University of California, Berkeley, researchers have taken genes from grass-eating fungi and stuffed them into yeast, creating strains that produce alcohol from tough plant material - cellulose - that normal yeast can't digest.

An innovative grouping of conservation scientists and practitioners have come together to advocate a fundamental shift in the way we view biodiversity. In their paper, which was published today in the journal Science, they argue that unless people recognise the link between their consumption choices and biodiversity loss, the diversity of life on Earth will continue to decline.

Scientists have warned that avoiding dangerous climate change this century will require steep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. New energy-efficient or carbon-free technologies can help, but what about the power plants, cars, trucks, and other fossil-fuel-burning devices already in operation? Unless forced into early retirement, they will emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for decades to come. Will their emissions push carbon dioxide levels beyond prescribed limits, regardless of what we build next? Is there already too much inertia in the system to curb climate change?

(AP) -- Federal health regulators are warning doctors that a class of injectable drugs used in MRI medical imaging scans can cause a rare and sometimes fatal condition in patients with kidney disease.

As speech recognition systems become more commonplace - on the computer desktop top, at the call centre and even in the car - it is increasingly important to ensure that the voice signal is as clear as possible before it is processed by a computer and acted upon. It could mean the difference between anything from a profitable financial deal to a safe vehicle or aircraft maneuver. Similarly, mobile phone conversations and even the clandestine recording of speech for security and law enforcement purposes could benefit.

The Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center is the lead institution in a national clinical trial of technology that will allow artificial heart patients to recuperate, rehabilitate and wait in the comfort of their own homes until a donor heart becomes available for transplant.

from Scott361

NPR’s story on Tim Kaine this morning featured this comment from a college student, who volunteered to help elect Obama in 2008 (audio ca. 2:55).

“We thought there was going to be a huge change in the country, and a lot of people aren’t quite sure that it’s worth putting in the effort this time around if we’re not going to get the promises that were made.”

Yep.

When you campaign on CHANGE and you double down on the Bush/Cheney wars, expand the Bush/Cheney police state, extend the Bush/Paulson TARP program, and deliver Mitt Romney’s health care plan – you have to expect a certain level of disillusionment.

Greg McNeal summarizes:

State Secrets Privilege - National security - United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit - Classified information - United States

The President will have to act expeditiously
to choose Rahm Emanuel's replacement as chief of staff, assuming that Emanuel
decides to leave after the November elections to run for mayor of Chicago. Some mid-level
White House officials assume that the President has already made up his mind,
although he has not indicated his preferences to a wide group of advisers. Deputy National Security Adviser Thomas P. Donilon, currently in China,
finds himself at the top of listmakers' lists.

But he may not be at the top of the
President's list. One White House adviser who is familiar
with personnel matters said that the president has tossed out several
other names and is still soliciting advice. Donilon, who has an impressive
resume, is not a leading candidate, this person said. Obama, this person
predicted, will choose his next chief of staff by setting criteria and then
figuring out who best fills them. Priority one is competency, discretion and
trust, qualities that Obama believes are linked to each other. Then comes
managerial competence, followed by a fresh set of eyes, a deep knowledge of the
policy-making process, and perhaps a distinctive voice -- someone who does not
have ties to Chicago politics.

Donilon, 54, would nominally fit the
bill.

He acts as the chief of operations for
the National Security Staff. He manages the interagency working groups that work
through tough problems, like Middle East
peace, non-proliferation, Chinese currency manipulation, and counter-terrorism.
With Vice President Joe Biden, he helped to shepherd the change in mission in Iraq, finding
himself in the middle of arcane disputes about Iraqi parliamentary procedure.
With Jim Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, and Larry Summers, the
president's chief economic adviser, Donilon has tended to the delicate task of
working with China
on a long-standing dispute about its currency. More prosaically, when the White
House Situation Room receives an alert, Donilon is the staffer who decides how
far up the food chain the news should travel.

Donilon is not considered
to be a part of the president's inner circle of advisers, but he has distinguished
himself, White House associates say, by this work ethic and his accessibility.
"When there's a problem, Tom is the first one you want to talk to," a
top administration official said.

Donilon has known the Vice President for
years, having served on his 1988 campaign staff. Biden "would be
thrilled" if he were the chief of staff, an aide said. And just as
importantly, he has established a close friendship with Valerie Jarrett, the
president's best friend and confidante, whose informal powers complicated her
relationship with Emanuel.

But outside of the foreign policy realm,
Donilon has less of a footprint. Several senior staff members who work on
domestic policy issues said that they barely knew him.

Donilon was once a major force in Democratic
politics, having served as a senior adviser to virtually every Democratic
presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter's. Donilon's first job in Washington was as an
associate liaison to House members during the Carter administration. In 1993,
he was named assistant secretary of state for public affairs, having served as
Secretary Warren Christopher's chief counsel during the presidential
transition, and later as his State Department chief of staff.

In the intervening
years, he served as a senior adviser to
Biden, worked as a corporate lawyer, and served, like many Democratic poo-bahs
of his generation, as an executive at Fannie Mae. Donilon was not implicated in
any of the shenanigans that contributed to the mortgage lender's collapse, but
he helped with their lobbying strategy, which was quite successful. As a lawyer, his
private clients included several firms at the center of the financial crisis,
including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Optically, this may present problems for
a president whose primary job, after a bruising midterm election, will be to
kick-start a sluggish economy.

Donilon had made the transition from mere
politics to corporate finance and never expected to be on the White House
staff.

But in 2008, at the urging of his long-tme
friend, David Axelrod, and a client, the developer Penny Pritzker, Donilon became an informal adviser to Obama, serving as a sounding board
for policy and political ideas and helping the candidate, who was new to
Democratic politics, extend his circle of advisers beyond the Chicago suburbs.
He helped prepare Obama for his presidential debates, and worked quietly with a
team of Obama counselors who were preparing for the transition.


















Rahm Emanuel - Joe Biden - David Axelrod - White House - Thomas E. Donilon

In the American system of government, one of the executive branch's most powerful tools is the ability to decide what information can be classified, or withheld, from anyone whom the executive branch does not want to give access. In any given circumstances, the government can use this authority, the same authority, to protect the nation from destruction AND permit the government to violate the law; to torture, even to kill. Presidents for 80 years have jealously guarded this privilege, because it provides cover for virtually every tough decision they may have to make. Ordinarily, because presidents can be held accountable for their actions through elections, we might, as a people, be prepared to sanction an unchecked power like this based solely on trust. 

But this is fundamentally misleading. The president himself, and the president's staff, almost never decide to classify things. In the Bush Administration, though President Bush specifically amended an executive order to allow Vice President Cheney to classify programs and reports, it is not clear whether this authority was given prophylactically; most of what the Vice President supervised, including the special mission units of the special operations command, already operated in near-total secrecy.

So who classifies things? Who has this power? Government officials possessing something sexily titled "original classification authority." There are thousands of people with "OCA." You've never heard of most of them. They range from the current commander of Delta Force to senior accountants at the Office of Management and Budget. Once something is classified, even if improperly, there are very few systems of accountability to make sure that the power is not being abused for the sake of an abuse of power. People with OCA are citizens of the republic, and they are loyal, but they are also citizens of their agencies and government departments.

Say that you'll never, never, never need it. One headline, why believe it? Everybody wants to rule the world.

This is a problem for the judiciary branch. Today, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals essentially conceded that law and precedent do not give, and should not give, the judiciary branch an equal claim to determine whether the government correctly classified information. They did so in an en banc ruling in the case of five men, including Binyan Mohammed, who alleged that Jeppesen Dataplan, a flight logistics company, helped the CIA render them to other countries where they were tortured. The U.S. government had asserted the State Secrets Privilege. The plaintiffs insisted the government asserted the privilege to cover up its complicity in torture. The court today held that, in essence, it does not matter if the information in the case was used to cover up torture, so long as the privilege was properly asserted.

So what does the court have to say about who gets to make that judgment? By way of background, judges have routinely, in recent years, been asking to at least see the classified information that the government insists is so sensitive that even the protections afforded to classified information in other trials are not sufficient. It says very little. The majority cites previous decisions that are, essentially, fist shakers: the government must not use the privilege capriciously; courts must regularly review the underlying information; the executive branch is not the "sole" determinant of whether information is properly classified. But at the same time, the court acknowledges, or, rather, asserts, based on precedent, that only the executive branch is capable of making that determination. So the effect is that the government will almost always have a trump card. 

In the Ninth Circuit case, the majority held that an absolute privilege might lead the way to "intolerable" abuses of power. It's hard to think of anything more intolerable than torture, but perhaps the underlying evidence that has been made public about the plaintiff's claims is weaker than it seems. In any event, if the privilege was asserted properly in this case, and the plaintiffs were indeed tortured with the complicity of the U.S. government, then the court is simply providing an extremely light check on this most magnificent and easy-to-abuse power.



















United States - United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit - George W. Bush - Classified information - Central Intelligence Agency