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Is Trump Looking For a New Press Secretary?

Mother Jones

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

Seriously?

That’s from the San Jose Mercury News. There are only a few possibilities here:

  1. Sean Spicer has already resigned and is only staying on until a replacement is hired. So he knows all about this.
  2. Spicer doesn’t know Trump is planning to fire him and Guilfoyle was supposed to keep it confidential.
  3. Spicer doesn’t know but nobody in Trumpland gives a shit how he finds out he’s been fired.

It must be a real joy working in the White House these days.

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Is Trump Looking For a New Press Secretary?

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Am I the Only Person in the World Who Thinks Windows 8.1 Is Great?

Mother Jones

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The AP reports that Microsoft is prepping a Windows update: “Just one year after the Windows 8 launch, Microsoft issued a free update to address some of the gripes. The system now lets people run more than two apps side by side, for instance, and its Internet Explorer browser lets people open more than 10 tabs without automatically closing older ones.”

Atrios comments: “Whenever I read about Windows 8.x I just shake my head.”

This is something I’d usually address in a weekend post, but I was busy this weekend and I’m curious about something. I apologize in advance to the millions of you who couldn’t care less about this.

Here’s what I’m curious about: why is there so much griping about Windows 8.1? (I’m talking specifically about Windows 8.1 here, not the original Windows 8 release.) I ask about this as someone who’s used both an iPad and an Android tablet extensively, and was surprised at just how much I like the Win 8.1 tablet I bought last month. I mostly got it as a lark, but it’s been great. The tile interface is really nice: smooth, clean, and functional. The menu interface, which brings up menus by swiping in from the sides, is very handy. And if you don’t like the tile interface, you can just boot directly to the old-school Windows desktop and never see it again.

Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t used Internet Explorer for at least 15 years, so I didn’t know about the tab thing. That’s kind of dumb. And getting rid of the Start button on the desktop—probably the single biggest source of complaints—was mind-bogglingly stupid. Still, you can fix that with a third-party add-on in about two minutes. It’s really not worth whining about.

This isn’t to say that Windows 8 doesn’t have issues. There are some annoyances here and there, and the app ecosystem is anemic compared to Apple and Android—though, to my surprise, I managed to download very nice apps for every single application I care about. But overall, I’ve found it to be the best tablet OS I’ve used. The tile apps I’ve installed are mostly excellent; performance is good; I like having both a real file system and a real copy of Office; and it allows me to install a full desktop browser, not a stripped-down piece of junk that chugs along like a Model T. Practically the first thing I did when I got the tablet was to install Firefox and hit the sync button. That was great! A browser that actually does everything I want; supports all the add-ins I like; allows me to write blog posts without compromise; and has great performance. Android can’t touch that, and it drove me nuts on my Asus tablet.

Obviously my reaction is based on the limited set of things I personally happen to do on a tablet. I don’t listen to music or play games, for example, so I have no idea if it’s any good in those areas. But I’m curious to hear from other folks who are using Win 8.1 on a tablet. Do you like it? Or does it really have lots of serious drawbacks that I just haven’t run into?

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Am I the Only Person in the World Who Thinks Windows 8.1 Is Great?

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Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

NASA

In most of the carbon-trading world, it has been getting cheaper in recent years to buy the rights to pollute the atmosphere with climate-changing carbon dioxide. That’s largely because recession-afflicted Europe is awash with too many carbon allowances for its trading scheme to have any real bite, and because demand for U.N.-issued allowances has crashed along with hopes of a meaningful international climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

But in a bleak year for carbon markets, North America was a rising star.

Despite ongoing failure by the U.S. and Canadian governments to impose limits or taxes on greenhouse gas pollution, state and regional initiatives on the east and west coasts of North America moved forward.

California and Quebec are now the most expensive places in the world in which to pump carbon dioxide into the air.

Still, the value of global carbon markets plummeted last year, according to a new analysis published by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon. “The healthy growth in the North American markets was not enough to compensate for a stagnating European market and the collapse of UN-issued credits,” it found.

For the first time since 2010, the global carbon markets receded year-on-year in terms of transacted volumes.  …

The drop in value was more significant: as European carbon prices continued to fall, and the price of international credits collapsed completely, the total value of the transactions was 38.5 billion euros [$52.3 billion], a 38 percent decrease from the 2012 value. …

The year saw a bloom in the North American carbon markets, with strong growth in California and renewed activity in the north-eastern states’ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) market. We assess overall transactions to have been 390 million metric tonnes with a value of $2.8 billion (€2 billion). This equals a volume growth of 200 percent and a value growth of 262 percent.

In the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) that encompasses California and the Canadian province of Québec, carbon allowance and offset prices are the highest in the world, with the allowance price floor of $10.71/t (approximately €7.8) in 2013 and trades clearing above that.

As the following graph shows, North America still has a long way to go before it could rival the sheer size of the E.U. Emission Trading Scheme (which trades EUAs) or, to a lesser extent, the U.N.-run international market for certified emission reductions (CERs) and emission reduction units (ERUs):

Thomson Reuters Point CarbonClick to embiggen.

Other highlights in 2013 carbon-trading news included the launch of trading programs in China and Mexico. A lowlight was Australia’s election of a new prime minister, Tony Abbott, who pledges to dismantle his country’s trading program.


Source
Carbon Market Monitor: A Review of 2013, Thomson Reuters Point Carbon

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

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How Healthcare.gov Could Be Hacked

Mother Jones

With Healthcare.gov plagued by technical difficulties, the Obama administration is bringing in heavyweight coders and private companies like Verizon to fix the federal health exchange, pronto. But web security experts say the Obamacare tech team should add another pressing cyber issue to its to-do list: eliminating a security flaw that could make sensitive user information, including Social Security numbers, vulnerable to hackers.

According to several online security experts, Healthcare.gov, the portal where consumers in 35 states are being directed to obtain affordable health coverage, has a coding problem that could allow hackers to deploy a technique called “clickjacking,” where invisible links are planted on a legitimate web page. Using this scheme, hackers could trick users into giving up personal data as they enter it into the web site, potentially placing Americans at risk of identity theft or allowing fraudsters to file bogus health care claims. And it’s not just the federal exchange that has security problems. Some of the 15 states that have established their own online exchanges aren’t using standard encryption throughout their Obamacare websites—leaving user information at risk.

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How Healthcare.gov Could Be Hacked

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Chasing Carbon: Headed to Mexico with Scientist Dad

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Chasing Carbon: Headed to Mexico with Scientist Dad

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Save the Planet; Eat Wood

Donna Hamilton

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Save the Planet; Eat Wood

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Chesapeake oil? Offshore drilling pushed by Virginia lawmakers

Chesapeake oil? Offshore drilling pushed by Virginia lawmakers

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Terry McAuliffe used to oppose offshore oil drilling, then he lost a gubernatorial primary and now he’s running as an offshore drilling supporter.

Lawmakers are talking up the prospect of drilling off the Virginia coast, and the mere whiff of the possibility of oil profits has already driven one prominent candidate there to sway in the wind.

For a time, the Deepwater Horizon calamity had put the brakes on offshore drilling, and the Obama administration responded by slapping moratoriums on the practice off coastlines around the country. (A moratorium covering the Gulf of Mexico was quickly lifted by the Interior Department.)

But the memory of the Gulf oil spill apparently does not weigh heavily on either of Virginia’s Democratic senators nor on Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.). They have introduced bills in congress that would put an end to the drilling moratorium off the coast of their state. From offshoretechnology.com:

According to [Sen. Mark] Warner, 12.5% of Virginia’s 50% share [of public drilling revenues] will be earmarked for environmental conservation efforts, while the remaining 37.5% will be put into the state’s general fund.

The senator also said that it is difficult to put a figure on the amount of money that Virginia will receive, as it is not clear how much natural gas and oil is available for drilling off the coast.

On the other hand, Virginia Sierra Club chapter director Glen Besa said that offshore drilling can “jeopardize” the state’s tourism and fishing industries.

“As we saw with the Gulf oil disaster, oil spills decimate tourism and fishing industries. In Virginia, that means risking over $2.5bn and over 100,000 jobs in industries that depend on healthy ocean and Chesapeake Bay waters and clean beaches,” Besa added.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster seems to have had an even more curious impact on former Democratic Party chairman and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

Since losing the Democratic primary in 2009 and launching another campaign to try to win office in 2013, McAuliffe has flipped and flopped on the drilling issue.

When McAuliffe ran for governor in 2009, he opposed drilling for oil off Virginia’s coast — a position that his  opponents attacked. “Our priority on energy needs to be on efficiency measures and renewable sources of energy,” he said in the Washington Post in 2009. “As governor, that will be my focus. We need to invest in renewable energy and look for opportunities to create green jobs.”

Then Creigh Deeds easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, the Deepwater Horizon thing happened, a few years passed and now McAuliffe is running again for governor — and this time he is all about offshore drilling. From the Washington Post:

“Terry has learned more about offshore drilling from experts in Virginia,” said McAuliffe spokesman Josh Schwerin. “He thinks that because of technological progress we can now do it in a responsible fashion.”

It seems that, at least for one former champion of renewable energy, the heartache of losing a primary has proven more persuasive than the heartache of watching an environmental disaster play out in the Gulf of Mexico.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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Chesapeake oil? Offshore drilling pushed by Virginia lawmakers

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Eco-Friendly DIY Scrubbing Cleansers

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Eco-Friendly DIY Scrubbing Cleansers

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Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

Mother Jones

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Nearly two decades after their mid-’90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry’s products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.

And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe’s largest pesticide makers? Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven’t panned out—and there’s little evidence they ever will.

Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as of de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.

The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: “a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops.”

The report brims with examples of the US government promoting the biotech industry abroad. Here are a few:

The State Department encouraged embassies to bring visitors—especially reporters—to the United States, which has “proven to be effective ways of dispelling concerns about biotech crops.” The State Department organized or sponsored 28 junkets from 17 countries between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, when the US embassy was trying to prevent Poland from adopting a ban on biotech livestock feed, the State Department brought a delegation of high-level Polish government agriculture officials to meet with the USDA in Washington, tour Michigan State University and visit the Chicago Board of Trade. The USDA sponsored a trip for El Salvador’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock to visit Pioneer Hi-Bred’s Iowa facilities and to meet with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that was expected to “pay rich dividends by helping the Minister clearly advocate policy positions in our mutual bilateral interests.”

Another example: this 2009 cable, referenced in the FWW report, shows a State Department functionary casually requesting US taxpayer funds to to combat a popular effort to require labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong—and boasting about successfully having done so in the past. Why focus on the GMO policy of a quasi-independent city? Hong Kong’s rejection of a mandatory labeling policy “could have influential spillover effects in the region, including Taiwan, mainland China and Southeast Asia,” the functionary writes, adding that her consulate had “intentionally designed anti-labeling programs other embassies and consulates” could use.

The report also shows how the State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition. In a 2009 cable, FWW shows, the US embassy in Nigeria bragged that “U.S. government support in drafting pro-biotech legislation as well as sensitizing key stakeholders through a public outreach program” helped pass and industry-friendly law. Working with USAID—an independent US government agency that operates under the State Department’s authority—the State Department pushed similar efforts in Kenya and Ghana, FWW shows.

Yet, as FWW points out, in so aggressively pushing biotech solutions abroad, State is bucking against the global consensus of ag-development experts as expressed by the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project, convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008, to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world’s needs in a time of rapid climate change. The IAASTD took such a skeptical view of deregulated biotech as a panacea for the globe’s food challenges that Croplife America, the industry’s main industry lobbying group, saw fit to denounce it. The US government backed up the biotech lobby on this one—just three of the 61 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.

So why why are our corps of diplomats behaving as if they answered to Monsanto’s shareholders with regard to ag policy? My guess is GMO seed technology, dominated by Monsanto, as well as our towering crops corn and soy crops (which are at this point almost completely from GM seeds) are two of the few areas of global trade wherein the US still generates a trade surplus. The website of the State Department’s Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division puts it like this:

In 2013, the United States is forecasted to export $145 billion in agricultural products, which is $9.2 billion above fiscal 2012 exports, and have a trade surplus of $30 billion in our agricultural sector.

I guess US presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, are bent on preserving and expanding that surplus. President Obama altered much about US foreign policy when he took over for President Bush in 2009; but he doesn’t seem to have changed a thing when it comes to pushing biotech on the global stage. And the impulse is not confined to the State Department. Back in 2009, when Obama needed to appoint someone to lead agriculture negotiations at the US Trade Office, he went straight to the ag-biotech industry, tapping the vice president for science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, Islam A. Siddiqui, who still holds that post today.

Meanwhile, the State Department operates an Office of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Textile Trade Affairs, which exists in part to “maintain open markets for U.S. products derived from modern biotechnology” and “promote acceptance of this promising technology.” The office’s biotechnology page is larded with language that reads like boilerplate from Monsanto promo material: “Agricultural biotechnology helps farmers increase yields, enabling them to produce more food per acre while reducing the need for chemicals, pesticides, water, and tilling. This provides benefits to the environment as well as to the health and livelihood of farmers.”

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Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

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Photos: Stark Scenes From the Guantanamo Hunger Strike

Mother Jones

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For more than two weeks, 100 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba have been on hunger strike to protest conditions at the prison and their indefinite confinement. First denied and downplayed by the military, the strike has now become a full-blown emergency, as the Huffington Post‘s Ryan J. Reilly reports:

Twenty-three detainees are currently being force-fed. At least twice a day, guards in riot gear tie each detainee to a chair or bed, and medical personnel force a tube up his nose and down his throat, and pump a can of Ensure or other dietary supplement into his stomach. There are so many detainees being force-fed that Guantanamo’s medical personnel are working around the clock to keep up with the demand, and approximately 40 additional medical personnel just arrived in Guantanamo to help deal with the growing crisis.

Though they do not show any of these frantic scenes, recently released military photos offer a window onto how Guantanamo has been dealing with the unprecedented protest: A “feeding chair” where detainees are force-fed sits next to a tray of feeding tubes and a bottle of butter pecan Ensure; guards deliver meals through “bean holes” in detainees’ cells, only to throw away the uneaten food; hospital beds behind chain-link fences with rings for shackles beside them.

Other images in the series, taken in early April by Sgt. Brian Godette of the Army 138th Public Affairs Detachment, depict scenes from Camps V and VI, where most prisoners are held: a sign asking soldiers to respect praying detainees, a stuffed recliner in the “media room” that looks almost normal until you notice the ankle restraints. Original photo captions are in quotes. (h/t Public Intelligence)

“Feeding chair and internal nourishment preparation inside the Joint Medical Group where the detainees receive medical care.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Internal nourishment preparation inside the Joint Medical Group where the detainees receive medical care.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Overnight medical stay area inside the Joint Medical Group.”

“Shackles restraint point between hospital beds inside the Joint Medical Group.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Guard Force soldiers unload and wheel in food items delivered to Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp V to prepare for breakfast disbursement to detainees.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Dated boxes and marked containers designate items and freshness.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Fresh olives are part of standard food items delivered.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Guard Force soldier distributes lunch to detainee through a bean hole in Camp V cell.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Guard Force soldier discards breakfast delivered earlier in the morning which was refused by detainees in Camps V and VI.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“The Behavioral Health Unit where the detainees receive psychological medical care.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Detainees religious rights are respected throughout the detention camps as well as inside the Joint Medical Group.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Standard issued items to restricted detainees inside detention Camp V.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

“Media room inside Camp V Detention Facility which provides detainees access to television and movies.”

Sgt. Brian Godette

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Photos: Stark Scenes From the Guantanamo Hunger Strike

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