Friday, April 15, 2011

Breaking News Fri. April 15, 2011

IT'S Friday!
I sure hope that everyone had a good week and that your weekend is going to be nice too. Got a lot of work done in the garden yesterday and if the weather here holds, will get some more goodies planted this weekend! Yeah!
I'd like the thank rj for his tireless work and all the extra links he sends for us everyday! Thank you rj! you can see his weekly financial wrap up at the Global Glass Onion. It's posted every Friday and well worth reading.
Also, if you aren't a member of one of the forums linked at the bottom of this post, do take the time and sign up. You'll make lots of good friends and find all the information you need to help you with your prepping.
And as a reminder, if you don't like clicking back and forth, right click on the links and chose 'open in new tab/window'. I don't know why Blogger doesn't have that option but, for now it doesn't.


Japan
AmericanDream: Much Of Northern Japan Uninhabitable Due To Nuclear Radiation?
With no resolution to the crisis in sight, the damaged facilities at Fukushima continue to pump massive amounts of nuclear radiation into the surrounding environment every single day.  So will much of northern Japan end up being uninhabitable due to nuclear radiation?
NHKWorld: Temperatures rise at No.4 spent fuel storage pool
USAToday: Aftershocks: What are they?A “non-stop” series of aftershocks have continued to rattle Japan since the powerful magnitude-9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated parts of the country on March 11.
nydailynews: Japan's emperor and his wife visit earthquake-displaced refugees in shelter
Grist: The Fukushima nuclear disaster just keeps getting messier and scarier 
Guardian: How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation
Reuters:  Burial of Japan reactors trickier than Chernobyl:
(Reuters) - Encasing reactors at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant in concrete would present much more of a challenge than Chernobyl, according to an executive of the firm whose pumps are helping cooling efforts there.
TruthOut: Radioactive Human Embryos: Our Nuclear Legacy?
TheDiplomat: Japan’s Economy Takes a Hit 
NewScientist: How Japan will survive psychological fallout of crisis 

Global Conflict
NPR: Kidnapped Activist Found Dead In Gaza, Hamas Says

Time: Bahrain: Is a U.S. Ally Torturing Its People? 
WashingtonPost: Two Western journalists missing in Libya; three spotted in Tripoli detention camp
BusinessInsider: LIBYA: The Massacre In Misrata Continues With Over 600 Dead 
ZeroHedge: China Net Seller Of US Treasurys For Fourth Consecutive Month 

Financial News

BusinessInsider: Gold Priced In Silver Edges Ever Closer To The Natural Ratio Found In The Earth's Crust
 Good stuff from Max Keiser! "You can't negotiate with Financial Terrorists!"

BusinessInsider: There's A Big Problem With All These Wall Streeters Warning About The Debt CeilingEarlier this week it emerged that John Boehner had reached out to Wall Street executives to get a sense of how far the GOP could push the debt ceiling issue without causing a major market problem.
ATaxingMatter: How is combatting fraud like socialism? You have to be a Wall Street Journal reporter to get that one...
TheEconomist: Buy now, pay later
The IMF warns America about its free-spending ways

NakedCapitalism: Senator Levin Claims Goldman Execs Perjured Themselves Before Congress on Mortgage Testimony
Bloomberg: Gold Is Little Changed After Reaching Record on Global Inflation Concern
BusinessInsider: Suddenly, Everyone Is Realizing That The British Are Sending The US A Huge Warning
BBC: India's inflation accelerates to 8.9% in MarchIndia's inflation rate rose to 8.9% from 8.3% in February, driven higher by fuel and manufacturing costs, the government has announced.
NakedCapitalism: Is Paying for Performance Such a Hot Idea? -- Yves Smith - Pay for performance has become virtually a religion in America. As a result, evidence that it doesn’t work as advertised is seldom heard in polite company. 
CSMonitor: Mortgage lenders must pay homeowners for improper foreclosures
Mortgage lenders ordered to reimburse customers they foreclosed on improperly. Regulators tell 16 mortgage lenders to hire auditors to find out who could have avoided foreclosure in 2009 and 2010. 
TheIndependent: US investigates banks over credit crisis ‘cartel’ claim
Mish: Survey Shows Americans Want Their Cake and Eat It Too - Surveys repeatedly show US Americans are very concerned about the deficit. However, Other surveys show that concern goes out the window when asked how they are willing to reduce it.  
BusinessInsider: Larry Summers Identifies The Catch-22 Of Financial Regulation 
CNNMoney: Meanest budget cutsFrom heating for the poor to removing unexploded landmines, the budget compromise takes the ax to some very worthy programs.CNNMoney: Meanest budget cuts
From heating for the poor to removing unexploded landmines, the budget compromise takes the ax to some very worthy programs.
Spiegel: Back to the Roots
Why Elections in Finland Could Doom Portugal's Bailout
ZeroHedge: Gold And Silver Reach New Record Nominal Highs – Little Coverage, Bearish And Superficial Analysis
CreditWritedowns: Ireland Cut By Moody's to One Notch Above Junk
YahooFinance: Goldman Is “A Perfectly Designed Machine for Making Money,” William Cohan Says

Peak oil and Energy News
CSMonitor: Dams power Turkey's future, but drown its rich history
Cultural and natural sites are being submerged as Turkey races to double its power output by 2020.
OilPrice: Is Natural Gas About to Make a ComebackToday’s surprise release of figures showing a shocking draw down in natural gas supplies throws a great spotlight on what has undoubtedly been the red headed step child of the energy space for the last three years.
TheOilDrum: Saudi Arabia Did NOT Make Up For Libyan Oil Production
So the world has abruptly lost something like 1.3mbd of oil production between mid February and March.  Now there were a lot of news reports in the business press at the time this was first happening that Saudi Arabia was going to make up the difference.  

PlattOil: Sweet/sour crude oil spread widens on Libyan shortfall & divergent light/heavy products. Download Platts podcast: Podcast

Environmental News
ScientificAmerican: Looking Down on Deforestation: Brazil Sharpens Its Eyes in the Sky to Snag Illegal Rainforest Loggers
After reaching the lowest Amazon deforestation rate ever recorded, Brazil faces a its next hurdle: how to maximize the increasing resolution of satellite images to monitor small-scale forest destruction
CSMonitor: Coal power: TVA agrees to phase out 18 units, shift to cleaner fuels
Tennessee Valley Authority says it will phase out 18 older coal-fired generators at three power plants by 2020. Natural-gas and biomass units will replace the coal power as part of a TVA settlement over clean-air violations.
Weather.com: The Weather Channel Video Polar Bear Wakes up on Oil Drill
LATBlogs: Scores of earthquakes reported on California-Nevada border 
McClatchy: Pacific salmon may be dying from leukemia-type virus 
TruthOut: The Planet Strikes BackIn his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it's no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of "melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat."
Reuters: BP faces angry oil spill protesters at AGM

America in Decline

LegitGov: Germany: An Appeal to Obama Over a U.S. Prisoner's Treatment

Cops Fired After Beating Unconscious Man

MotherJones: Arizona GOP to Obama: Show Us Your Circumcision CertificateThat's right: Arizona Republicans want you to provide proof that you've been circumcised; it makes the "boxers and briefs" question look downright prudish. But a warning for overzealous candidates: As the Phoenix New Times helpfully notes, "Pulling out your penis in front of election officials, however, will not prove citizenship—and, in the worst case scenario, could get [you] labeled a sex offender." Rules to live by.
CSMonitor: Far from Mexican border, Georgia mulls Arizona-style immigration crackdownGeorgia could become the next legal and political flashpoint over illegal immigration if it adopts an Arizona-style immigration law. But supporters of the dominant Republican Party are divided.
ThinkProgress: Scott Walker Admits Union-Busting Provision ‘Doesn’t Save Any’ Money For The State Of Wisconsin 
WashingtonIndependent: Report: Voter ID part of coordinated effort to suppress minority turnoutVoter photo identification proposals in 32 states, including Texas, are the product of a coordinated effort by conservatives to reduce polling place turnout by minority groups, who turned out in unprecedented numbers during the 2008 presidential election, a progressive civil rights organization alleges in a new report.
FDL: Have the Spooks Finally Admitted to Congress They’ve Been “Exploiting” Gitmo Detainees as Spies?Something funny happened yesterday.
The House Armed Services Committee had a hearing on Gitmo Detainee Transfer Policy. According to Carol Rosenberg’s tweeting, up to two hours of the hearing was conducted in closed session before the hearing opened to the public and the witnesses explained that the interesting details–like the “recidivists” names and the amount paid to other countries to accept detainees–are secret (meaning they presumably got reported in that secret session).
Time: The Budget Ax: Why Homeless Veterans but Not NASCAR?
ibtimes: Donald Trump loses all credibility, makes mockery of presidential raceCOLUMN: Donald Trump just lost all credibility by abusing the presidential election process for his personal gain.

Food and Water
Grist: Ranchers struggle against giant meatpackers and economic troubles

EconomicCollapse: 20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming 
Grist: Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco 
Alternet: 'Ag Gag' Laws Would Punish Whistleblowers, Protect Animal AbusersBig Agribusiness is trying to keep the public in the dark about the
sordid realities of life on the factory "farm."
Grist: Modernist urban farm makes veggies sexy 
Bloomberg: Search for Super Corn Seeks to Limit Nitrogen Use, Pollution 

Science and Technology 

ScientificAmerican: A Bicycle Built for None: What Makes a Riderless Bike Stable?
The two attributes thought to be most important for a bicycle's self-stability turn out not to be necessary

LiveScience: 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Antarctic Meteorite Yields New Mineral 
Kurzweil: Solar power without solar cells: A hidden magnetic effect of light could make it possibleA dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.   
WiredScience: Underground Experiment Fails to Find Dark Matter

Medical and Health
WashingtonPost: Hospitals fight a form of delirium that often strikes ICU patients 

CBSMoneyWatch: Is Your Dentist Ripping You Off?
PBS: Top Five Global Health Headlines: Foreign Aid Cuts, Preventing Stillbirths, Japan Raises Alert  
Spiegel: Skin Factory. A Stuttgart Lab's Pioneering Effort to Cultivate Human FleshEver since American scientists grafted ear-shaped cartilage onto a mouse, Heike Walles has dreamed of cultivating human flesh -- and transforming the world of medicine. Though her lab has finally succeeded, EU laws are delaying the introduction of synthetic skin into clinical practice.

Wikileaks
TruthOut: My Experience Dealing With the Department of Defense Regarding Pfc. Bradley Manning Has Been Kafkaesque by: Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Other News
Time: Finland's Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach
The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good.
WashingtonPost: County officials: Sheriff’s office, known for crime and immigration sweeps, misspent $99M
NatGeo: Maya Mystery Solved by "Important" Volcanic Discovery?

Volcanic ash found in canals may explain how cities survived with poor soil.

NYT: Up for Parole? Better Hope You’re First on the DocketA new paper finds that experienced parole judges in Israel granted freedom about 65 percent of the time to the first prisoner who appeared before them on a given day. By the end of a morning session, the chance of release had dropped almost to zero.
After the same judge returned from a lunch break, the first prisoner once again had about a 65 percent chance at freedom. And once again the odds declined steadily.
NewScientist: Evolutionary Babel was in southern Africa Where did humanity utter its first words? A new linguistic analysis attempts to rewrite the story of Babel by borrowing from the methods of genetic analysis – and finds that modern language originated in sub-Saharan Africa and spread across the world with migrating human populations.
USAToday: Mom posted Facebook farewell before driving into Hudson with kids"If I am going to die, we're all going to die together," the boy told police and Meave Ryan, the motorist who took him to a nearby fire station, the Associated Press says. But as the van filled with water she tried to climb into the front seat, saying, "Oh, God, I've made a mistake," La'Shaun Armstrong said today.
Grist: Growing her own tobacco in Brooklyn [UPDATED]
Guardian: Privacy online – it's complicatedThe EU justice commissioner has announced plans to modernise data protection laws, including a 'right to be forgotten'

The Forums

TinfoilPalace: Goldman Sachs signals end of oil price rises  
TinfoilPalace: PROFESSOR: Sarah Palin Probably Staged A Gigantic Hoax About Being Trig's Mother
TheOilAge: Iraq Veteran: War Made Me Go Solar
TheOilAge: I believe Yellowstone will erupt soon *Official thread*
Hubberts-Arms: TAKE YOUR F*CKING DRUGS
Hubberts-Arms: Doomsday Bunker
SilentCountry: And you thought YOUR anti smoking laws were draconian
SilentCountry: Sociopath of the Century

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