Tag Archives: top stories

You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something

by irj972ys Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Admit it: When you see milk past the “sell by” date in your fridge you’re apt to skip the smell test and throw that stuff out. What you might not know is that the date is actually meant for store stockers to keep track of product rotation. It offers little indication of when the milk may actually sour. You wouldn’t be alone in tossing out perfectly good milk. Nine out of 10 Americans needlessly throw away edible, unspoiled food based on “use by,” “sell by,” and “best before” labels, according to a report released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School.

The problem of wasted food is serious and multifaceted. As Kiera Butler reported earlier this week, a whopping one-third of the global food supply is wasted. Not only that, but this discarded food is responsible for 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third worst carbon-emitting country on the planet after China and the United States, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Here in America, we’re even worse: Roughly 40 percent of our food goes uneaten, amounting to an economic loss of $165 billion a year, the NRDC reported in 2012. The authors of this week’s analysis found that much of that waste is due to “misinterpretation” of the date labels.

“The average household is losing up to $450 on food each year because they don’t understand the labels,” said co-author Dana Gunders, an NRDC food & agriculture staff scientist, during a press call Wednesday morning. It’s a travesty, she added, especially when one in six Americans are “food insecure.” It’s also a terrific waste of human resources—think about all the time and energy that goes into harvesting, transporting, and processing those trashed foods. Eighty percent of our water, more than half of our land area, and 10 percent of our energy are consumed by agriculture.

The authors of the NRDC study, titled “The Dating Game,” place the blame on inconsistent and irrational labeling laws, which tend to be nonbinding: “This convoluted system is not achieving what date labeling was historically designed to do—provide indicators of freshness. Rather, this creates confusion and leads many consumers to believe, mistakenly, that date labels are signals of a food’s microbial safety. This unduly downplays the importance of more pertinent food safety indicators.”

The solution? A system of clear and consistent federally mandated labels for foods. Here are the authors’ three major recommendations:

1. Sell by dates, only meant as business-to-business information, should be made invisible to consumers; only useful labels that indicate when the food will likely spoil should be stamped on packaging.

Click here to view the NRDC infographic.

2. Government should mandate a clear set of labels for consumers, with unambiguous language that clearly distinguishes between dates for safety and dates for quality. For instance a ready-to-eat sandwich should indicate the date by which it should be eaten, with a label saying something like “unsafe to eat after.” Date labels should be removed from non-perishable goods and replaced with quality-based dates with more general information about when the product peaks in taste.

3. Date labels should be come with more information about safe food handling, including time and temperature exposure indicators. Ted Labuza, a co-author and food safety expert at the University of Minnesota, has argued for labels that indicate temperature changes of the product during shipping and handling.

But the authors say consumers also have a responsibility to reduce the amount of wasted food. They offer a handy infographic for demystifying your fridge with tips such as never letting ice build up in the freezer, and keeping the fridge temperature below 40 degrees F. Labuza said he has kept milk fresh at that temperature for up to six weeks.

Learning some of the tips that our grandparents used could be helpful too. For instance, this rule of thumb for eggs: If it sinks in a bowl of water, it’s good; if it floats, toss it out.*

Obviously, you want to toss anything that looks or smells rotten. In short, trust your senses, not the labels.

*Correction: An eagle-eyed reader noted that this adage was initially in the reverse order.

Original article: 

You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on You Just Threw Out a Perfectly Good Gallon of Milk Because You Think the "Sell By" Date Means Something

9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

by Unique Article Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Oh, BuzzFeed, we love your serious reporting and we also love when you try to make ridiculous memes win the internets. But when you inadvertently help tenuous gun-lobby talking points go viral? Not so much.


10 Crazy Gun Laws Introduced Since Newtown


More Than Half of Mass Shooters Used Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines


The Showdown Over Gun Laws From Coast to Coast


Newtown “Changed America,” But Will Congress Change Gun Laws?


Under Obama, Feds Holster Gun Cases


A Guide to Mass Shootings in America


10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down


Want to Buy a Gun Without a Background Check? Armslist Can Help

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Yesterday BuzzFeed staff writer Ryan Broderick posted a listicle titled “9 Potential Mass Shootings That Were Stopped By Someone With A Personally Owned Firearm.” That’s a pretty definitive headline for a post that can’t back up its claims.

“Can law-abiding citizens with guns combat mass shootings?” Broderick asks by way of introduction. That’s it—there’s no attempt to define his terms or explain the scope of his reporting. What exactly constitutes a “law-abiding citizen” or a “personally owned firearm”? And how do you define a mass shooting? Broderick doesn’t answer these potentially inconvenient questions, letting his post suggest that armed civilians are responsible for stopping nine mass shootings that were either in progress or about to start.

Contrast that with what my colleague Mark Follman has found in his extensive reporting on mass shootings (which is based on an clear explanation of the terms and criteria being used.) While pro-gun advocates claim that courageous gun owners have routinely stopped mass shootings, the reality is that armed civilians rarely respond to shooting rampages—and those who have are rarely, if ever, successful. Most of the examples they cite are either ambiguous or involve trained law enforcement or military personnel—not the ordinary citizens with personal firearms that Broderick alludes to in his clicktastic headline and just-asking-a-question subhead.

Here are the nine incidents listed in Broderick’s post and why they deserve a click on BuzzFeed‘s trademark “FAIL” button:

1. The Pearl High School shooting: In this case, a 16-year-old who’d killed two people and wounded seven was subdued by an assistant principal who retrieved a handgun from his truck. However, the shooting may have already been over when the assistant principal arrived. And he wasn’t an ordinary civilian: He was an Army reservist. All this is explained in issue of People whose image is in Broderick’s post. However, his sole link goes to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag (motto: “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out”).

2. The Parker Middle School dance shooting: Another case where a teenaged shooter may have already finished his rampage, which killed one person and wounded three, when an armed adult showed up. Yet Broderick says definitively that the shooting “was ended” when a man with a shotgun intervened.

3. The Appalachian School of Law shooting: Another deadly incident in which trained law-enforcement personnel stepped in. From a New York Times article Broderick links to:

Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said.

”We’re trained to run into the situation instead away from it,” said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.

Though the article notes that Gross grabbed his service pistol, Broderick vaguely describes it as a “personally owned firearm,” suggesting that he carried it for personal use.

4. The New Life Church shooting: Broderick makes it sound like this shooting, which killed two people and wounded three, was stopped by “a former police officer” who just happened to be at church that day. In fact, she was a church security officer.

5. The Trolley Square shooting: Yet another incident where a off-duty cop got involved. The officer who confronted the shooter during this Salt Lake City shooting was “well-trained for such an event,” according to the local news article Broderick cites.

6. The Golden Market shooting: “The details are murky,” writes Broderick, “but according to reports, a man entered a Golden Market in Virginia in 2009 and began firing a gun.” The “reports” he links to are a breathless post on AmmoLand and a pro-gun op-ed in the Collegiate Times. The Richmond Times-Dispatch‘s account of the incident makes it sound like a botched robbery, not a thwarted mass shooting.

7. The New York Mills AT&T store shooting: A good example of a planned mass shooting being averted—by a cop. In this 2010 incident, a 79-year-old man with a handgun walked into an AT&T store, wounded one employee and apparently planned to kill several others whose names were on a list in his pocket. An off-duty police officer who was in the store shot and killed the shooter.

8. The Clackamas Town Center shooting: Nick Meli, an off-duty security guard, drew his concealed handgun on the shooter during this 2012 rampage that left three dead at an Oregon mall. Broderick doesn’t mention that Meli was a guard, but asserts that shooter Jacob Roberts “retreated” after seeing Meli produce his weapon, which he did not fire for fear of hitting a bystander. It’s not clear if Meli affected the outcome of the incident, which ended with Roberts killing himself. After a 926-page investigative report on the shooting was released, a sheriff’s spokesman told The Oregonian, “We have no information that the suspect’s—Roberts’—actions were ever influenced by anything Mr. Meli did. But I also can’t deny it.”

9. The San Antonio Theater shooting: In December 2012, a 19-year old opened fire at a San Antonio restaurant where he and his ex-girlfriend worked. He then shot at a police car and headed into an adjacent cinema, where he wounded one person. He was pursued and wounded by a security guard who was an off-duty sheriff. Breitbart described it as a would-be “mass shooting,” and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze suggested that the suspect had intended to shoot up a crowded theater. Yet the shooting appears to have been sparked by the breakup and it’s unclear how many people the suspect intended to kill. Broderick doesn’t acknowledge this uncertainty, adding more fodder to the questionable premise that more “good guys with guns” can stop the next mass shooting before it happens.

View original article:

9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

Charts: Income Growth Has Stalled For Most Americans

by trqe9vwyqm Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Yesterday the Census Bureau released its latest income data, confirming what millions of Americans already know: the recession may be over, but the recovery has yet to trickle down. Specifically, the Census reported that median household incomes didn’t budge between 2011 and 2012.

Digging deeper into the new data reveals more evidence of the widening income gap between the rich and the rest.

The only bright side of stalled incomes is that they are no longer experiencing the steep decline that started in 2007 before the recession hit. But that’s hardly cause for celebration: At $51,017, the real median household income in 2012 is even less than it was at the end of the ’80s, and it’s down 9 percent from its high in 1999.

This loss of real income hasn’t affected all Americans equally. For the top 20 percent of earners, average incomes grew 70 percent since 1967, and they grew 88 percent for the top 5 percent. Meanwhile, middle-income households have seen their earnings grow just 20 percent in the past four decades.

This translates into a greater share of total income going to top earners. In 2012, the top 20 percent took in more than half of all income in the United States, according to the Census.

To put that into sharper focus, I’ve charted how each percentile’s share of total income has changed since the late ’60s. After experiencing significant growth in the mid-1970s, the bottom 20% of earners have seen their share steadily drop. Compare that with the top 5 and 20 percent, which have seen their piece of the pie expand in the past two decades while all other Americans’ shrunk.

This trend is also seen in the latest income data complied by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which shows that the top 10 percent of earners now hold their largest share of total income since the eve of the Depression.

The new Census data on the bleak state of the American Dream came one day after Forbes released its latest list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Together, they are worth more than $2 trillion. The past year has been very good to them:

The average net worth of list members is a staggering $5 billion, $800 million more than a year ago and also a record. The minimum net worth needed to make the 400 list was $1.3 billion. The last time it was that high was in 2007 and 2008, before property and stock market values began sliding. Because the bar is so high, 61 American billionaires didn’t make the cut.

As Piketty and Saez report, 95 percent of all income growth between 2009 and 2012 went to the 1 percent.

Sources: Chart 1: Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012″ (PDF); charts 2-4: Census Bureau historical income data; chart 5: Emmanuel Saez, UC Berkeley (Excel)

Front page image: rangizzz/Shutterstock

Continued here – 

Charts: Income Growth Has Stalled For Most Americans

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charts: Income Growth Has Stalled For Most Americans

How Energy Efficient Is Your City?

by Markianish Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Does your city have a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically? Is it seeking to reduce car use through bike share programs and public transit subsidies? Does it partner with utility companies to help small businesses and homeowners save energy? And does it lobby for statewide energy-efficiency legislation?

Those are just a few of the policies that have made Boston the top-ranked city for energy efficiency, according to a new report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Portland, Ore., placed second, followed by New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

ACEEE ranked 34 major American cities—the 25 most populous incorporated ones, plus the central cities of nine other major metropolitan areas—according to their efforts to promote energy savings. The report looked at building codes, community-wide energy initiatives, transportation policies, energy-saving programs involving public utilities, and efforts to improve the efficiency of government building. You can see where each city ranked on the map above.

The cities’ scores are based largely on their implementation of efficiency policies—enforceable building standards, for instance—rather than on quantifiable reductions in energy use and emissions. During a conference call following the release of the report, ACEEE official Eric Mackres said the report focused on specific policies because the group wanted it to serve as a “playbook of actions you can take to improve efficiency.” He added that “because most cities aren’t as good at promoting energy efficiency as Boston and Portland, we don’t have as good of data on energy savings and energy consumption…and as a result, we weren’t able to compare all of the cities in the scorecard using those energy metrics.”

Most cities did substantially worse than the top performers. While Boston received 76.75 of the possible 100 points, 23 cities earned fewer than 50 points. Jacksonville, Fla., finished dead last with only 17.25 points. The Sunshine State is also home to two other cities—Miami and Tampa—that finished in the bottom 10. Mackres pointed to several factors that led cities to score poorly, including a lack of support from some state governments and a lack of knowledge about the issue on the part of city policymakers. “A number of cities at the bottom have taken a variety of actions, but in a lot of cases they’ve been piecemeal and not tied into a broader strategy,” he added.

Original article: 

How Energy Efficient Is Your City?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Energy Efficient Is Your City?

Did Climate Change Worsen the Colorado Floods?

by Larry Daichea Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Last Thursday, as torrential rains turned into floods that washed away homes, roads, and bridges in Boulder, Colorado, and the surrounding region, the local National Weather Service forecast office went ahead and said what we were all thinking. It put it like this:

MAJOR FLOODING/FLASH FLOODING EVENT UNDERWAY AT THIS TIME WITH BIBLICAL RAINFALL AMOUNTS REPORTED IN MANY AREAS IN/NEAR THE FOOTHILLS.

The word “biblical” certainly captures the almost preternatural scale of the Colorado floods, and the rainfall that caused them. Indeed, according to climate scientist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “this single event has now made the calendar year (2013) the single wettest year on record for Boulder.”

But does that mean that climate change is involved? Although suggestive, broken records alone do not constitute definitive proof that humanity’s fingerprints have been left on a particular weather disaster. On the other hand, climate scientists say with considerable confidence that a hotter planet will feature more extreme rain events, much like this one.

So what can actually be said about the Colorado floods in a climate context?

Just how extreme was this event? First off, it’s important to get a sense of how out-of-the-ordinary these floods—which have killed eight people and left hundreds unaccounted for—really were. That’s not difficult; superlatives have hardly been lacking to describe the event. Remarking on the “epic deluge,” meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of the popular Weather Underground site, had this to say:

According to the National Weather Service, Boulder’s total 3-day rainfall as of Thursday night was 12.30″. Based on data from the NWS Precipitation Frequency Data Server, this was a greater than 1-in-1000 year rainfall event. The city’s previous record rainfall for any month, going back to 1897, was 9.59″, set in May 1995. Some other rainfall totals through Thursday night include 14.60″ at Eldorado Springs, 11.88″ at Aurora, and 9.08″ at Colorado Springs. These are the sort of rains one expects on the coast in a tropical storm, not in the interior of North America!

So what caused such a deluge? That the rains were reminiscent of a tropical storm gives a hint as to how this occurred. What fell over Colorado last week was, in significant part, tropical moisture, pulled up all the way up to the Rockies from the Mexican coast by a confluence of atmospheric events. Furthermore, the rainfall on the Front Range was exacerbated by a so-called atmospheric “blocking pattern,” which produced a situation of stuck weather, in which one pattern (unending rain) persisted for a long period of time. “We had this giant cutoff low sitting over Salt Lake City, dredging up a continuous stream of tropical moisture,” explains Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas, who is founder of the Media Logic Group and has been frequently outspoken about the reality of climate change from a Republican political perspective.

Satellite imagery showing tropical moisture being pulled from the coast of Mexico up to Colorado. Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And here’s the first possible climate linkage: The idea that the jet stream has been altered as a result of climate change, leading to more stuck weather and more blocking patterns, is a serious one, and one that has also been brought up in relation to the odd behavior of Superstorm Sandy. “I’ve noticed since last September, since the record ice loss in the Arctic, that the jet stream has been misbehaving, more blocking patterns in general over the northern hemisphere,” says Douglas.

He’s not the only one: Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University has led the scientific charge when it comes to the connection between Arctic sea ice loss and mid-latitude weather extremes (for further explanation, see here). And while the issue remains debated, it’s certainly possible that global warming is making blocking patterns, like the one that helped produce the Colorado floods, more likely to occur on average.

Doesn’t climate change produce more extreme rainfall, period? The idea that there will be more extreme rainfall, in general, in a warming world is very well established scientifically at this point. “The science about future increases of extreme rainfall is very solid, just because we have a good understanding of the physics of it,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist and statistician with Climate Central and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Warmer air is going to hold more moisture,” Tebaldi continues, “so when something happens, there is going to be more available water to precipitate on us.”

If you want to get your inner nerd on about why this is the case, the answer is the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which states that as atmospheric temperatures increase, the amount of water vapor that the air can contain increases exponentially. For a good explanation, see here.

How much extra water vapor are we talking about here? “For 1 degree Fahrenheit, it’s something like 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere,” explains climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (which itself happens to be in Boulder). That extra water vapor, according to Trenberth, helps fuel and strengthen storms, even as it also gives them an added moisture supply, meaning that the net effect on increased rainfall may be 5 to 10 percent. For Trenberth, that would therefore mean that climate change contributed somewhat to the Colorado floods, but that’s very different from saying that it caused the entire event. “You can’t blame this thing on climate change,” he says.

Martin Hoerling of NOAA comes to a similar conclusion. “Global warming has led to an increase in the atmosphere’s water holding capacity, and empirical studies indicate a few percent of increase in water vapor to date,” he comments by email. That means that the majority of the moisture over Colorado was there not due to global warming per se, but simply because of the aforementioned atmospheric circulation patterns.

Are extreme rainfall events increasing, as predicted? Absolutely. NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center keeps extensive data on weather extremes, and has found that since the 1970s, there has been an uptick in one-day extreme precipitation events:

Extremes in U.S. one-day precipitation, 1910-2012 National Climatic Data Center

An increasing trend in extreme rains is also supported by the recently leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. The draft says that it is “very likely” that central North America has already seen a trend toward more extreme precipitation events and that there is “medium confidence” that humans have contributed to this change. In the future, moreover, this trend is expected to continue. According to the IPCC draft, “in a warmer world, extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions will very likely be more intense and more frequent by the end of this century.”

In this sense, the Colorado Floods are consistent with the general picture of what we’ve been seeing, and what we would expect to see, under climate change. That doesn’t make them directly caused by climate change, but it does put them in context.

What about Colorado’s climate future in particular? The future precipitation forecast for Colorado itself is less certain. The U.S. National Climate Assessment, which is currently in draft form, includes regional projections for how temperature and rainfall changes are expected to affect different parts of the United States. The report includes Colorado in the country’s Southwest region, which overall has seen a 12 percent increase in heavy precipitation since the year 1958 (considerably less than some other regions). Going forward, the southern part of the Southwest region, including states like Arizona and New Mexico, is actually expected to see a decrease in precipitation. But the picture isn’t as clear for Colorado; according to the National Assessment draft, projections aren’t in agreement with each other. However, even in areas where average rainfall is expected to decline, the percentage of overall precipitation falling in extreme downpour events is expected to increase. In other words, the shift remains towards more extremes.

And now for the really tough question: Did global warming in any way “cause” this event? So far, we’ve established that the Colorado floods are consistent with expected climate trends: more extreme rains (pretty certainly), and possibly more blocking patterns (still a new and debated issue). And we’ve also suggested that rainfall in this particular event may have been amplified, somewhat, by climate change.

But causation? That’s a very different, much knottier issue, as Kevin Trenberth’s remark above (“You can’t blame this thing on climate change”) makes clear. In fact, Trenberth himself has argued prominently that “no events are ’caused by climate change’ or global warming, but all events have a contribution.” The issue is further complicated by a large gap between how scientists understand the word “cause,” and how the lay public does.

“Correlation,” an XKCD comic.

Ordinarily, we think about “cause” in a simple sense in which one thing fully brings about another. Thus, I tripped and fell, and this caused me to have a bump on my head. But in the atmosphere, it’s hardly so simple. As we’ve seen, the Colorado floods were partially caused by moisture from the tropics, partly caused by a blocking pattern that held one weather system in place for an extended period of time, and perhaps also partly caused by past wildfires that increased the risk of runoff (to name just a few partial causes). The cognitive linguist George Lakoff has introduced the distinction between “direct causation” and “systemic causation” to help us tackle this sort of problem. The latter form of causation is not direct; rather, it is diffuse, partial, and usually captured in statistical relationships. But it is no less real for this reason, or less amenable to scientific analysis.

In the past, scientists have demonstrated, for a few individual events, that global warming made them more likely to occur in a statistical sense. That includes the 2003 heat wave in France, and a particularly devastating UK flood in 2000. (For an explanation, see here.) More recently, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UK Met Office released a landmark study on 2012’s extreme weather events, and whether climate change was involved, finding a role in some of them but not others. For instance, climate change was found to have made July 2012’s heat wave in the U.S. as much as four times more likely to occur, and increased the likelihood of the US’s anomalous March-May 2012 warmth by as much as 12 times. But no role was found for the 2012 US drought.

Not surprisingly, such an analysis has not yet been performed for the 2013 Colorado floods, but it surely will be. And what will be the result? That’s unclear. “With precipitation events it’s much harder than with heat waves,” explains Claudia Tebaldi, “because of these two aspects that combine, the thermodynamic and the dynamic.” The thermodynamic is the easy part: There’s more moisture, due to a warmer atmosphere. There’s physics on that. But the dynamics—whether, in a world without global warming, the atmospheric flow that created this event would still have occurred…well, that’s extraordinarily difficult to unravel.

So what’s the bottom line? With every extreme weather event nowadays, from Superstorm Sandy to the Colorado floods, there’s a strong inclination to link it to climate change. But once you get into the details, the word “link” becomes far too vague: Each event is different, and the ways in which it may or may not relate to a changing climate are also varied. Partial contributions may be present—global warming exacerbated Sandy’s storm surge through sea level rise, and probably contributed to some percentage of the rainfall over Colorado—and individual events may be consistent with larger trends. But ultimate “causal” connections remain difficult to establish and, according to Trenberth, the very attempt itself may be missing the point.

The real question is: Why would we expect it to be otherwise? When you conduct a massive experiment with only one planet as your test subject—or as scientists would put it, an experiment with an N of 1—this is the situation you create. And the proper way of thinking about that situation is clear: Even when you can’t be definitive, you can definitely be worried.

Continue at source: 

Did Climate Change Worsen the Colorado Floods?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did Climate Change Worsen the Colorado Floods?

Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

by euro9 Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

It’s already well known that Facebook and other social media networks harvest user data and sell it to companies that use that info to peddle their products to consumers. But some lenders have begun to find a new use for this information, scrutinizing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn data to determine the credit-worthiness of loan applicants. It’s an unprecedented practice that consumer advocates say can be unfair or discriminatory—and one that is poised to only become more prevalent in the years ahead.

Among the US-based online lenders that factor in social media to their lending decisions is San Francisco-based LendUp, which checks out the Facebook and Twitter profiles of potential borrowers to see how many friends they have and how often they interact; the company views an active social media life as an indicator of stability. The lender Neo, a Silicon Valley start-up, looks at the quality and quantity of an applicant’s LinkedIn contacts for clues to how quickly laid-off borrowers will be rehired. Moven, which is based in New York, also uses information from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites in their loan underwriting process.

Several international lenders have been using similar tactics for a while. Lenddo, for example, which makes loans to folks in developing countries, denies credit to applicants who are Facebook friends with someone who was late repaying a Lenddo loan. Big banks have not yet jumped on board with this controversial credit-vetting method, but consumer advocates and financial industry experts say it’s probably only a matter of time.

Continue Reading »

Link to article:  

Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

Posted in Anker, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

Who Still Does Third-Trimester Abortions?

by Aaron Doolsey Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

After Tiller
Oscilloscope


Inside Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic


South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers


GOP Bill Would Force IRS to Conduct Abortion Audits


Behind the Right’s Fetal-Pain Push


The House GOP’s Plan to Redefine Rape

See more MoJo coverage of reproductive rights.

One can understand the decision of the expectant mother after she learns that even if her baby were to survive delivery, his life would be short and marred by seizures and suffering. One can sympathize with the god-fearing couple whose unborn child is revealed to have terrible deformities and little hope for any real quality of life. And it’s not difficult to comprehend the choice of the young woman who became pregnant after being raped. But then there are the women who just waited—in denial, out of fear, or for some other private reason. No matter the case, the decision to undergo a late-term abortion is a complex moral dilemma for patients and doctors alike.

After the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita, Kansas church, only four doctors continued to provide third trimester abortions openly in the United States. After Tiller, a politically charged yet tender portrait by filmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, tells us the stories of these doctors (LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and Shelley Sella), who perform their duties under the very real threat of assassination.

The process of third-trimester abortion is especially wrenching. The practitioners must euthanize the fetus in utero by injecting a drug into its heart, and then induce labor so the woman can deliver a stillborn child. Some families hold funerals, saying hello and goodbye to their baby in the same devastating moment. In the film, one couple takes home tiny hand and foot prints.

Many Americans consider third-trimester abortion homicide; in a December 2012 Gallup poll, only 14 percent of respondents said it should be legal. This past June, in fact, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks, except in cases of rape, incest, and where the health of the woman is endangered. The Senate won’t even consider the legislation, and the White House has indicated it would veto such a bill. Still, 11 states have enacted similar abortion bans; Arizona even narrowed the window to 18 weeks, although the courts have blocked it and two other states from enforcing these laws, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

After Tiller demonstrates that these doctors—protégés, peers, and friends of the murdered abortion provider—understand better than anyone that their profession skirts a morally ambiguous line. At the same time, it succeeds at showing why their work is desperately, vitally important.

In medical school, Warren Hern started out as an obstetrician because he loved delivering babies, calling it a joyful and miraculous experience. Then he did a stint in the Peace Corps in an impoverished part of Brazil, working with post-natal women and also women recovering from illegal abortions—nearly half of whom died, he told the filmmakers. He also saw the horrible abuse of children born to parents who didn’t want them or who were unprepared to care for them. “I’ve looked at this from the beginning as a public health issue,” he says.

The film portrays LeRoy Carhart as being most in the crosshairs of anti-abortion protesters who alternately plead and pray or heckle and harass his clinic’s patients and staff. In February, shortly after the film debuted at Sundance, one of his patients died from complications related to an abortion procedure. Although the police filed no charges after investigating the case, the woman’s death sparked fresh outrage among anti-abortion groups. Carhart is now on the short list of abortion doctors targeted by Operation Rescue, whose senior policy advisor, Cheryl Sullenger, served prison time for plotting to blow up an abortion clinic in the 1980s. While the group doesn’t openly advocate for violence against abortion providers or patients, Sullenger’s phone number was found in possession of Scott Roeder, the man who murdered Tiller.

Although it is a woman’s choice whether to have an abortion, a doctor ultimately must agree to do the procedure. Here’s how Susan Robinson, one of the doctors profiled, justifies her decision to heed her patients’ wishes:

What I believe is women are able to struggle with complex ethical issues and arrive at the right decision for themselves and their families. They are the world’s expert on their own lives. So if somebody comes in and says, “I want an abortion,” whether or not she is articulate about it, let alone she has a great story to tell, isn’t the point. The point is that she has made this decision…For me, if I’m going to turn down a patient it should be because I think it’s not safe to take care of her. I think that is really the only reason that it’s fair to turn a patient down.

After Tiller opens in theaters in New York City on September 20. Check here for other screenings.

Also read: Meet Chicken & Egg Pictures, the driving force behind women-produced films like After Tiller.

Source: 

Who Still Does Third-Trimester Abortions?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Who Still Does Third-Trimester Abortions?

This Year Is on Track to Set Another Grim Record in Mass Shootings

by Ludie69E Posted on September 17, 2013

Mother Jones

At a press conference following Monday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief medical officer of Medstar Washington Hospital Center, offered some candid and heartfelt words: “I would like you to put my trauma center out of business. I really would. I would like to not be an expert on gunshots… Let’s get rid of this. This is not America.”

Unfortunately, this is America. Over the last few years there has been a pronounced rise in mass shootings, as our award–winning data investigation shows. The horror reached new heights not long ago: From a Colorado movie theater to a Connecticut elementary school, 2012 was a record year for what law enforcement refers to as “active shooter events” in public places, seven of which qualified for mass murder by the FBI’s definition. In terms of frequency this year is not far behind: There have now been five mass shootings in 2013, with more than 40 people injured and killed, from Santa Monica to Miami to to our nation’s capital. And without a quick response by law enforcement at a Florida university, or the heroics of Antoinette Tuff—an elementary school employee in Atlanta armed only with intelligence and courage against a gunman—there may well have been seven to date.

At Mother Jones, we’ve tracked mass shootings closely, analyzing 67 cases going back three decades. On Monday night, CNN’s Piers Morgan shared some of the data we’ve gathered—all of which is available to the public here—with several gun-rights enthusiasts. They didn’t seem to think much of it. Watch the heated exchange:

It’s not surprising that a discredited pundit like John Lott shows little regard for data. (That’s why Morgan keeps having him on; it makes for entertaining television.) But the reality of the nation’s gun-violence epidemic is getting harder and harder to dismiss, with new research from two different criminologists affirming that mass shootings have spiked. A report from Dr. Frederic Lemieux of George Washington University, presented at an international conference in July, found that “the frequency of this type of incident has accelerated in the past five years.” Dr. Pete Blair of Texas State University reached the same conclusion, as I detailed in this story in April.

And let’s not start up again with the NRA myth of arming “good guys” as a solution: As Blair observed in his research, not a single one of these attacks was stopped by an armed civilian. The carnage that took place in Washington, DC, on Monday was no exception. There the gunman died in a shootout with police—the second of two ways most mass shootings end when the perpetrator does not take his own life.

In the coming days, as more details emerge about Monday’s slaughter, some gun-rights advocates will no doubt continue to ignore the reality of mass gun violence. After all, it’s inconvenient for the $11.7 billion a year gun business. (Even when it actually increases demand.) But if we are to take Dr. Orlowski’s words to heart and set about getting rid of this problem, we need to recognize how often these killings occur, who’s carrying them out, and where the legally obtained, high-powered weapons used in them come from.

View post:  

This Year Is on Track to Set Another Grim Record in Mass Shootings

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Year Is on Track to Set Another Grim Record in Mass Shootings

Will the Supreme Court Stop Cops From Reading Your Text Messages?

by dig1iti43 Posted on September 17, 2013

Mother Jones

If you’re like many Americans, your cell phone is overflowing with personal information—text messages, emails, photos of your friends and family, an organized history of who you’ve been calling, private notes, automatic login to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, your favorite music, and even maps of where you like to run around your house. And if you’re anything like Mother Jones staffers, you probably keep your cell phone on you at all times. If I’m arrested on my way home from work (probably for eating on the Metro), you can bet that my smart phone will be in my pocket or my purse. And in Washington, DC, as well as most states across the country, the law won’t keep the arresting officer from taking my phone without a warrant, rifling through my text messages, copying the data for later use, and even breaking my password to do so—all things that would most likely be illegal if the officer went to my office and did them to my work computer, instead.

But that could soon change. The Supreme Court has been asked to consider two cases—United States v. Wurie and Riley v. California—which challenge the legality of warrantless cell phone searches under the Fourth Amendment. Police (and the Obama Administration) maintain that these searches are necessary, stopping suspects from deleting crucial information about drug deals and trafficking rings; but civil liberties advocates say that’s no excuse for officers not to get a warrant. Here’s everything you need to know about these searches, and whether the Supreme Court might stop them:

So, why are police allowed to search my cell phone without a warrant?

Terence McCormack, Flickr

The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect Americans from being searched by police without a warrant—but there are exceptions, one of which kicks in as soon as you get arrested. If you’ve got cuffs on, even if you did nothing wrong, your rights now fall under the “Search Incident to Lawful Arrest Doctrine.” That means that the cop arresting you doesn’t need a warrant to search anything in close proximity to your body. The reason this exception exists is to keep law enforcement officers safe—say, if a suspect has a cigarette pack inside his shirt that could be mistaken for a gun—and to stop suspects from destroying evidence on the scene of the crime (like this alleged bank robber, who appears to be eating his hold-up note).

A court ruled in the 1970s that an item—in this particular case, a footlocker in a car trunk that contained marijuana—couldn’t be searched without a warrant once it had been taken away from the scene of the arrest. But as the Electronic Freedom Foundation notes, there still isn’t a decisive ruling as to whether this applies to smart phones. The way the law stands now in most states, police can take your cell phone, read your messages, and even copy data for a search later, citing the fact that you may be able to delete it remotely.

So could a cop search my computer without a warrant under this same logic?

Probably not. In order to go into your home and search your computer without a warrant, police need to have probable cause that you’re about to destroy important evidence from your hard drive, or have your consent. And Linda Lye, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) notes that “no court would say an officer can come search your home, without a warrant, because you’ve been arrested.” However, if you’re holding your computer when you get arrested or its in your car, it might be seized so that you can’t potentially destroy evidence (and if you’re at a US border, all bets are off, privacy-wise.)

In which states are these cell phone searches legal?

It depends on rulings made by state and federal courts. Only Ohio, Florida, and the First Circuit Court (which includes Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island) have decisively ruled that police need to get a warrant before reading your text messages. The rest of the states have either not ruled on the issue (meaning police can probably conduct the searches) or explicitly allow them. For more information on which states outlaw this practice and why, check out this awesome interactive map put together by Forbes and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (blue states outlaw these warrantless searches, red states allow them, and yellow states haven’t ruled.)

Forbes

When have these warrantless searches happened?

Lots of times—here’s a brief review of 14 cases that have made it to court in the last six years alone. And not all the cases have to do with hard crimes. In 2012, a man who was protesting a proposed city law in San Francisco by pitching a tent and sleeping outside was arrested for loitering. Even though police already had evidence of his crime (i.e., the tent), they allegedly began to read his text messages, which included sensitive information and contacts that could affect his future lobbying efforts on the proposal.

What happened in the two cases that are facing the Supreme Court?

In 2007, Boston police nabbed Brima Wurie for allegedly engaging in a cocaine deal at a convenience store. After he was booked at the station, the officers noticed that the phone they had seized from Wurie was receiving calls from a number identified as “my house.” They then looked at his call log without a warrant and used that information, as well as a photo of what appeared to be his girlfriend, to find his home. They then searched his residence, obtaining additional evidence that was used to charge Warie. The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that in this case, the officers violated the Fourth Amendment.

The second case, Riley v. California, deals with David Riley, who was stopped by officers because the tags on his car were expired—but his cell phone was then seized and searched, revealing that he participated in a 2009 gang shooting in San Diego. The California Supreme Court ruled that case was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

What’s the legal argument against these searches?

Susan Melkisethian

As Brianne Gorod, the appellate counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center explains, “The search in Riley v. California violates that core purpose of the Fourth Amendment…If the Supreme Court doesn’t resolve this, police officers in some parts of the country will be able to search the entire contents of an individual’s cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and any other digital devices he has in his possession if he is arrested, even if the arrest is for a minor offense, such as failing to fasten his seatbelt.” Additionally, the judge in Wurie found that not only do cops not need to read text messages in order to determine whether a cell phone is a gun, but they don’t need to read them to stop evidence from being deleted, either:

Weighed against the significant privacy implications inherent in cell phone data searches, we view such a slight and truly theoretical risk of evidence destruction as insufficient. While evidence preservation measures, such as removing a phone’s battery may be less convenient for arresting officers than conducting a full search of a cell phone’s data incident to arrest, the government has not suggested that they are unworkable, and it bears the burden of justifying its failure to obtain a warrant.

The case where the San Francisco protester had his cell phone seized, described above, uniquely argues that the searches violate the First Amendment; because cell phones contain valuable contact information for assemblies and protests.

My phone is locked, so this won’t happen to me…right?

It could. While it’s illegal for officers to compel you to give up information that could lead to incriminating evidence; Linda Lye from the ACLU argues that “the courts are still struggling with the issue on whether you can compel someone to provide a password to a cell phone.” And Ryan Radia, writing for Ars Technica, notes that “once police have lawfully taken the phone off your person, they are free to try to crack the password by guessing it or by entering every possible combination.” Law enforcement definitely has the capacity to break cell phone locks—CNET reported in 2012 that major tech companies have been helping police bypass lock pages on cell phones for years—and many police departments have forensic extraction devices that can obtain data from computers and cell phones.

Why do law enforcement say these searches are necessary?

Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, argued in a US News and World Report op-ed earlier this month that not all people under arrest are going to have their cell phones searched without a warrant. Instead, “in cases involving human trafficking, sexual slavery and narcotics, the contents of these devices can prove to be invaluable.” He also notes that “for those who choose to disobey our laws, they must understand that their actions could result in the loss of the privacy they enjoyed.”

What are the chances of the Supreme Court actually hearing these cases?

Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says, “It’s very likely that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari and review the issue (either in Riley or Wurie). If the Court does not take one case, it will likely take the other.” Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles argues that, “I think this issue will make it up to the Supreme Court, however, the court often waits to see how the circuit courts work out the issue, so I don’t think that Riley or Wurie will necessarily be the cases that go all the way.” The Supreme Court should issue its decision within the next month.

View article – 

Will the Supreme Court Stop Cops From Reading Your Text Messages?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will the Supreme Court Stop Cops From Reading Your Text Messages?

What Does Aaron Alexis’s Race Say About the Navy Yard Shooting?

by dla@kk2.pl Posted on September 17, 2013

Mother Jones

The details emerging about Aaron Alexis, the now-dead 34-year-old suspected of killing 12 people and injuring more at the Washington Navy Yard Monday morning, paint the picture of a complicated and troubled man. He loved Thai culture and went to a Buddhist temple. He served in the Navy from February 2008 to January 2011, most recently as an Aviation Electrician’s Mate, 3rd Class. In 2010, prior to leaving the Navy, he was arrested by Fort Worth police after being accused of recklessly discharging a gun; no charges were brought. Prior to enlisting, he shot the tires out of someone’s car in an “anger-fueled ‘blackout'”; Seattle detectives referred the case the DA’s office, which never filed charges.

But one detail, like a shiny object to a magpie, has captivated a certain segment of the population: Alexis’ race. A few enterprising Twitter users have even found a way to loop both Barack Obama and Trayvon Martin into their commentary on the shooter’s skin color, using a tragedy to further a political viewpoint or validate a convenient narrative about race and violence. But the facts on mass shootings in the US tell a much different tale than the one some are spinning.

A look at the data compiled by Mother Jones on mass shootings shows that 16 percent of the 67 mass shootings that have occurred since 1982 were committed by black shooters, including the alleged Navy Yard shooter, while 66 percent were committed by whites. Monday’s shooting, and all the others that have occurred in the last 30 years, does tell a story—about guns and safety and violence in the US. But if you’re looking at Aaron Alexis’ skin color, you’re missing the point.

Source:

What Does Aaron Alexis’s Race Say About the Navy Yard Shooting?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Does Aaron Alexis’s Race Say About the Navy Yard Shooting?