Daily News Hole

10 Comments

1. 

   CabinGirl on January 19, 2006 at 9:24 am

   Area high school student proposes random drug testing of student body: LINK

   …(17 year old) Tavangar researched nonpunitive random drug testing and decided to bring the idea to the District Safety Committee, which is comprised of parents, teachers, administration, community members, law enforcement officials, students and a representative from the Chester County Office of Addictive Diseases.

   “I proposed it to the school safety committee. They unfortunately declined it,” he said. “The district in general, it’s very happy with the status quo because the GPA average is through the roof. Drug use is also through the roof, but that’s not a priority.

   And there’s more…

   A possible drug testing program might function as testing half of the students involved in extra-curricular activities or with parking privileges on school property once a year at random. This would involve the student relinquishing a hair. The results don’t show up on transcripts and would not be made available to friends, teachers or police. However, if a student tests positive, the school would notify the parents and require talking to a student care specialist. Ultimately, each school decides the appropriate actions in the case of a positive test result. This might involve a point system along with progressive action or some other method.

   “It’s really aimed at helping,” said Tavangar, “sending them to a student care specialist because that is what these kids need.”

   However, the issue has attracted considerable opposition from organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which asserts that drug testing in schools doesn’t deter drug use; is expensive and legally risky; and discourages participation in extra-curricular activities (www.aclu.org/drugpolicy/index.html). Many believe that testing violates a student’s right to privacy and might allow for police targeting if results were revealed to authorities.

2. 

   Knoxville Progressive on January 19, 2006 at 11:19 am

   Here’s the daily headline list on science, energy, medicine and all that nerdy technical stuff.  Enjoy:

   Science Headlines 19 Jan 2006

   Very Bad News du Jour:  Due to reduced convection currents, warmer seas will have less plankton; a positive feedback on climate change and harmful to the oceanic food chain.

   UN experts warn bird flu could devastate Africa

   Scientist studying tropical clouds to improve precision of climate change models

   Scientists open capsule containing comet dust; estimate over a million particles inside

   Sediment samples and orbit calculations reveal asteroid collision 8 million years ago rained dust on earth for a million years, possibly affecting climate

   Brain scans reveal men’s pleasure in revenge

   Nine-fold increase in air pollution in China over last 50 years decreases sunlight at ground, despite fewer cloudy days

   Six former EPA heads urge action on greenhouse gas emissions (NYT)

   New coral bleaching event at Great Barrier Reef blamed on high temperatures; raises fears

   Avian flu found in wild birds in Crimea (Ukraine)

   EU prepares for WTO ruling on genetically modified food ban

   Canada’s supreme court upholds legality of local pesticide bans

   Sunscreen compounds may be endocrine disruptors in fish, Swiss find.

   Acetaminophen forms toxics during chlorination

   Vatican – via newspaper L’Osservatore Romano – weighs in on evolution debate again; sides with science in Dover, PA case.

   Longer article:
   The January issue of Environmental Health Perspectives has a feature article following up on the effects of Hurricane Katrina.  (Can also be downloaded as pdf file)

3. 

   spiderleaf on January 19, 2006 at 11:27 am

   and says something about a truce with the US and rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq. Also something about more attacks inside the US if the truce isn’t accepted.

   Waiting on the tape/ transcript from al-jazeera.

   • 

     SallyCat on January 19, 2006 at 11:32 am

     San Francisco Chronicle – AP Breaking News”

     Found this in my local paper on the Bin Laden story. More info shortly from other sources I’m sure.

   • 

     CabinGirl on January 19, 2006 at 11:34 am

     I heard that on NPR news just a bit ago, but didn’t get any details  Will you post them when you find more?

   • 

     spiderleaf on January 19, 2006 at 11:49 am

     Here’s the al jazeera transcript/ article

     • 

       spiderleaf on January 19, 2006 at 12:20 pm

       The truce quote:

       /Here’s a quote:

       “In response to the substance of the polls in the US, which indicate that Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stick to.

       “We are a nation that Allah banned from lying and stabbing others in the back, hence both parties of the truce will enjoy stability and security to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by war.

       “There is no problem in this solution, but it will prevent hundreds of billions from going to influential people and warlords in America – those who supported Bush’s electoral campaign – and from this, we can understand Bush and his gang’s insistence on continuing the war.”

       Addressing Americans again, he said: “If your desire for peace, stability and reconciliation was true, here we have given you the answer to your call.” /

   • 

     maryb2004 on January 19, 2006 at 11:55 am

     Why isn’t the traditional media pointing out that such an attack is clearly impossible.  We attacked Iraq so that they couldn’t attack us here.  Huh?

4. 

   Arcturus on January 19, 2006 at 3:48 pm

   as MSN, AOL & Yahoo roll over:

   In court documents filed Wednesday, the Bush administration asked a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., to force Google to comply with a subpoena for the information, which would reveal the search terms of a broad swath of the search engine’s visitors.

   Prosecutors are requesting a “random sampling” of 1 million Internet addresses accessible though Google’s popular search engine, and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google on a given day.

   Google said in a statement sent to CNET News.com on Thursday that it will resist the request “vigorously.”

   The Bush administration’s request is part of its attempts to defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which is being challenged in court in Philadelphia by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says Web sites can not realistically comply with COPA and that the law violates the freedom of speech mandated by the First Amendment.

   The search engine companies are not parties to the suit.

   An attorney for the ACLU said Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL received identical subpoenas and chose to comply with them rather than fight the Bush administration’s request in court. “Our understanding is that MSN and AOL have complied with the government’s request, that Yahoo has provided some information in response but that information wasn’t completely satisfactory (according to) the government,” said ACLU staff attorney Aden Fine. (snip)

   A subpoena dated August 2005 requests a complete list of all Internet addresses that can “be located” through Google’s popular search engine, and “all queries that have been entered” over a two-month period beginning on June 1, 2005. Later, prosecutors offered to narrow the request to random samples of indexed sites and search strings. It’s unclear what version of the request that AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo complied with.

   Although the government is not asking for Internet addresses that would identify users, some legal experts fear that disclosing search terms would invade privacy. “The more (the government) can figure out who the surfers are, the more peoples’ First Amendment rights are in jeopardy,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University.

   link

   Why does the DOJ want these records?

   The Bush administration’s request is tied to its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, which restricts the posting of sexually explicit material deemed “harmful to minors” on commercial Web sites, unless it’s unavailable to minors.

   A divided U.S. Supreme Court in 2004 stopped short of striking down the law and instead said that a full trial–to take place in Philadelphia–was needed to determine whether the law is constitutional.

   As part of their defense of COPA, prosecutors are expected to argue that technological filtering methods are less effective than criminal prohibitions.

   Why should this matter to us?

   Privacy watchdogs have worried about the massive store of data that Google has assembled about the online behavior of Internet users. Google keeps log files that record search terms used, Web sites visited and the Internet Protocol address and browser type of the computer for every single search conducted through its Web site. It also sets cookies that can be used to correlate repeat visits to the company’s growing network of Web sites.

   Sherwin Siy, staff counsel at the privacy rights advocacy organization Electronic Privacy Information Center, praised Google for fighting the administration’s request. However, he said there would not even be an issue if the search engine hadn’t collected the information and made it aggregatable in the first place.

   “This continual aggregation of people’s search streams and all this information and the other data from their other services like Gmail places privacy at risk. This is something you would think Google should have anticipated,” he said. “It is not a recent phenomenon that overbroad government investigations will put people’s privacy at risk by digging through business records.”

   The fact that other search engines have complied with the broad Justice Department request was “very worrying,” Siy said. “I think people generally don’t expect that their searches are subject to government surveillance, to government scrutiny and that these businesses would be so eager to turn their information over on what doesn’t look like a very good basis.”

   Meanwhile, anti-porn activists are blathering on & on on cspan’s coverage of congressional hearings today.

5. 

   chocolate ink on January 19, 2006 at 3:56 pm

   http://tinyurl.com/9sjde These 4 pictures pretty much says it all regarding our levee’s and how other countries have protected themselves from flooding.

   Shows picture of London, what the Dutch have done, the Italians in protecting Venice and how the supposed richest country in the world protects their people.

   It just seems so bizarre that there is no planning to undertake some sort of similar project for New Orleans.  Instead it seems we are just going to patch up the old levees and hope the over a hundred year old water pumps last what..another hundred years.