Author Archives: RupertxMcmillan

Democrats Have Already Caved In to Republicans

Mother Jones

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Yet another in my series of quick reminders: Democrats have already agreed to fund the government at Republican levels. In other words, they’ve already caved in. It wasn’t even a compromise. They’ve just flatly given in to Republican demands to continue funding at sequester levels.

This is the CR that Republicans now refuse to pass.

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Democrats Have Already Caved In to Republicans

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

Mother Jones

One of China’s largest and most prominent media companies—12 percent of which is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox—has been rocked by a major sexual harassment and assault scandal. A lawsuit filed on July 19 in federal court against Phoenix Satellite Television contains a series of jaw-dropping allegations concerning its onetime Washington, DC, bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu. The Chinese journalist is accused of a litany of offenses, including encouraging job applicants to meet him in hotel rooms for interviews and then groping them, attempting to coerce the wife of a cameraman to have sex with him to preserve her husband’s job, telling a job candidate about the “gigantic and powerful penis” of his black friend, and attempting to rape a reporter.

The plaintiffs, two of whom are US citizens, claim at least one high-ranking Phoenix executive knew about this conduct for years before the company fired Liu last December. They also say that after Phoenix ousted Liu, the media conglomerate installed a new bureau chief who proceeded to retaliate against employees who had complained about the alleged abuses.

Four of the five plaintiffs—Meixing Ren, Ching-Yi Chang, Taofeng Wang, and Haipei Shue—are men who say that Tao Lu, the current bureau chief, punished them for speaking out about his predecessor’s alleged conduct by downsizing their job duties and firing one of them. The fifth plaintiff is a former Phoenix intern who alleges that Liu repeatedly groped her. Another former Phoenix intern filed a separate lawsuit in New York earlier this year making similar allegations. Mother Jones interviewed three of the male plaintiffs and four of Liu’s alleged female victims.

Phoenix Television, which is based in Hong Kong, is one of few private broadcasters permitted by the Chinese government to operate in mainland China. The multimedia empire maintains bureaus around the world, covers more than 150 countries, and is worth about $1.9 billion. In 2008, the company’s current CEO, Liu Changle, won an International Emmy for being “one of Asia’s leading broadcast entrepreneurs.”

The lawsuit is “full of inaccuracies and false statements about the Company,” Wu Xiaoyong, the CEO of Phoenix’s American subsidiary, told Mother Jones in a statement. “We have retained counsel to defend the Company’s interests, and we will have no further comment regarding this case.” Mother Jones left messages at several phone numbers associated with Liu; he did not respond to these repeated requests for comment. Both Xiaoyong and the law firm representing the plaintiffs said they do not know the ex-bureau chief’s whereabouts. Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox declined to comment.

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

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This Man Has an IQ of 70. Will Georgia Execute Him Tonight? (Update: No)

Mother Jones

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Update: A Fulton County judge has stayed Hill’s execution, pending a hearing on Thursday.

At 7 p.m. EST on Monday, Georgia is set to execute Warren Hill, who has been on death row since 1989 for murdering his cellmate with a wooden board. (Hill had, at the time, been serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend.) That in itself isn’t especially unusual, except that according to every expert who has examined him, Hill is mentally disabled—and states are prohibited from executing mentally disabled individuals under a 2002 Supreme Court decision.

At this point, no one seems to dispute that Hill meets even the state’s high standard for proving he’s mentally handicapped. But Georgia contends—and in April, a federal appeals court agreed—that his mental capacities are irrelevant, because he is procedurally barred from making that case. That is, even though there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Hill is unfit for execution, Georgia is going ahead with the lethal injection anyway, on a technicality; he’s all out of options.

But there’s another wrinkle. In February, a state court granted a stay of execution for Hill due to questions about the legality of the state’s lethal injection cocktail. The difficulty in acquiring new lethal injection cocktails is such that in February, Georgia sought to expedite the executions of its 94 death row inmates before its cocktails reached their March 1 expiration date. So in May, Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act, which classifies the state’s execution drug cocktail as a “state secret,” and therefore immune from judicial oversight:

The identifying information of any person or entity who participates in or administers the execution of a death sentence and the identifying information of any person or entity that manufactures, supplies, compounds, or prescribes the drugs, medical supplies, or medical equipment utilized in the execution of a death sentence shall be confidential and shall not be subject to disclosure under Article 4 of Chapter 18 of Title 50 or under judicial process. Such information shall be classified as a confidential state secret.

Under the new law, judges—or anyone else, really—are prohibited from finding out what drugs are actually being used to execute death row inmates, and where those drugs are coming from. (In Oklahoma, for instance, lawyers have successfully blocked executions that make use of new, more experimental drugs.) Because the cocktail is unknown, it is impossible to know whether such an execution process would square with other Constitutional tenets, such as the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Hill’s last best hope now is the US Supreme Court, which had previously announced it would conference on the case in September. But that’s only pushed Georgia to speed up its own deadline. The law went into effect on July 1. On July 3, Georgia set the new execution date for Hill. We’ll keep you updated.

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This Man Has an IQ of 70. Will Georgia Execute Him Tonight? (Update: No)

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Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

Mother Jones

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The Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based nonprofit, is at the center of the key legal battles over abortion and contraception.

CRR filed the lawsuit that forced the Obama administration to drop its effort to restrict access to Plan B One-Step—a brand of what is popularly known as the morning-after pill—this week, making emergency contraception available over-the-counter to everyone. The group is also leading the legal fight against bans on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which a dozen states have passed in the last three years. And next week, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether or not it will hear Oklahoma’s appeal of court decisions CRR won blocking both a mandatory sonogram law and a ban on medication abortion in that state.

CRR’s president and CEO, Nancy Northup, was in Washington this week to talk to legislators about what’s happening in the states and to promote her group’s proposal for a Bill of Reproductive Rights. Launched last year, the effort calls on federal legislators to pass protections for abortion and other reproductive health care at the federal level. The GOP-led House, however, was moving in the opposite direction this week, with the judiciary committee debating Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide. Mother Jones spoke to Northup during her visit.

Mother Jones: The DOJ’s latest offer is that the FDA will make Plan B One-Step available over-the-counter for everyone, but the appeals court’s ruling last week said that it needed to make all types of two-pill EC available. So the administration’s response didn’t actually answer the court’s ruling. What’s next?

Northup: We’re going to back to the court saying, “Enough with the gamesmanship.” It’s safe and effective. All these pills are safe and effective for use by all ages and they should all be over the counter. And that the generic option, which is less expensive, should be available. They’re $10-20 cheaper.

Mother Jones: Another issue CRR has been involved in is the 20-week abortion bans in the states. You recently won a lawsuit against Arizona’s in court. But at this point, 12 states have passed this type of law. What’s next on that front?

Northup: There are some states with no providers who offer abortions up to 20 weeks. So we’re not challenging those, because we have no standing to challenge them. That again shows how much of a political and messaging campaign this is by people who want to restrict access. Why are they are passing 20 week bans in states where doctors don’t even provide those services? Everywhere that they have been challenged, they have been, to date, enjoined. In Georgia there’s a preliminary injunction in place. Arizona has an injunction after the 9th Circuit decision. Idaho’s decision came down that it was unconstitutional. What we’re now looking at is fighting the 12-week ban in Arkansas, and we will be filing in North Dakota against the six-week ban. We challenge them where it’s meaningful to challenge them.

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Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

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The Financialization of America (and the World)

Mother Jones

Bruce Bartlett writes today about the relentless financialization of the American economy and the danger it poses:

Ozgur Orhangazi of Roosevelt University has found that investment in the real sector of the economy falls when financialization rises….Adair Turner, formerly Britain’s top financial regulator, suggests that the financial sector’s gains have been more in the form of economic rents — basically something for nothing — than the return to greater economic value.

Another way that the financial sector leeches growth from other sectors is by attracting a rising share of the nation’s “best and brightest” workers, depriving other sectors like manufacturing of their skills.

The rising share of income going to financial assets also contributes to labor’s falling share….This phenomenon is a major cause of rising income inequality, which itself is an important reason for inadequate growth.

The dangers of runaway financialization are pretty well known and pretty well accepted. Given that, the key question you should ask is: Why? It’s not inevitable, after all. The finance industry doesn’t grow because some fundamental feature of the modern economy demands it. In fact, it’s really more mysterious than it seems. After all, we know why, say, the car industry grew during the 20th century: because more people wanted cars. Likewise, we know why the tech industry is growing now: because more people want to surf the net and play video games.

So why has finance grown? Because the world needs more finance? Up to a point, sure: availablility of capital is a key requirement for economic growth in a modern mixed economy. But we passed that point quite a while ago. Capital has been freely and easily available in America and most of the developed world for decades. So again: Why the continued growth? It doesn’t seem to be demand driven, so there must be some other reason. Anyone care to guess in comments? No prizes for the right answer, I’m afraid.

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The Financialization of America (and the World)

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Frankensalmon could breed with trout, produce frankentrout

Frankensalmon could breed with trout, produce frankentrout

Shutterstock

Brown trout sans frankengenes.

Interspecies hanky-panky is a thing, in case you didn’t know. Sometimes love, or perhaps a blindly primeval desire to reproduce, can lead one species of animal to breed with another. Think of a liger, for example — a hybrid of a lion and a tiger. Or a mule, which has a donkey for a father and a horse for a mother. And, every once in a while, an Atlantic salmon will mate with a brown trout.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration appears poised to approve the sale of genetically engineered AquAdvantage® salmon this year, despite significant aversion to the very idea of the frankenfish. If the transgenic Atlantic salmon escapes into the wild, environmentalists worry that the fast-growing fish could breed with wild Atlantic salmon and throw natural populations into unpredictable turmoil. Which got scientists to wondering: What if transgenic Atlantic salmon got loose and bred with wild brown trout? Could AquAdvantage fish sow their freaky oats over a species barrier?

The answer, according to scientists who ran experiments with the fish, is yes. Yes they can. Not only that, but the hybrid offspring can inherit the turbo growth genes and grow at a remarkable pace, outcompeting both natural salmon and transgenic salmon for food.

From a paper published Wednesday by Canadian researchers in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (the “B” stands for biology, by the way):

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of environmental impacts of hybridization between a GM animal and a closely related species.

From the BBC:

When the fish were placed in a mocked-up stream inside the laboratory, the researchers found that the hybrids were out-competing both the genetically modified salmon and wild salmon, significantly stunting their growth.

“This was likely a result of competition for limited food resources,” explained [Darek] Moreau [of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada].

The researchers said this study highlighted the ecological consequences should genetically modified fish get into the wild.

They acknowledged that the risks of such an escape and subsequent encounter with a brown trout were low, but said this information should still be taken into account by those who are regulating GM animals.

AquaBounty, the company behind AquAdvantage salmon, says its fish won’t escape into the wild. It’s impossible, the company assures us, because the fast-growing fish would all be sterile females kept in tanks on land. Yet, as Jeff Goldblum’s character reminds us after he’s told that velociraptors in Jurassic Park could never breed because they are all engineered to be female, “life finds a way.”

Just ask the farmer in Oregon who recently discovered illegal GMO wheat growing on his property, years after Monsanto stopped field trials of the Roundup-ready wheat and dropped its development altogether. That should also have been impossible. Yet here we are.

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Frankensalmon could breed with trout, produce frankentrout

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WATCH: Snuggly Bear from DOJ Says, "Don’t Worry About the AP Scandal" Fiore Cartoon

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Snuggly Bear from DOJ Says, "Don’t Worry About the AP Scandal" Fiore Cartoon

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Where did all the tornadoes go?

Where did all the tornadoes go?

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Remember these guys?

The drought that parched much of the nation during the past year didn’t just stunt crops — it also stunted the annual yield of tornadoes. And an unseasonably chilly spring is so far helping to keep the hellish twisters at bay — although weather forecasters warn that trend may be short-lived.

During the past 12 months, the U.S. was hit by an estimated 197 tornadoes rated EF1 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which ranks tornadoes according to their destructive potential from a low “0″ up to a devastating “5.” That was the lowest number of such tornadoes during any 12-month period since record-keeping began in 1954 — well below the previous low of 247 recorded between July 1990 and June 1991.

That’s in huge contrast to the onslaught of tornadoes that tore deadly paths of destruction through the nation in 2011, which was a record-busting year of tornadoes galore.

These tornado statistics come from NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory researcher Harold Brooks. He also noted in a blog post that the number of people killed by tornadoes during the past year — 7 — was the lowest since 1899. Here’s a graph lifted from his post:

NOAA

(Click to embiggen.)

The record tally of tornadoes in 2011 had people wondering then whether climate change was to blame, and the sudden dearth of the storms has people again wondering the same thing. It certainly feels like one of those boom-bust weather cycles that we expect from climate change. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence directly linking the recent tornado cycle to global warming.

The dearth of tornadoes over the past year was linked to the lack of moisture in the air amid the shortage of rainstorms nationwide. There are divergent views on whether the recent droughts affecting the tornado states were caused by climate change — although climate models do predict more droughts in central North America, which is often a vast playpen of deadly twisters.

Likewise, we can’t singularly blame climate change for the cold snap that recently hit the Great Plains and the Midwest. But climatologists have drawn links between global warming and the weather patterns that delivered the cold spurt.

Climate Central delves into the tornado/climate question:

The drought that enveloped the majority of the lower 48 states during the past year has contributed greatly to the paucity of tornadoes, since the dry conditions have robbed the atmosphere of the water vapor that fuels severe thunderstorms. Other tornado ingredients, such as strong upper-level winds and atmospheric wind shear, have also been missing. …

Since tornado seasons vary considerably from one year to the next due to natural variability, it is unclear that the absence of tornadoes during the past 12 months has anything to do with global warming, just as it’s unclear if the 2011 tornado outbreaks were connected to it, either.

Tornadoes are complicated beasts, affected not only by moisture and temperature but also by wind shear and other factors.

Meanwhile, the Weather Channel warns that the cold conditions that have been recently keeping tornadoes at bay might soon break:

[T]he stubborn cold air of this past week will … gradually give way to more typical warm and humid air returning from the Gulf of Mexico into the central and southern Plains, to the east of a sharpening dryline.

With that said, the polar jet stream will remain well to the north in Canada through at least mid-week, rather far north for early May. Instead, weaker wind flow aloft, despite the upper-level system limping east from California, will be in play.

What that means is while severe thunderstorms and some tornadoes are possible in the Plains this week, the weaker wind flow aloft may keep this episode from reaching a full-fledged, widespread outbreak [of tornadoes] that May is so notorious for.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Where did all the tornadoes go?

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Who’s Using Chemical Weapons in Syria?

Mother Jones

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I haven’t seen this picked up anywhere else, but Reuters is reporting that a UN official says they have no evidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons in its ongoing civil war:

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

I have no idea if this is reliable or not. However, for more on just how shaky the evidence is about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, you might try this Guardian piece from a few days ago. Overall, it suggests that the Obama administration might indeed be wise to collect more definitive evidence about this before they do anything rash.

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Who’s Using Chemical Weapons in Syria?

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Weird Recycling: Gross or Green?

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Weird Recycling: Gross or Green?

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