Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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The office of Razoo on Connecticut Avenue blends two distinct cultures common in Washington. It has the feeling of an Internet start-up, what with programmers clicking away, big flat screens, an espresso machine and funky green carpet. Yet the photos on the walls from Rwanda and other poor countries and the 11 employees, age 23 to 33, suggest it could just as easily be a nongovernmental organization. The combination is no mistake. Razoo is a company that has built a Web site to connect people with one another, much like social networking giants MySpace and Facebook, but in support of humanitarian objectives such as preventing homelessness in the United States and helping families who live in a Nicaragua trash dump. Users and causes each have their own pages. "YouTube is transforming TV. Google has transformed advertising," said Razoo founder J. Sebastian Traeger. "The Web will do the same thing for philanthropy." Traeger ... is following in the footsteps of several other Internet entrepreneurs who are trying to reinvent philanthropy. They hope to apply the tools of the digital age -- such as social networking and peer-to-peer and viral marketing -- to an industry long criticized for its slow-moving ways. Risks abound. The for-profit companies are operating in a nonprofit world. "While the fusion of commercial values and non-commercial values makes sense and has promise, it's not going to be this magical cure," said Jeff Trexler, a Pace University professor who has studied the phenomenon. By merging social networks and philanthropy, the idea is that people will be more likely to give money or support to a certain cause if their friends do. The Internet also holds the promise of cutting down on bureaucracy and the high administrative and marketing costs associated with raising money.
The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows. The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher. The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total income of all Americans, up from 14.3 percent of all income in 2003. The total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans, analysis of the report showed. Earlier reports, based on tax returns, showed that in 2005 the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and fractions of the top 1 percent enjoyed their greatest share of income since 1928 and 1929. Much of the increase at the top reflected the rebound of the stock market after its sharp drop in 2000, economists from across the political spectrum said. About half of the income going to the top 1 percent comes from investments and business. In addition, Congress in 2003 cut taxes on long-term capital gains and most dividends. Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who characterizes the Bush administration’s policies as YOYO economics, based on You (Are) On Your Own, said the differences in income growth explained why so many Americans have told pollsters that they are feeling squeezed. “It is meaningless to middle- and low-income families to say we have a great economy because their economy looks so much different than folks at the top of the scale because this is an economy that is working, but not working for everyone.”
Note: For numerous other reliable media reports on worsening income inequality, click here.
All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found. “It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.” At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers. Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters. Florida, another swing state with a history of voting problems, is also scrapping touch-screen machines and switching to optical scan ones for the election. Such systems have gained favor because experts say they are more reliable than others and, unlike most touch screens, they provide a paper trail for recounts. The study released Friday found that voting machines and central servers made by Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic were easily corrupted. The $1.9 million federally financed study assembled corporate and academic teams to conduct parallel assessments. “All of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election,” the team wrote.
Note: This article somehow fails to mention the fact that as these machines were used in the 2004 presidential election, the results could easily have been flawed. For a summary of many major media reports on the problems with electronic voting machines, click here.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the special court that reviews government requests for warrants to spy on suspected foreign agents in the United States, seems to have forgotten that its job is to ensure that the government is accountable for following the law — not to help the Bush administration keep its secrets. Last week, the court denied a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to release portions of past rulings that would explain how it has interpreted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The court should share its legal reasoning with the public. After the 9/11 attacks, the National Security Agency for years engaged in domestic spying that violated both FISA and the Constitution. Earlier this year, after a court ruled that the program was illegal, the Bush administration said that in the future it would conduct surveillance with the approval of the intelligence court. At the same time, it announced that a judge of the court had issued orders setting out how the program could proceed. The administration has repeatedly referred to these orders, but has refused to make them public. As a result, it is impossible for the American people — and even some members of Congress — to know how the court reached its conclusions, or the state of the law with respect to domestic surveillance. The idea of courts developing law in secret and handing down legal principles that the public cannot know about should not be part of the American legal system. That is especially true when the subject matter is as important as the government spying on its citizens, an issue the founders — who drafted the Fourth Amendment — cared about deeply. The people have a right to know how the act, which is in the process of being revised, is being interpreted so they can tell their elected representatives what they think the law should be.
This has been an important week in the torture debate in America. It has been the week of the President’s coming-out party. This week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said; no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement: LAUER: "Was the White House involved in that decision?" KIRIAKOU: "Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department." He then goes into the process in considerable detail. Watch the video here. So now the process can be fully diagrammed, and the cast of characters is stunning. The torture system involves the operations division of the CIA on the implementation side. The Justice Department is right in the thick of it. And finally the White House. David Addington, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley—these are all names we can now link directly to the torture system. They decided who would be tortured and how.
Can singing change history? “The Singing Revolution,” a documentary by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty about Estonia’s struggle to end Soviet occupation, shows that it already has. The first part of “Revolution” provides a thumbnail sketch of 20th-century Estonian history, and it’s not pretty. This small nation was a satellite state of the former Soviet Union for much of that time, except for a brief period when the Germans controlled it. Under the Soviets, especially, Estonian culture was brutishly suppressed, but it welled up every five years in July, when Estonians gathered in Tallinn for the Estonian song festival, which often drew upward of 25,000 people. The images of these festivals are moving already; the force of the singers and the precision of their conductors are stunning to behold. But the emotion swells further when Estonians defy their occupiers by singing nationalist songs. This bold act reclaimed Estonian identity and set the stage for a series of increasingly daring rebellions under the Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who advocated glasnost and got more than he bargained for. Imagine the scene in “Casablanca” in which the French patrons sing “La Marseillaise” in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of “The Singing Revolution.”
When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, were they also destroying the truth about Sept. 11, 2001? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day - and the nature of the enemy in this war on terror that Bush launched in response to the tragedy - comes from the CIA's account of what those prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was forced to rely on what the CIA was willing to relay instead. On the matter of the existence of the tapes, we know the CIA deliberately lied. Why should we believe what we've been told about what may turn out to be the most important transformative event in our nation's history? On the basis of what the CIA claimed the tortured prisoners said, President Bush launched ... an endless war that threatens to bankrupt our society both financially and morally. How important were those "key witnesses" to the 9/11 Commission report? Check out the disclaimer on page 146 about the commission's sourcing of the main elements laid out in its narrative: "Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members ... Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses ... is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but ... were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process." Videos were made of those "sensitive" interrogations, which were accurately described as "torture" by one of the agents involved, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Yet when the 9/11 Commission and federal court judges specifically asked for such tapes, they were destroyed by the CIA, which then denied their existence.
Note: Author Robert Scheer goes on to ask what did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other key Congressional Democrats know about the torture techniques used by the CIA, and when did they know it? For a powerful summary of many major-media reports raising questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.
Federal courts had prohibited the Bush administration from discarding evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics. Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons. While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videos of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed. The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay." U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July. At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren't at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books -- and apparently beyond the scope of the court's order. Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, ... said "It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation. It's logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained."
A US-based human rights group has accused the Egyptian government of using torture and false confessions in a high-profile anti-terrorism case. Twenty-two alleged members of an unknown Islamist group, the Victorious Sect, were accused of planning attacks on tourism sites and gas pipelines. Human Rights Watch says its research suggests the security forces may have fabricated the group's name. It reports claims the case was used to justify renewing emergency laws. The BBC's Ian Pannell in Cairo says this is just the latest in a run of accusations by human rights organisations against Egypt's police and state security apparatus. The authorities' claims made headlines in April 2006 when they said they had smashed a previously unheard-of terrorist group plotting a series of attacks against soft targets including tourists and Coptic Christian clerics. "Beyond coerced confessions, there appears to be no compelling evidence to support the government's dramatic claims," HRW says. "Indeed, it appears that SSI (state security investigations) may have fabricated the allegations made against at least some and possibly all of them," its report says. Detainees quoted by HRW said they had been beaten and kicked by their interrogators, and some were given electric shocks on their bodies, including their genitals. A spokesperson for the organisation said the case was not unusual, but was part of a pattern of detention and torture by the Egyptian security services in order to obtain false confessions. The "Victorious Sect" arrests came to light shortly before Egypt renewed its enduring and controversial emergency laws, which give sweeping powers of detention to the security forces.
Widespread anxiety about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels, coupled with a genuine fear that oil and gas will become scarce before the century ends are fueling a renewed interest in renewable energy and, in particular, solar power solutions. Research is increasingly focusing on 'concentrated solar power' systems -- CSP for short. CSP systems focus direct solar radiation through optical devices onto an area where a receiver is located -- much like burning a hole in a piece of paper with a magnifying glass. This solar radiation is then converted into electricity. In practice, the CPS system comprises of four elements - a solar field, solar collector elements, a solar receiver and ... the remaining systems required to operate a power plant. In Europe, a number of solar projects are being rolled out. Germany leads the way with over 10 solar power plants. Located in the Tabernas Desert in southern Spain, however, is the Platforma Solar de Almeria -- a solar power research facility where new solar technologies are being tested. One of the concepts being trialed is the 'central tower' configuration which utilizes a collection of heliostats -- mirrors which automatically track sunlight -- which act as solar collectors. The heliostats then concentrate the solar radiation onto a central receiver located at the top of a tower. Europe's first commercial concentrated solar power plant was officially opened in Seville, Spain in March 2007. The new Planta Solar 10 (PS10) is the first commercial solar thermoelectric power plant in the world. 624 large heliostats focus the sun's rays on to a single solar receiver 115 meters high. With temperatures reaching up to 250 degrees Celsius, the solar receiver then turns water into steam, which in turn powers a turbine. It has a peak capacity of 11 MW ... enough to generate 23 million kWh of electricity per year. That's enough to power 6,000 homes and save 18,000 tons of carbon emissions every year.
Note: For other reports of exciting breakthrough developments in new energy technologies, click here.
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident. Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job. "Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told. In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas. "I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. "We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer. The State Department ... dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container. According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally." Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case. Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.
The peculiar red orb hung motionless in the summer sky. A boy at the time, Keith Chester vividly recalls that day in 1966. "The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up," Chester said. "I was so scared that I ran into my neighbor's house. I still think it was a UFO." The incident sparked an interest in unidentified flying objects. In recent years, Chester's interest has grown into a passion that led him to write Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in WWII. The ... book contains descriptions of UFO sightings by American and British service members culled from research that included documents at the National Archives. In 1989 ... he met Leonard Stringfield, who was ... a sergeant in the 5th Air Force during World War II and ... told him about how he was among the first people to fly into mainland Japan after the bombing of Nagasaki. Stringfield said that he was on a plane flying between Le Shima and Iwo Jima, when he looked out the window and saw three luminous, disk-shaped objects flying in formation. "He told me that the objects had no outline, no exhaust, and no wings," Chester said. Stringfield heard a commotion in the cockpit - the engine was malfunctioning. But when the objects disappeared, the plane was able to land safely. In 1999, [Chester] began visiting the National Archives ... to study military records for information about UFO sightings during the war. Throughout almost four years of research, Chester found documents detailing sightings described as objects, lights, flares, strange lights or rockets [including] a silver, cigar-shaped object that looked like an airship. He also found ... information about unexplained objects reported by members of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, a former Army Air Forces fighter squadron that fought during World War II. "Some of the soldiers thought the objects they saw were beyond the realm of conventional technology," Chester said.
Note: To read a powerful summary of evidence on UFOs from highly respected military and government professionals, click here.
A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said ... President Bush is standing by "feverish legal theories" to justify actions which are unconstitutional. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., made the comments on the Senate floor during debate. Whitehouse said that ... he had examined "highly classified secret legal opinions" issued by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel [OLC]. Whitehouse recounted that, "Sitting in that secure room, as a lawyer, as a former U.S. Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and State Attorney General, I was increasingly dismayed and amazed as I read on." Whitehouse related three OLC legal opinions which he got declassified: "An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order."; ... "The President ... can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority"; [and] "The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations." "Imagine a general counsel to a major U.S. corporation telling his board of directors, 'In this company the counsel’s office is bound by the CEO’s legal determinations,'" Whitehouse said. "The board ought to throw that lawyer out - it’s malpractice, probably even unethical." We are a nation of laws, not of men. This nation was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that ... 'The King can do no wrong'."
Note: To hear the revealing Senate speech on this vital topic by Senator Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, click here. For Whitehouse's comments on this topic on his Senate website, click here.
The CIA made videotapes in 2002 of its officers administering harsh interrogation techniques to two al-Qaeda suspects but destroyed the tapes three years later, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said. Captured on tape were interrogations of Abu Zubaydah ... and a second high-level al-Qaeda member who was not identified. Zubaydah [was] subjected to "waterboarding" ... while in CIA custody. All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the CIA's director of clandestine operations. The destruction came after the Justice Department had told a federal judge in the case of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui that the CIA did not possess videotapes of a specific set of interrogations sought by his attorneys. The startling disclosures came on the same day that House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA. The measure ... would effectively set a government-wide standard for legal interrogations by explicitly outlawing the use of [waterboarding], forced nudity, hooding, military dogs and other harsh tactics against prisoners by any U.S. intelligence agency. Civil liberties advocates denounced the CIA's decision to destroy the tapes. Jameel Jaffer, a national security lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the tapes were destroyed at a time when a federal court had ordered the CIA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU seeking records related to interrogations. "The CIA appears to have deliberately destroyed evidence that would have allowed its agents to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners," Jaffer said. "They are tapes that should have been released to the courts and Congress, but the CIA apparently believes that its agents are above the law."
Greg Palast may be the only journalist with a New York office who works, as he says, "in journalistic exile." There, with a team of a half-dozen researchers largely supported by $50 donations from readers, Palast ferrets out documents and smoking-gun-toting insiders from Washington to Ecuador and uses them to gird his bitingly sardonic investigative essays that most American mainstream outlets won't touch. He was one of the first to write about the manipulation of voter [rolls] in the 2000 election, and he used a combination of unnamed sources, leaked documents and gumshoe reporting to critique the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Palast says his desire to expose class-warfare stories is rooted in his upbringing in [a poor Los Angeles] neighborhood wedged between a power plant and a dump. Kids in the neighborhood had two choices, he said: go to Vietnam or work in the auto plant. "We were the losers," he said. After graduate school at the University of Chicago ...Palast became an investigator, a "forensic economist," unearthing documents exposing fraud and racketeering on behalf of labor unions and consumer groups. One of the first stories that received widespread attention ... was about the manipulation of the Florida vote count during the disputed 2000 election. Palast predicts the 2008 election won't be stolen by faulty touch-screen voting machines or even through computers at all. It will be done by making it hard for voters - particularly people of color in traditionally Democratic enclaves - to register and vote by a series of challenges to their registration. "What we see is a systematic manipulation of the electoral system." To support his investigative work, three years ago he created a nonprofit fund. It raises more than $100,000 a year - most of it in $50 and $100 donations from individuals. "It's the only thing that's kept us alive," said Palast, who takes no money from the fund.
Note: Greg Palast is one of many brave journalists who have been silenced by the mainstream media. To read our summary of his highly revealing essay on the media cover-up, click here.
In the [U.S.] Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intuitive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say. It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition. Future Combat Systems "has some serious problems," said Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), chairman of the House air and land forces subcommittee. "Since its inception, costs have gone up dramatically while promised capability has steadily diminished." Today, the Army program involves more than 550 contractors and subcontractors in 41 states and 220 congressional districts. "When a program gets to a certain size, in the billions, it employs so many people in so many districts you can't kill it. It's kind of like the Titanic. How do you move it five degrees?" said a congressional staffer and former Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing review of the program. The GAO said the cost has increased 79 percent, to $163.7 billion, from $91.4 billion, its original estimate in 2003.
Note: For highly revealing reports from major media sources on corruption in government contracting, click here.
Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day -- or nearly $1 million a minute. What's that mean to you? It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States. Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion. And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt -- now at relatively low interest rates -- rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain. So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind. But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending -- leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above. A major economic slowdown, as some economists suggest may be looming, could hasten the day of reckoning. The national debt -- the total accumulation of annual budget deficits -- is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009. Interest on the national debt ... totaled $430 billion last year. Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
Business lobbyists ... are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor. Hoping to lock in policies backed by a pro-business administration, poultry farmers are seeking an exemption for the smelly fumes produced by tons of chicken manure. Businesses are lobbying the Bush administration to roll back rules that let employees take time off for family needs and medical problems. And electric power companies are pushing the government to relax pollution-control requirements. Even as they try to shape pending regulations, business lobbies are also looking beyond President Bush. Corporations and trade associations are recruiting Democratic lobbyists. And lobbyists, expecting battles over taxes and health care in 2009, are pouring money into the campaigns of Democratic candidates for Congress and the White House. At the Transportation Department, trucking companies are trying to get final approval for a rule increasing the maximum number of hours commercial truck drivers can work. And automakers are trying to persuade officials to set new standards for the strength of car roofs — standards far less stringent than what consumer advocates say is needed to protect riders in a rollover. At the Interior Department, coal companies are lobbying for a regulation that would allow them to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys. A coalition of environmental groups has condemned the proposed rule, saying it would accelerate “the destruction of mountains, forests and streams throughout Appalachia.” A priority for many employers in 2008 is to secure changes in the rules for family and medical leave.
Note: For many revealing reports on corporate corruption, click here.
Electronic voting systems used throughout California still aren't good enough to be trusted with the state's elections, Secretary of State Debra Bowen said. While Bowen has been putting tough restrictions and new security requirements on the use of the touch screen machines, she admitted having doubts as to whether the electronic voting systems will ever meet the standards she believes are needed in California. "It's a real challenge," she said at a ... conference on voting and elections. What's available now isn't as transparent or auditable as the paper ballot systems they replaced. Earlier this year, Bowen put together a top-to-bottom review of voting systems used in the state and found that most of the voting machines were vulnerable to hackers looking to change results or cause mischief with the systems. Despite loud howls from county voting officials, Bowen decertified almost all the touch screen systems used in California, allowing only their most limited use. "When the government finds a car is unsafe, it orders a recall," she said. "Here we're talking about systems used to cast and tally votes, the most basic tool of democracy." The secretary admitted that she wants to see California's counties use optical scan systems in their polling places, especially because most of them already use the systems to count mail ballots. Optical scan systems, where voters mark their choices on a paper ballot that then gets inserted into a tallying machine, "are old and boring, but cheap and reliable," Bowen said, because the paper ballots make it easy to recount the ballots and ensure the accuracy of the vote. "I want to make sure the votes are secure, auditable and transparent and that every vote is counted as it was cast," she said. Although Bowen's review of the voting systems affected only California, it had a nationwide impact, because the same systems are used in many other states.
Note: For a summary of major media reports on the problems with electronic voting machines, click here.
Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine — a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup — turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm. The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running). Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil. Or rather, he had extracted it. Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its component parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each material. In 2004 he teamed up with engineer pal Hawk Hogan to take the machine commercial. Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. Oil companies are looking to the machines to gasify petroleum trapped in shale.
Note: For many exciting breakthroughs in new energy technologies, click here.
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