our views on public policy.”

The impact would be felt beyond Catholicism too, said Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. She called the forthcoming letter “one of the most important documents on the moral implications of what we are doing to our planet.” In particular, Tucker said, the document “will contain compelling teachings on environmental justice for the poor and those who are victims of climate disruption around the world.”

But would America’s Catholics welcome climate advocacy from the pope? Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion suggests that many would.

The survey asks a series of questions about the environment and religion in an attempt to discern how faith impacts our thinking on science, current events, and policy. The biggest takeaway when it was released in November was that nearly half of Americans say natural disasters are a sign of “the end times,” as described in the Bible. But there are other, more detailed findings about individual religions, too. The researchers break down the results by religious and racial group: White evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, black Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, Jewish Americans, other non-Christians, and “religiously unaffiliated.”

And indeed, most Catholics seem to agree with the pope that climate change poses a serious threat. Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

Nearly three-quarters of Hispanic Catholics surveyed agree that climate change constitutes a “crisis” or a “major problem.” The same is true for a majority (53 percent) of white Catholic respondents. Of the groups surveyed, Jews are the most concerned about climate change, with nearly 80 percent calling it a “crisis” or a “major problem.” On the other end of the spectrum, a majority (54 percent) of white evangelicals see climate change as only a minor problem, or not a problem at all.
Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of Catholics surveyed said climate change is the “most pressing” environmental issue we face. That’s more than white mainline Protestants and evangelicals, but less than black Protestants or those who are unaffiliated with a religion.
The pope’s climate message is likely to resonate with what’s happening already at a grassroots level in churches, as least in Hispanic communities, according to the survey. Seven-in-10 Hispanic Catholics say their clergy discus climate change often (22 percent) or sometimes (48 percent). Hispanic Catholics are also more likely than any other group surveyed to say their congregation has sponsored climate change-related activities, like group discussions or educational programs on the topic.
Interestingly, there’s wide agreement that acting now on climate change will matter economically. Majorities of all groups surveyed—including 69 percent of Hispanic Catholics and 63 percent of white Catholics—agree that dealing with global warming now will help prevent economic calamities in the future.

The pope’s climate plans follow a call by prominent Catholic bishops to end the use of fossil fuels and secure a global agreement to fight climate change. “As the church, we see and feel an obligation for us to protect creation and to challenge the misuse of nature,” declared one of the statement’s authors, Monsignor Salvador Piñeiro García-Calderón, the Archbishop of Ayacucho, during the recent climate conference in Lima, Peru. “We felt this joint statement had to come now because Lima is a milestone on the way to Paris, and Paris has to deliver a binding agreement.”

It’s also not the first time Pope Francis has advocated tough climate action. Ahead of the Lima meeting, the pontiff wrote a letter to Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s minister of the environment and the host of the meeting, to urge action. “The time to find global solutions is running out,” wrote the Pope. “We can find adequate solutions only if we act together and unanimously.”

Climate change, he added, will “affect all of humanity, especially the poorest and future generations. What’s more, it represents a serious ethical and moral responsibility.”

See original:  

The Pope Thinks Climate Change Is a Major Threat. So Do American Catholics.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Pope Thinks Climate Change Is a Major Threat. So Do American Catholics.

The Best Corrections of 2014

by HildegaSizemore Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In 2014, journalists produced a number of solid blunders and fails. That’s bad news for industry esteem, but great news for lovers of hilarious corrections. Here are some of our favorites from the past year:

The Economist, Drug Legalization: The magazine’s collective memory gets hazy when attempting to recall the finer details of their push for drug legalization.

New York Times, Dick Cheney: An amazing error that speaks volumes about the Bush years.

New York Times, Kimye Butts: In a story titled “Fear of Kim Kardashian’s Derriere,” the Grey Lady cites a fake interview where Kanye West compares his butt to the infamous butt of his wife.

Mumbai Mirror, Narendra Modi: Sarcasm!

NPR, Cow Farts: In a story about gassy cows and climate change, NPR “ended up on the wrong end of cows.”

New York Times, “Good Burger”: In which the Times made it embarrassingly obvious their newsroom is unfamiliar with the 1997 film classic, “Good Burger.” (Plus, a bonus #teen error!)

Vox, Barry Manilow: While cataloging the slew of celebrities who appeared on Stephen Colbert’s final show, Vox confuses old white man Barry Manilow for old white man Rod Stewart.

New York Times, Gershwin grammar gaffe: Gershwin 101.

Courier-Mail, Birth Announcement “Retraction”: Let’s end on a heartwarmer. Well done, Bogert clan!

Jump to original – 

The Best Corrections of 2014

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Best Corrections of 2014