Thursday News Bucket

9 Comments

1. 

   CabinGirl on May 25, 2006 at 8:46 am

   sitting in a tree: Reuters/Yahoo

   OS ANGELES (Reuters) – Folk singer Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” from a tree-top perch in Los Angeles on Wednesday in a bid to save a community garden from demolition.

   Baez, 65, who gave voice to civil rights and anti-war campaigners in the 1960s, joined Julia “Butterfly” Hill, an anti-logging activist, in taking up residence in the tree in the 14-acre (5.7-hectare) fruit and vegetable garden in gritty south Los Angeles.

   Baez will take shifts occupying the tree with Hill, who spent two years in the late 1990s sitting in a northern California redwood to highlight the plight of ancient forests.

   Now, where were they when mythmother needed them few weeks ago?

   • 

     Knoxville Progressive on May 25, 2006 at 9:04 am

     Egarwaen and I profiled this threatened community garden in one of our New Environmentalism diaries back in January (near the end of the diary).  Glad to see it’s still hanging on (for now) and getting some high-profile support.

2. 

   Knoxville Progressive on May 25, 2006 at 9:06 am

   Like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle, continents have split, drifted and merged again many times, but geologists haven’t understood the mechanism behind the moves. A new study now offers evidence that continents sometimes break along preexisting lines of weakness created when small chunks of land attach to a larger continent.

   Listening to music can reduce chronic pain and depression by up to 25 per cent and make people feel more in control and less disabled by their condition.

   Union leaders representing EPA scientists assert that agency managers and pesticide-industry officials are exerting political pressure to allow continued use of a family of harmful pesticides.  [Link for Wall Street journal subscribers only] 🙁

   Need a little help to quit smoking but don’t have the time or money to visit a psychologist?   Perhaps a chatbot virtual coach could help you kick the habit.  Or maybe this is the inspiration you need:  San Diego scientists have identified a link between unstable molecules found in cigarette smoke and air pollution and the symptoms seen in brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

   Climate Change rant du jour presents “a comedy of errors:”  In the shadow of twin giant cooling towers, Bush said yesterday that his plan to expand nuclear power would curb emissions contributing to global warming and would provide an “abundant and plentiful” alternative to limited energy sources. But he might have wanted to get his story straight with congress first, as at the same moment the House appeared ready to scale back President Bush’s plan to resume nuclear fuel reprocessing as part of an international program to boost nuclear power.

   Researchers have discovered that white rot, a type of wood fungus, can break down phenolic resins widely used in plastic formulations. The finding could make it easier to recycle the synthetic polymers, which are known for their durability and resistance to attacks by termites and fungi.

   The first life-cycle assessment of green roofs confirms that they save energy as well as improve the larger environment.

   The first stage of the recently-completed Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River filled during June 2003, disrupting the flow of the river and trapping sediments and nutrients behind the dam.  New research shows that the dam affects downstream transport of nutrients, altering the ecosystem at the mouth of the river in the East China Sea, a rich fishing area.  Researchers also examined waters at the mouth of the Yangtze River for primary productivity: the variety and density of tiny marine life such as diatoms and flagellates, as well as by chlorophyll and light-saturation measurements.  By 2003, the primary productivity had diminished by 86% and saltwater had encroached into regions that previously had been brackish.  The results have implications for the future of the East China Sea ecosystem, or any ecosystem at the end of a large dammed river.

   A blob-like creature is invading Long Island Sound and posing a threat to its lobsters and other shellfish.  University of Connecticut scientists say they have found colonies of invasive sea squirts, blob-shaped animals that reproduce easily, on the floor of the sound.  They believe this variety of sea squirt, known as didemnum, arrived on the hulls of ships from Asia. They have no known predators.  “This thing has the potential for causing significant economic impact when it attaches to the floor of the Sound, where it blankets and suffocates shellfish and lobsters,” said Ivar Babb, director of UConn’s Undersea Research Center at Avery Point in Groton.  The scope of the invasion is being determined to see if the creatures can be chemically eradicated without damaging other sea life.  “This thing is ugly,” Babb said. “It has no socially redeeming virtues.”

   The monster that wouldn’t die:  The House of Representatives is planning to this week vote yet again on opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.  In the Senate, Alaska’s two Republican lawmakers said they would continue to push to advance ANWR drilling. Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Commerce Committee, said ANWR drilling could be included in a package of energy legislation that Republicans are drafting for possible consideration this summer.

   “Unclean!  Unclean!”  Tiny Caribbean spiny lobsters are social creatures that live together in underwater caves. But scientists have shown that the creatures can sense a lethal virus in other lobsters, even before they show signs of sickness, and then avoid them.  This is the first record of healthy animals avoiding diseased members of their own species in the wild.

3. 

   boran2 on May 25, 2006 at 9:13 am

   Link

   Seven Governments Sign Nuclear Fusion Agreement

   BRUSSELS, Belgium, May 24, 2006 (ENS) – A project to demonstrate the potential of nuclear fusion as an energy source moved a step closer to realization today as the seven governments involved in the research initialed an agreement on the construction, operation, and decommissioning of a research facility. Known as ITER, the project will attempt to harness the same type of energy which powers the Sun and other stars.

   This morning, ministers representing China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States of America met in the European Commission’s Berlaymont Building in Brussels to initial the agreement they have been negotiating over the past year. They have selected a site for the construction and operation of ITER at Cadarache in southern France.

4. 

   CabinGirl on May 25, 2006 at 9:14 am

   Reuters/Yahoo

   Chocolate lovers rejoice. A new study hints that eating milk chocolate may boost brain function.

   “Chocolate contains many substances that act as stimulants, such as theobromine, phenethylamine, and caffeine,” Dr. Bryan Raudenbush from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia noted in comments to Reuters Health.

   “These substances by themselves have previously been found to increase alertness and attention and what we have found is that by consuming chocolate you can get the stimulating effects, which then lead to increased mental performance.”

   Is anybody really surprised by this?  At last, some justification for eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag…

5. 

   Knoxville Progressive on May 25, 2006 at 9:28 am

   Was there a protest in DC we didn’t know about?

   AP is reporting a power outage snarled rail traffic between Washington, D.C., and New York City this morning forcing trains to suspend service.

   NJ Transit stopped all service on its heavily traveled Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast lines, stranding thousands of commuters.  NJ Transit spokesman Ken Miller said the problem occurred on Amtrak equipment somewhere between Washington and New York, but it was not immediately clear where.

   • 

     Gaianne on May 25, 2006 at 5:58 pm

     My first thought!  😀  

     But the deeper issue is that just as car and truck transport are visibly proving themselves unviable, our rail systems are showing the signs of decades of neglect and rot.  Of course it was an Amtrak failure that precipitated the outage.  

     We will be back to horse and buggy before you know it!  

     (Or maybe bicycles.)  

     Can you say, “Third World”?  

6. 

   ask on May 25, 2006 at 2:14 pm

   When giving birth means being damaged and shunned

   ADDIS ABABA — The best thing, Ajo says, is that soon people won’t talk about her any more. She will be just like every other woman, and no one will notice her at all.
   At 15, she has the height of a much younger child, and a voice as tiny as her frame. But Ajo has been married and divorced and twice endured childbirth that went on for days and days until she lost consciousness and her babies died, in a small dark house in rural Ethiopia. And with the last baby, Ajo developed a fistula, a hole in her vaginal wall that leaked urine, leaving her with soaked clothes and burns on her legs, plagued by flies and a terrible smell. And so she was not just childless, but abruptly divorced and dumped back with her mother.
   “Then everyone started to talk about me,” she said. “They said it was evil spirits that caused all this to happen.”
   (snip)
   For more than 50 years, this hospital has quietly pioneered the treatment of the horrific but little-known problem of obstetric fistula. An estimated two million women worldwide are living with the problem, the World Health Organization says, most of them in Africa. Fistula once occurred in North America and Europe, too, but disappeared more than 100 years ago because of better antenatal care. Today, fistulas affect the poorest women in the most isolated places, and because of that the issue attracts little attention and even fewer resources.

   The issue of fistula has been covered previously on BT, most extensively in Nanette’s diary from May last year.

7. 

   idredit on May 25, 2006 at 3:54 pm

   Here is the better BOMBSHELL OF THE DAY from Murray Waas writing in the National Journal
   today exposes all the LIARS: Bush Ashcroft Cheney Rove

   Rove-Novak Call Was Concern To Leak Investigators

   On september 29, 2003, three days after it became known the CIA had requested an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak called White House senior advisor Karl Rove to assure that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation….

   It gets better

   In the early days of the CIA leak probe, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was briefed on a crucial conversation between Robert Novak and Karl Rove.

   Rove testified to the grand jury that during his telephone call with Novak, the columnist said words to the effect: “You are not going to get burned” and “I don’t give up my sources,” according to people familiar with his testimony. Rove had been one of the “two senior administration” officials who had been sources for the July 14, 2003, column in which Novak outed Plame as an “agency operative.” Rove and Novak had talked about Plame on July 9, five days before Novak’s column was published. [.]

   Asked during his grand jury appearance his reaction to the telephone call, Rove characterized it as a “curious conversation” and didn’t know what to make of it, according to people familiar with his testimony. [.]

   How do we spell that new holiday that’s a coming?

   FITZMAS

   Thought you could.

   x posted in Gonzalez entry.(h/t: cursor.org)