Thursday, June 28, 2012

Breaking News Thurs. June 28, 2012

Well, I guess other than the heat,  this is pretty big news today. LOL
Sweet, now I can be forced into buying yet another thing I don't have money to buy in the first place.
Great.
USAToday: Supreme Court upholds Obama health care law
The Supreme Court upheld President Obama's health care law today in a splintered, complex opinion that gives Obama a major election--year law.
Basically. the justices said that the individual mandate -- the requirement that most Americans buy health insurance or pay a fine -- is constitutional as a tax.

Much thanks to RJ at the Global Glass Onion and the Ozarker at Conflicted Doomer , and to Doug at 3Es News and David at ETF Daily.
Do check out their blogs and websites and don't forget to visit the forums linked at the bottom of this post.


Peak Oil and Energy News
Reuters: Iran acknowledges oil exports down 20-30 pct 
TechReview: Natural Gas Tapped as Bridge to Biofuels

TheOilDrum: Tech Talk - Saudi Arabia and Natural Gas Liquids 
EarlyWarning: OECD Oil Stocks 

Businessweek: Are Oil Prices Nearing a Bottom? 
FuelFix: Texas OKs big boost in wholesale electricity rate  - The Texas Public Utility Commission voted Thursday to raise the wholesale electricity price cap by 50 percent this summer in a move it hopes will spur construction of new power plants.


Global Conflict
MSNBC: Turkey sends military convoys toward Syrian border
LAT: Blast rocks Syrian capital; Turkish troops on the move
BlacklistedNews: ‘Israel persuaded Russia not to sell Syria missiles’ 

Atlantic: Cairo is No Place for a Woman  

Visual.ly: Nuclear Weapons - Trying to catalogue the nuclear warheads in the world is an almost impossible challenge. Secrecy aside, every country has different ways of tallying their arsenals (a weapon may be listed as decommissioned and not tallied, but could be made viable again.) This graphic attempts to look at the number of immediately available nuclear weapons in the world; weapons that could at a very short notice - because that is the point - be used in a war. 

WSJ: Turkey Sends Antiaircraft Guns to Syrian Border, Turkish Media Say
BBC: Syria unrest: Explosions rock Damascus court complex

CNN: Blasts erupt near Syrian Justice Ministry
WashingtonPost: Blast rocks Syria's capital; state media says target is a government building.

NYT: Turkey Deploys Antiaircraft Units Along Syrian Border
Counterpunch: What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers?

LAT: Iran sanctions are about to get tougher
Reuters: At least 10 killed in Pakistan attack: police

Guardian: Why Washington and Moscow want to make a backroom deal over Syria


Hacker News
ENENews: Japan TV: ‘Anonymous’ penetrates gov’t computers — Posts message opposing nuclear restart on Ministry website (PHOTO & VIDEO)


Domestic Financial News
WSJ: Rise in Durables Orders Not Enough to Dispel Caution - A better-than-expected rise in orders for long-lasting goods wasn’t enough to cheer economists erring on the side of caution amid broader slowness.
PublicService: Forget peak oil, we may have reached 'peak GDP'

LAT: Southland cities struggle to avoid joining Stockton in bankruptcy
BusinessWeek: U.S. Automakers Cut Retirees Loose 

Boston.com: Governor faces deadline on California budget plan
CBPP: History Shows Spending Cuts in Deficit-Reduction Packages “Stick” -  Some opponents of including any revenue increases in a deficit-reduction deal — no matter how outweighed by spending cuts — argue that such cuts never “stick.”  They claim — as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform recently did — that “when bipartisan deals are struck promising to cut spending and raise taxes, the spending cuts don’t materialize but the tax hikes do,” and they invariably cite the 1982 and 1990 budget agreements as proof.[1]   Yet an examination of the 1982 and 1990 agreements finds no basis for this assertion.  As detailed below, Congress largely followed through with the spending cuts in both agreements.

NakedCapitalism: Quelle Surprise! Barclays Settlement on Massive Interest Rate Price Fixing Illustrates Bank Crime Pays Well

Governing.com: Stockton, California’s Bankruptcy Makes ‘Normal’ Cities Nervous 
LAT: Stockton bankruptcy will make history; residents reeling

NYT: New Indications Housing Recovery Is Under Way
Businessweek: Brown Closes $16 Billion Budget Gap With Tax Increase 

eXiled: S.H.A.M.E. Profile: Freakonomics Author Steven Levitt Is An Anti-Labor, Pro-Prison Milton Friedman Extremist 
CBSNews: After Supreme Court ruling, hospital shares up 

CharlesHughSmith: Priced Out of the Middle Class 
WSJ: Supreme Court Upholds Mandate as Tax 

LAT: Gov. Jerry Brown vetoes funding for college aid, child care, parks 


Global Financial News
TheAtlantic: The Myth That Entitlements Ruin Countries, Busted in 1 Little Graph  - Here's the dirty little secret of the euro debt crisis. There is no euro debt crisis. There is a euro crisis. 
Reuters: FOREX-Euro falls as prospect of EU summit progress dims

Time: Why Thursday’s Euro Summit Really Is a Make-or-Break Moment. Really
NYT: Beyond Spain and Cyprus, Europe’s Mightiest Banks Still Grapple With Crisis - Five years after the financial crisis began, many banks throughout the euro zone are still in a weakened state, cut off from money markets because investors do not trust them, and effectively on life support from the European Central Bank.

Reuters: Derivatives watchdog defends global reach (Reuters) - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), accused by a top broker in off-exchange financial derivatives of wanting to regulate the world, said on Tuesday new rules will inevitably reach beyond its borders to police the $460 trillion market.

NakedCapitalism: Europe Has No Levers for Growth 
DebtDeflation: The Looting of China by the Kleptokapitalist Bourgeoisie Roaders
ETFDaily: Five Signs China’s Economy Is Headed For Serious Trouble (FXI, FXP, VWO, EEM) 

FinancialSense: “We Wish You A Long Life” – Is A Hyper-Volatility Event Coming? 


Commodities/Metals
CommodityOnline: Morgan Stanley cuts 2012 2013 forecasts for Silver Gold 
Gold “Lacks All Safe Haven Interest” as Commodities Pull Silver Prices Lower (GLD, SLV, IAU, DZZ, ZSL, AGQ)


Environmental
USGS
M 5.3, 110km WNW of Sola, Vanuatu
M 3.0, 32km NNW of Road Town, British Virgin Islands 

ENENews: Intense M5.2 quake hits Fukushima — Centered just miles from plant (MAP)

ClimateCentral: Massive ‘Debilitating’ Heat Wave Expands Eastward
NationalPost: Toronto issues heat alert as temperatures today set to reach 32 degrees 
MSNBC: 'Life-threatening' heat warning across much of US 


'Overall pattern looks like it is going to stick around well into July,' meteorologist says

NYT: DuPont Says Claims Over Herbicide Are Rising - DuPont, which introduced a herbicide last year that was later linked to the deaths of thousands of trees, has begun processing claims for compensation that are running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, company officials said.

MiamiHerald: Rising seas mean shrinking South Florida future, experts say
PatriciaShannon: More record-setting heat; Waldo Canyon Fire consumes 15,000 acres

CNN: 'Epic' Colorado fires force 35,000 to flee 
Guardian: Colorado Springs: Waldo Canyon wildfire spreads 

MIT.edu: Lead from gasoline discovered in Indian Ocean - Since the 1970s, leaded gasoline has been slowly phased out worldwide, as studies have shown that lead can cause neurological and cardiovascular damage and degrade vehicles’ catalytic converters. Today, 185 countries have stopped using leaded gasoline; six others, including Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea, plan to phase it out in the next two years. But while leaded gasoline usage has decreased drastically in the last few decades, lead is still pervasive in the environment.  

DesdemonaDespair: ‘Flooding of record severity’ in Florida, thousands evacuate 
USAToday: Colorado wildfire destroys hundreds of homes 


America in Decline
(thanks RJ for the following story)
Forbes: Parenting for the Elite - A few years ago, I was lucky enough to interview William Dougherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota about that eternal American conundrum: Why, I asked, oh why won’t our children perform chores– or, for that matter, pick up the occasional stray toy — without epic parental pleas? I didn’t expect the response I got. “Children,” he told me, “should be considered citizens of the household, not consumers of household services.  I’ve thought quite a bit about Dougherty’s remark over the years, and it came to mind again while reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s parental cri de coeur in this week’s New Yorker. Kolbert compared the American children studied by the University of California, Los Angeles’ family study program, an anthropological longitudinal study of current parenting practices, with the kids of an Amazonian tribe. The tribal kids were a group of self-sufficient doers, able to forage food and otherwise help out with the chores of daily living.  Our crew? A bunch of entitled whiners heading off to junior high still expecting their moms and dads to tie their shoes – and complaining if they don’t do a good enough job of it. As Dougherty would say, the tribal kids are citizens. Ours are consumers of household services.
FDL: This Week in Financial Not-Crime - What would it take to get the candy-ass prosecutors in the Department of Justice to indict banksters? We already knew that securities fraud wasn’t sufficient, but that got reinforced today with news that a hedge fund operator got off with civil case for taking money from the fund to pay his taxes and for manipulating the price of stocks and bonds. Phillip Falcone is facing a civil suit instead of leg shackles.

HuffingtonPost: Heaven Sutton, Chicago 7-Year-Old Girl, Fatally Shot While Selling Snow Cones With Her Mother


Food and Water
Food Democracy Now: Stop the Monsanto Protection Act!: This week the House of Representatives will consider a provision to House Agricultural Appropriations Bill that will fundamentally undermine the concept of judicial review. Hidden under the guise of a “Farmer Assurance Provision” (Section 733), the provision strips the rights of federal courts to halt the sale and planting of genetically engineered crops during the legal appeals process.

BlacklistedNews: Mutated pests are quickly adapting to biotech crops in unpredicted and disturbing ways


Science and Technology
TechReview: "Spray-On" Photovoltaic Windows 
Phys.org: Looking for the next American hyrax? 

NationalPost: Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom wins key court ruling over ‘illegal’ mansion raids 
PopScience: B612 Sentinel: The First Privately-Funded Deep Space Mission 

DailyMail: World's first GM babies born
The world's first geneticallymodified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.
The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.
So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'.

Medical and Health
ScienceDaily: Glucose Deprivation Activates Feedback Loop That Kills Cancer Cells, Study Shows - Compared to normal cells, cancer cells have a prodigious appetite for glucose, the result of a shift in cell metabolism known as aerobic glycolysis or the "Warburg effect." Researchers focusing on this effect as a possible target for cancer therapies have examined how biochemical signals present in cancer cells regulate the altered metabolic state. Now, in a unique study, a UCLA research team led by Thomas Graeber, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology, has investigated the reverse aspect: how the metabolism of glucose affects the biochemical signals present in cancer cells. In research published June 26 in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, Graeber and his colleagues demonstrate that glucose starvation -- that is, depriving cancer cells of glucose -- activates a metabolic and signaling amplification loop that leads to cancer cell death as a result of the toxic accumulation of reactive oxygen species, the cell-damaging molecules and ions targeted by antioxidants like vitamin C.

CivilEats: The Obesity Paradox: Overfed But Undernourished
PopSci: Injecting Oxygen Directly into the Bloodstream Could Save Suffocating Patients 

PopFYI: Could Drugs Like "Bath Salts" Be Causing An Outbreak of Cannibalism? 
NYT: Mexicali Lures American Tourists With Medical Care 

io9: How to cure a hangover — with science! [Video]


Doomsteading, Gardening, Urban Farming
CanadianDoomer: Pressure Canning Milk?
BackdoorSurvival: Survival Reading – Books for the Summer Book Bag

CSMonitor: Colorado wildfires: How prepared a parent would you be?  
Treehugger: Simple Cutter Gives Glass Bottles New Life


Other News
CSMonitor: Stand-your-ground defense falls short in Texas 
NJ.com: So-far futile search for stowaways aboard ship still going on at Port Newark


CSMonitor: Myth busters: Consumer Reports takes on alleged gas-saving tips
WSJ: Which Cities Are Growing Faster Than Their Suburbs? - U.S. cities are growing faster than their suburbs for the first time in decades, but how does that break down from city to city?

NYT: Turks Seek Freedom to Travel to Europe Without Visas 
CSMonitor: More than one third of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth


Politics
BusinessInsider: The Black Caucus Is Staging A Walkout During The Eric Holder Contempt Vote 
BusinessInsider: WATCH: Jon Stewart Ridicules Cable News For Freaking Out About The Obamacare Decision 

MSNBC: GOP compares Fast and Furious to Watergate
LAT: House expected to find Eric Holder in contempt of Congress

MSNBC: Dems cheer high court as galvanized GOP vows 'full repeal' 
DRUDGE: There's A 'Super Ugly Election Coming' 

FiscalTimes: Economy May Not Be Slam Dunk for Romney 
ETFDailyNews: Robert Prechter: Stock Market Drop Will Weaken Obama Re-Election Odds (XHB)


Forums
TinfoilPalace: Did ONE high-tech worker bring RBS to its knees? Junior technician blamed for meltdown that froze millions of accounts
TinfoilPalace: "By 2020 Warfare Will Define Human Life"

TheOilAge: 7 myths used to "debunk" PO, debunked
TheOilAge: Your Retirement...

HubbertsArms: Waco man jacked up on K2 "synthetic cannabis" freaks sky high, eats family dog
HubbertsArms: Americans favor Obama to defend against space aliens


SilentCountry: More Record Breaking Temp's

SilentCountry: Overpopulation: the New Taboo


DestinyCalls: Operation Mind Control Walter Bowart 1978
DestinyCalls: Positive Lightning Strikes Intensify As Cosmic Rays Increase



2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete