Tag Archives: top stories

Photos From the Massive Yosemite Wildfire

by Dean Golan Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Northern California’s ferocious Rim Fire exploded to more than 106,000 acres Friday. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, it is threatening roughly 4,500 structures, has entered Yosemite National Park, and is just 2 percent contained. These images will give you an idea of what it looks like:

Map of the fire from Friday, August 23. Updates can be found here. National Wildfire Coordinating Group

A DC 10 air tanker drops flame retardants just east of the town of Groveland. Hundreds of campers have been evacuated. Al Golub/ZUMA

A firefighting bulldozer from Barstow, California, behind San Jose Family Camp, near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

A crew from the 146th Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard flies over the Rim Fire on Thursday afternoon. The best shot of the fire comes around the six-minute mark.

On the first day of the Rim Fire, firefighters in an aircraft worked until sunset to attempt to keep the fire from reaching the Tuolumne River. When this photo was taken the fire was only 200 acres, but the next morning it had made it to the bottom of the Tuolumne River. Al Golub/ZUMA

Cal Fire firefighters created a backfire to stop fire coming out of the Tuolumne River Canyon on Highway 120 Near Yosemite National Park. The Rim Fire jumped this road in several places. Al Golub/ZUMA

Members of the Horseshoe Meadow Hotshots—Chuck Ervin, left, and Ian White—prepare a fire break at the Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest in California. Andy Alfaro/Modesto Bee/ZUMA

The Rim Fire jumps Highway 120 near Cherry Lake Road and San Jose Family Camp near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

Cal Fire firefighters take a break from creating a backfire on Highway 120 near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

A US Forest Service crew hikes down Harden Flat Road to support structures during the fire. Al Golub/ZUMA

Link: 

Photos From the Massive Yosemite Wildfire

Posted in Anker, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Photos From the Massive Yosemite Wildfire

Ask a FISA Court Judge!

by Margherit Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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

The FISA Court was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to oversee top-secret surveillance programs. Its opinions are classified, although the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released a rare, heavily redacted 2011 ruling striking down an NSA program that collected email data from American citizens and foreign nationals.

It also offers relationship advice.

Dear FISA Court Judge,

A coworker gave me and my husband a $25 certificate to the Cheesecake Factory as a wedding gift. It cost us $400 to feed her and her guest at our reception. Should I send it back and tell her she’s rude and cheap? Help, FISA Court Judge! —Dismayed in Des Moines.

FISA Court Judge says:

Dear Dismayed,

!!

Dear FISA Court Judge,

My husband and I have been married for 20 years but recently we hit a bit of a rough patch. I had an affair with my boss, and my husband missed the birth of our daughter to deliver a $3 million shipment of methamphetamine to a guy he knows from Chile. Also he’s dying of cancer. What should I do, FISA Court Judge? —Nervous in New Mexico.

FISA Court Judge says:

Dear Nervous,

I literally .

Dear FISA Court Judge,

Is there such thing as insanity among penguins? I try to avoid a definition of insanity or derangement—I don’t mean he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte—but could they just go crazy because they’ve had enough of their colony? You’re my only hope, FISA Court Judge! –Musing in Munich.

FISA Court Judge says:

Dear Musing,

puffins ; I hope that answers your question!

Read more: 

Ask a FISA Court Judge!

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ask a FISA Court Judge!

Is "Dads" the Year’s Most Racist Sitcom?

by Abraham Lowe Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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

“Well, you’re lucky your dads are American; my dad beat me with a math book ’til I was 16,” says Veronica, an Asian American character (played by Brenda Song) on the upcoming Fox sitcom Dads. The new series (executive produced by Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy, American Dad!, and Ted fame) premieres on September 17, but it has already generated controversy for its comic portrayal of Asian Americans and the Chinese. The show focuses on two founders of a video game company, and how they deal with their intrusive fathers. Comedy supposedly ensues, some of it at the expense of Asian folk.

In the pilot episode, the main characters (played by Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) insist that Veronica dress up like a “sexy Asian schoolgirl”—one who giggles like a Japanese teenage stereotype—in order to impress a group of Chinese investors. Chinese people are mocked and declared untrustworthy. The “Asian men have tiny dicks” stereotype is gleefully deployed. The term “Oriental” is used because…funny. And it doesn’t help that Dads co-creator Alec Sulkin once tweeted, “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll.'” Sulkin sent this tweet on March 11, 2011, the day a tsunami struck Japan and killed thousands. None of the victims, Japanese or otherwise, was ever implicated in the plot to bomb Americans in the 1940s. (Sulkin soon deleted the comment and apologized via tweet.)

Full disclosure: I am indeed of Asian descent—my parents were born in Bangkok, and I was born in Washington, DC. I rarely have a problem laughing at jokes that invoke Asian/Asian American stereotypes, so long as they are funny and/or have something wise to say. If you’d like my personal opinion of Dads, I’d say that the real problem does not lie with any ethnic or racial stereotypes, but with the fact that it is unoriginal and often a painfully unfunny, lazy waste of production space.

Continue Reading »

Link to original: 

Is "Dads" the Year’s Most Racist Sitcom?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is "Dads" the Year’s Most Racist Sitcom?

Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

by Toni Tolve Posted on August 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Shortly after being sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning announced a decision to live as a woman and switch to the name Chelsea. Manning released a letter to the Today show Thursday morning that said, “As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” Manning requested being referred to with the feminine pronoun, except with official mail sent to her at Fort Leavenworth, the Kansas prison where she will serve her sentence.

Manning now faces some unknowns with gender transition, including what will likely be a difficult battle to receive hormone therapy, which she indicated in her statement she wants to begin as soon as possible. Officials from Fort Leavenworth confirmed they do not provide transgender inmates with treatment beyond psychiatric care.

Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, told Today he hopes Forth Leavenworth will decide to provide Manning with the hormone treatment; if not, Coombs said he will “do everything in his power to force them to do so.” Coombs did not provide details to Today about his plans for legal action, but during a press conference yesterday following Manning’s sentencing, he said he is “going to become the smartest person on ensuring that a soldier who is in confinement, who has gender dysphoria, gets appropriate medical treatment.”

Continue Reading »

Taken from: 

Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

Here’s Obama’s Plan to Make College More Affordable

by dx1d3x0 Posted on August 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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

President Obama laid out a new plan today to make college more affordable:

A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend…“All the things we’re measuring are important for students choosing a college,” a senior administration official said. “It’s important to us that colleges offer good value for their tuition dollars, and that higher education offer families a degree of security so students aren’t left with debt they can’t pay back.”

Mr. Obama hopes that starting in 2018, the ratings would be tied to financial aid, so that students at highly rated colleges might get larger federal grants and more affordable loans. But that would require new legislation. “I think there is bipartisan support for some of these ideas, as we’ve seen in states where the governors have been working on them,” said the administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to disclose information not yet made public.

The basic idea here is that endlessly increasing the amount of federal student aid just isn’t working anymore. At this point, all it does is encourage universities to raise their prices, which means that students are no better off than they were before. In fact, maybe worse, since they end up graduating with ever more gargantuan loans to pay off. Instead we need to reward universities that actually provide a good bang for the buck: a solid education and high graduation rates at a reasonable cost.

Interestingly, this is very similar to the Washington Monthly’s “bang for the buck” ranking of colleges, which they started last year. Now, I have to confess that I’ve been sort of skeptical from the start of the Monthly’s attempt to rank colleges not on the basis of pure academic excellence but on the basis of how useful they are to society. I figured it was just spitting into the wind and would never catch on. Luckily, no one asked me and they kept plugging away at it. This year, in addition to pulling in lots of useful advertising dollars, I think they can legitimately feel like they’ve done something to advance the national conversation on higher education. The formula that the feds come up with will undoubtedly be different from the Monthly’s, but the idea will be the same. The Obama administration is basically proposing to do what they’ve been recommending for the past few years.

If you’re curious to see how various universities rank, click here. The top 20 are on the right, and I’m happy to see my alma mater coming in at #6. Nice work, 49ers!

Now about Obama’s belief that there’s “bipartisan support” for some of these ideas…

Link to original:

Here’s Obama’s Plan to Make College More Affordable

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Obama’s Plan to Make College More Affordable

Watch This Video of Louisiana’s 24-Acre Sinkhole Swallowing a Grove of Trees

by kowalski099 Posted on August 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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

For the current issue of the magazine (subscribe!) I wrote about the Bayou Corne sinkhole, a swampy, reeking, 24-acre hole in the earth that opened up near the site of an abandoned salt cavern in rural Assumption Parish, Louisiana. After the sinkhole first appeared (at about 1/24th of its current size) last August, Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered the 350 residents of Bayou Corne to evacuate. On August 2, Louisiana sued Texas Brine, the company that mined the salt cavern that experts have identified as the trigger for the sinkhole. Every few weeks the sinkhole burps—this is really the term the geologists use—and somewhere between 20 and 100 barrels of sweet crude bubble up to the surface. Really, it’s best explained in the piece.

I saw a lot of strange things in Louisiana, but on Wednesday, Assumption Parish emergency response office, which continuously monitors the sinkhole for burps and seismic activity, released perhaps the strangest video I’ve seen yet. It’s an entire grove of trees simply being swallowed up by the sinkhole—something that was known to happen but no one had managed to capture clearly on camera.

Watch:

Link:  

Watch This Video of Louisiana’s 24-Acre Sinkhole Swallowing a Grove of Trees

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch This Video of Louisiana’s 24-Acre Sinkhole Swallowing a Grove of Trees

If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

by wojciechrak75 Posted on August 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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

A previously unknown Bush administration program continued under President Barack Obama grants the FBI and other national security agencies broad authority to delay or squash the immigration applications of people from Muslim countries, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Under the program, immigrants can be designated “national security concerns” based on the flimsiest of rationales, such as coming from a “suspicious” country. Other criteria that can earn an immigrant this label include wiring money to relatives abroad, attending mosques the FBI has previously surveilled, or simply appearing in FBI case files.


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


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


When Did Lefty Darling Brandon Darby Turn Government Informant?


Charts from Our Terror Trial Database


Watch an FBI Surveillance Video


Documents: FBI Spies and Suspects, in Their Own Words

“This policy is creating a secret exclusion to bar many people who are eligible for citizenship because…of their national origin or religion or associations,” says Jennie Pasquarella, the ACLU lawyer who authored a new report on the program, which is called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP). “It’s doing this without the knowledge of the public, without the knowledge of applicants, and without, we believe, the knowledge of Congress.”

The criteria laid out under CARRP, which took effect in April 2008, are used to process nearly every immigration application. But once the FBI or another government agency flags an immigrant as a potential national security threat, that person’s application for citizenship or permanent residency is shunted off into a separate system, where it lingers and is almost invariably rejected. The immigrants who have been labeled “national security concerns” have no way to know about or contest the decision.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here: 

If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China

by Cynthia Trevino Posted on August 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Ever since May, when a Chinese company agreed to buy US pork giant Smithfield, reportedly with an eye toward ramping up US pork imports to China, I’ve been looking into the simultaneously impressive and vexed state of China’s food production system. In short, I’ve found that in the process of emerging as the globe’s manufacturing center—the place that provides us with everything from the simplest of brooms to the smartest of phones—China has severely damaged its land and water resources, compromising its ability to increase food production even as its economy thunders along (though it’s been a bit less thunderous lately), its population grows (albeit slowly), and its people gain wealth, move up the food chain, and demand ever-more meat.

Now, none of that should detract from the food miracle that China has enacted since it began its transformation into an industrial powerhouse in the late 1970s. This 2013 report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) brims with data on this feat. The nation slashed its hunger rate—from 20 percent of its population in 1990 to 12 percent today —by quietly turbocharging its farms. China’s total farm output, a broad measure of food churned out, has tripled since 1978. The ramp-up in livestock production in particular is even more dizzying—it rose by a factor of five. Overall, China’s food system represents a magnificent achievement: It feeds nearly a quarter of the globe’s people on just 7 percent of its arable land.

Continue Reading »

From:

6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China

The Most Important Writing Tip the Late Elmore Leonard Ever Gave

by Zack Leverett Posted on August 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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

The “Dickens of Detroit” is dead.

American novelist Elmore Leonard, 87, died Tuesday due to complications from a stroke he suffered last month. According to a brief statement on the author’s website, Leonard died at home surrounded by family.

If you’ve been to the movies in the past five-and-a-half decades, chances are you’ve seen a movie (probably multiple times) based on one of his books or stories. Leonard wrote the basis for Out of Sight, one of director Steven Soderbergh‘s best films. He wrote Get Shorty, which became one of the better movies of the John Travolta career revival. His book Rum Punch was adapted into the Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. His 1953 short story Three-Ten to Yuma was adapted into two films, one of which was inducted into the prestigious Criterion Collection. And his characters served as the basis for three television series, including ABC’s Karen Sisco and FX’s hit drama Justified.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading: 

The Most Important Writing Tip the Late Elmore Leonard Ever Gave

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Most Important Writing Tip the Late Elmore Leonard Ever Gave

Leaked Report: Scientists Now 95 Percent Certain That Humans Are Causing Global Warming

by Jamie Cox Posted on August 19, 2013

Mother Jones

Even though more than a month remains until an official release, Reuters is now reporting on a leaked draft of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. The report, the first in six years by the international body, is considered the definitive scientific take on climate change (although it is sometimes faulted for being too conservative, and quickly becomes out of date).

Previous IPCC reports have made news for a variety of reasons. The 2001 report, for instance, declared it “likely” (e.g., a 66 percent probability; explanation here) that most of the observed warming that the planet has seen is caused by humans. The 2007 report upped that assessment to “very likely” (a 90 percent probability); and now, according to Reuters, scientists are giving us a 95 percent confidence in this central conclusion of modern climate research. That appears to be the chief headline that will be emerging from the IPCC this time around.

Another bombshell reportedly contained in the draft: The IPCC will now label the phenomenon of sea level rise “unequivocal” and increase prior estimates of projected sea level during this century.

IPCC reports are, invariably, attacked upon release by climate skeptics, who seek to cast doubt on some or all of the findings. Based on the Reuters report, those seeking a soft underbelly this time will know where to look: The report validates the increasingly popular skeptic claim that the rate of increase in global temperatures has “slowed” since 1998. In other words, temperatures are still going up, just not necessarily as quickly as previously.

The new report, Reuters says, offers only “medium confidence” that scientists understand the reasons for this slowing. Causes cited include the possibility that the oceans are taking up more heat, that volcanic eruptions (which tend to produce cooling) may be providing a partial offset to temperature rise, contributing too cooling, or that the climate itself has a lower “sensitivity” to greenhouse gas emissions than previously proposed. (For an explanation of why skeptics’ arguments about the global warming “slowdown” are misleading and should not offer any consolation, see this explainer from Skeptical Science.)

According to Jonathan Lynn, who is head of communications at the IPCC, the organization expects that leaks will occur because report drafts wind up in so many different hands. Lynn cautions that “there’s no question that the final report will not be the same as the drafts.” Indeed, for the upcoming 15-page “Summary for Policymakers,” requested changes are myriad. “We’ve received about 1,800 comments from governments, which will have to be taken into account in the approval sessions coming up in September,” says Lynn.

But will any of that reverse the scientific community’s overwhelming conclusion that global warming is human-caused?

Not very likely.

Visit source: 

Leaked Report: Scientists Now 95 Percent Certain That Humans Are Causing Global Warming

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Leaked Report: Scientists Now 95 Percent Certain That Humans Are Causing Global Warming