Category: News

Nobuyuki Oneda (pictured far right) currently serves as Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Sony Corporation and has been its Corporate Executive Officer since 2004. He is primarily responsible for Corporate Planning and Control, Accounting, Tax, Finance, Investor Relations, and Disclosure Controls. On June 18th, he will retire and current Deputy CFO, Masaru Kato, will assume Oneda’s place as Chief Financial Officer. Oneda joined Sony on April, 1969 (at the age of 24) and has served many positions in the company throughout his tenure, including Senior Vice President, Head of Transformation 60, Corporate Planning & Control, Accounting and Information Systems of Sony Corp.

Here is some of the other titles he’s held in Sony throughout the years:

• Jun 2004 – Oneda served as Sevenior Vice President, Corporate Executive Officer of Sony Corporation
• Feb 2004 – Oneda served as Officer in charge of Corporate Planning and Control, and Accounting of Sony Corporation
• 2003 – Oneda served as Senior Vice President, Executive Officer of Sony Corporation
• 2002 – Oneda served as Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Network Application & Content Service Sector of Sony Corporation and Corporate Senior Vice President of Sony Corporation
• 2000 – Oneda served as Deputy President and Chief Financial Officer of Sony Electronics Inc. and Group Executive Officer of Sony Corporation
• 1999 – Oneda served as an Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Sony Electronics Inc. (a U.S. subsidiary of Sony Corporation)
• 1996 – Oneda served as General Manager, Corporate Planning & Control Department of Sony Corp.

While AT&T may be taking its time to move on to a 4G network, Verizon is taking the opposite approach.  The company has said on previous occasions that they plan to have their 4G LTE network lit up in 25-30 markets by Q4 of this year and recently stated that they will have devices to take advantage of that speedy new network shortly thereafter.  Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has stated that Big Red won’t have any 4G-ready phones until May 2011, but that there will be up to five 4G phones available at that time.  It’s unclear who will manufacture those devices or what operating system(s) they will run, but given Verizon’s close relationship with Google and Android lately, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if at least one of these 4G phones was running the Android OS.

If you can’t wait until May 2011, McAdam went on to say that Verizon will be releasing tablets capable of using the new 4G network in Q4 of this year and that most of them would be Android-based.  Are you planning on picking up a new Android tablet or 4G phone to try out Verizon’s LTE network? Tell us below!

Via Phandroid

As one who passionately builds brands for a living, it saddens me when I am forced to bear witness to the downward spiral of a once-strong brand.  The recent troubles faced by Tylenol and other huge brands from McNeil Consumer Healthcare bear witness to the fact that, while the identity of a brand can help bring a product to the heights of popularity, that same identity, when linked to negative events, can bring the product crashing down in the minds of consumers.

Tylenol has a long history of bumps in the road, starting with drug-tampering problems back in 1982, which resulted in the brand being held up as an example of what to do when disaster strikes your product.  Take responsibility.  Take Action.  Don’t make excuses.

The public was reassured by how the Tylenol scare was handled and sales eventually returned to the brand.  Tylenol came to mean a trusted and safe product once again.  And in a market with unimaginable generic competition, that trust went a long way toward making consumers feel like the branded choice was the right choice.

More recent troubles, however, cannot be blamed on nameless and faceless culprits who are threatening the safety of the American public.  This time the responsibility for manufacturing irregularities fall solidly in the lap of McNeil.  There is no denying that they must take responsibility, there is nowhere else to put it.  But the public is not so quick to forgive this time.

Part of the difference is that this time McNeil is truly to blame for the issue.  And the other part of the difference comes from how the world has changed in those intervening 28 years.  In the world of 1982, the news of the recall and corrective action came through formal channels and gossip about the problem was contained within neighborhoods.  In the world of 2010, news of the recall hit Twitter and Facebook long before it made the front pages of the newspaper or local news broadcasts.  Along with the immediacy of informing the public, McNeil was unable to control the message, and unprepared to deal with the fallout.  Their customer service resources were inadequate, their recall website not up to date, their response times were not up to snuff.

So now, in addition to being worried about the threat that recalled medications might hold for their families, people are angry that McNeil isn’t managing the situation as well as they could.  The brand is breaking.

As the process of restocking medicine cabinets with generic versions of McNeil’s recalled drugs is documented in minute detail via social media networks, more and more people see that generics offer safe, cost-effective alternatives to the branded drugs.  The more social proof that consumers see that the generics are just as effective, the more likely they will be to continue to eschew the branded products.  There is no upside of going back to Tylenol or Benedryl.  Those names are tainted with both the manufacturing issues (real or imagined, it makes no difference) and the customer service disappointments.

The bar for what consumers expect from a generic drug is much lower.  Does it work?  Does it cost less than the branded product?  Is it safe?  Customer service and advertising and image don’t enter into the equation for these purposes.

By dropping the ball so many times, McNeil is training consumers to be satisfied with a less impressive package.  It will be interesting to see if they are able to resolve and recover from this current crisis situation.  As surprised as I am to say this, my bets in this case are against the brand.

In a country where the mantra “you can be anything you want” is practically a national prayer, it’s still kind of shocking to see someone suggest that a high school student should skip college. Some economists and professors, however, argue that college has become too expensive to throw money at if the odds are high that either you won’t finish, or you’ll go into an industry that doesn’t require a degree.

From the New York Times:

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

The educational system may not be ready for that kind of shift, though. A counselor at a New York City high school told the paper that she’d be more willing to steer some students into non-college careers if her school hadn’t eliminated most of the vocational training programs over the last decade.

One other interesting point from the article: employers are looking for entry level workers with social skills that college courses don’t necessarily teach, and that aren’t being taught in high school either. These include problem solving, decision making, conflict resolution, cooperation, and active listening.

“Plan B: Skip College” [New York Times]

On May 18, 2010 the European Union published the implementing Regulation (EC) No 79/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council on type-approval of hydrogen-powered motor vehicles that includes measures regarding hydrogen propulsion, hydrogen components and hydrogen systems and for the installation of such components and systems.   Regulation (2009/79)   allows car manufacturers  to apply for the EC whole-vehicle type-approval of hydrogen-powered vehicles on a voluntary basis. The regulation also provides for harmonised rules on hydrogen tanks, including for liquid hydrogen, is necessary in order to ensure that hydrogen vehicles can be refuelled throughout the EU in a safe and reliable manner. The implementing regulation can be downloaded here.

All evidence so far points to Final Fantasy Versus XIII staying exclusive to the PS3, but it seems Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada isn’t quite ready to close the door in Microsoft’s face.

The federal agency responsible for regulating oil and gas extraction let oil companies like BP write their own safety regulations, ignored or downplayed the environmental threats from drilling, and issued drilling permits before fully consulting with other regulatory agencies. The Obama administration has launched an overhaul of the agency and has sent to Congress a legislative proposal to address the looming disaster in the Gulf Coast region.

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The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Department of Interior (DOI) agency responsible for regulating energy and mineral resources, has badly mismanaged the oil and gas permitting process. The agency has abdicated its responsibility for ensuring that energy extraction is done safely, according to numerous sources investigating the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The April 20 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion left 11 workers missing and the subsequent oil spill continues to spew thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf. Investigations of the explosion are beginning to show that BP and its partners in the Deepwater Horizon project did not implement safe oil drilling practices that are used in other areas of the world. MMS left decisions about drilling practices to the companies rather than issuing strong regulatory requirements that may have prevented the explosion.

On May 12, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to begin assessing what committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called "a calamitous series of equipment and operational failures." The hearing focused on the actions by BP; Transocean Limited, the operator of the oil rig; and Halliburton, an oil services company responsible for a critical seal designed to stop the flow of oil.

The Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee also held hearings on the spill in which executives associated with the Deepwater Horizon rig testified.

President Obama also named MMS as a culpable party in this disaster. On May 14, for example, after getting another briefing on the federal government’s response to the spill, Obama said, "For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore."

In a scathing August 2008 report by the agency’s inspector general, MMS employees were found to have accepted gifts from oil industry representatives, improperly socialized with lobbyists, engaged in unauthorized business activities, and flaunted the agency’s ethical standards. The report summarized MMS’s royalty-in-kind program personnel as lacking professional conduct standards and believing the rules of ethics did not apply to them.

Obama asked DOI Secretary Ken Salazar to reform MMS so that the part of the agency responsible for collecting oil and gas royalties is separated from an office with regulatory safety and enforcement. The separation is intended to reduce conflicts of interest within an agency responsible for both managing a revenue stream and developing and enforcing regulations.

On May 17, amid the criticism of MMS, associate director for offshore energy and minerals management Chris Oynes announced his retirement, effective May 31. Before being named associate director, Oynes oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico. A May 17 Washington Post article reported that Oynes had been criticized by former MMS officials as being too close to industry.

A May 13 New York Times article highlighted the importance of creating a new office with regulatory powers. According to the Times, MMS:

• Issued dozens of permits to oil companies to drill in the Gulf without the approval of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees dangers to endangered species;
• Ignored staff scientists who raised concerns about engineering and environmental impacts and threatened retaliation if the scientists continued to voice concerns;
• Gave BP and other oil companies exemptions from requirements to file environmental impact statements;
• Silenced agency scientists and changed reports that raised the specter of oil spills; and
• Issued at least five permits for new drilling projects since Salazar announced a moratorium on new permits May 5.

The article quotes one former MMS scientist as saying, "You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an impact … If you find the risks of a spill are high or you conclude that a certain species will be affected, your report gets disappeared in a desk drawer and they find another scientist to redo it or they rewrite it for you."

Scientific integrity issues at DOI have been a concern for years. An April 29 report by the agency’s inspector general found that DOI has never had a scientific integrity policy despite a mandate from 2000 to produce one. The report documents a variety of problems the agency experienced during the Bush administration. The report recommends an agency-wide policy be established and a person assigned the primary responsibility for its implementation.

The Washington Post reported that MMS liberally applied “categorical exclusions” to reduce its NEPA workload and give companies a pass on the rigors of environmental review. MMS granted such a waiver to BP’s Deepwater Horizon operation. BP had appealed to the White House Council on Environmental Quality as recently as April 9 to use categorical exemptions more broadly, according to the Post.

On May 12, the administration also put forward a legislative proposal to enhance its ability to address the Deepwater Horizon spill. According to a White House fact sheet, the proposal calls for additional funding to several agencies to pay for current expenses resulting from the spill and to monitor the impacts. It would provide additional funding for DOI to conduct additional inspections and enforcement while slowing the pace of issuing permits so that relevant issues are explored more thoroughly. The proposal also calls for additional federal support to states to supplement unemployment assistance programs to those on the Gulf Coast who lose wages as a result of the spill. Additional assistance may be provided if Congress approves provisions for additional economic development efforts within affected communities. The proposal would also raise liability caps on those held responsible for the disaster and raises the tax on oil companies to fund the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.

Members of Congress have introduced numerous bills to address some of the issues contained in Obama’s more comprehensive legislative proposal. To date, there has been no progress on the bills as Congress awaits more information from different investigations into the causes of the explosion and spill.

Photo in teaser by the U.S. Coast Guard.

This is what we’ve come to: Four million people provide an average of $1,700 each to City Hall for police, fire, paved streets and sidewalks, parks and libraries and other basic services but all they care about is dogs, cats and gang-bangers.

Welcome to the City Hall Follies — a burlesque that lasted 11 hours on Monday and amounted to petty bickering and maneuvering to add another $5 in fines for illegal parking so they can provide more jobs to hoodlums and keep a closed-to-the-public warehouse with 167 unwanted pets functioning.

Once again, the City Council signed off on a budget that carries out the mayor’s plan for destroying the quality of life for the many to protect the few.

Even the word budget is inappropriate since it’s largely a work of fiction: Unrealistic revenue projections, revenue that doesn’t exist, layoffs and spending cuts they have no intention of carrying out.

Why they even go through the charade of holding a meeting in public and boring themselves and us to death is beyond me since it was always a done deal and solves nothing.

They balanced the budget on paper, not in reality. They want us to approve a tax on billboards so they can approve even more of them and legitimize the thousands of illegal ones they have done nothing about for years.

They make a mockery of government and fools of us.

It took them most of the day to come up the $5 illegal parking fine increase so they could keep the Northeast Valley animal shelter staffed to look after stray cats and dogs. It is the newest and costliest shelter in the city but never has opened to the public, nothing but a depot for animals destined to be euthanized.

A third of the dogs in the city are unlicensed so they impose a 50 percent fee on those who do license their dogs and do little or nothing to penalize those who don’t.

They spend millions to keep gang members from killing each other and the occasional bystander and plan to spend far more to train them as “green doctors” and laborers so they can put them on the DWP payroll and justify more rate hikes.

But the people who obey the laws and pay the taxes see their libraries and parks closing and  the 75-year backlog in paving streets and sidewalks heading toward the century mark.

Like bums cadging for money on Skid Row, they beg the city unions that elected them to temporarily give back a little from the years of sweetheart contracts just so they can get through another few months without layoffs or furloughs.

They put themselves in this position by cutting a deal last year to bribe 2,400 workers to retire early and signed a contract that deferred wage increases with the promise that workers would get two years’ of wage hikes totaling nearly 6 percent in 2010-11 if even a single worker was terminated or furloughed.

The bills are coming due for those wage hikes just as they are for the wage hikes they gave DWP workers at the same time, just as they will for their plans to borrow heavily to get through the next 12 months.

They are digging a financial hole for the city so deep that the day of reckoning accounts will have disastrous consequences.

At the end of the day, they all voted for this budget except Alarcon who objected that they didn’t do enough for the poor, the unions and the special interests and Koretz who simply disappeared when the vote was taken to no one’s surprise.

The instinct of many is to break up the city, slash their pay in half, declare bankruptcy or refuse to pay your DWP bill like so many others are doing with impunity.

We have come to this. We have become a global symbol of America’s failure and fading glory.

My only answer, for what it’s worth, is to throw these people out and start again with new leaders and a new vision that will treat people equally, restore trust in City Hall and offer a new deal that provides for a healthier future for LA   Otherwise it’s time to sell off what you can and pack your bags like so many families and businesses already have done.

Filed under: Europe, Earnings/Financials, SEAT

It’s no secret that Seat is the dimmest bulb in the Volkswagen classroom. The beleaguered Spanish manufacturer squandered a total of $138 million in the first quarter of this year alone – more than double what the next two least profitable brands in the German manufacturer’s lineup lost. In a last-ditch effort to get Seat back on its feet, VW has announced that it will both expand the company’s offerings and spread the brand outside of Spain. The plan is the brainchild of James Muir, the company’s new CEO as of September of last year.

Many of the problems currently afflicting Seat are due to the fact that Spain’s economy has taken a beating during the global recession. Likewise, most of the company’s sales come from Southern Europe – an area that hasn’t fared well amid the financial crisis. VW hasn’t said exactly where the Seat name will be showing up in the near future, but you can bet your lucky underpants it will be somewhere with a little extra money in its pocket.

Likewise, the company didn’t say much about what we can expect in terms of new models. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, a total of 56 percent of Seat sales come from the Ibiza compact, and Muir says that if the automaker’s outlook is to improve, that needs to change.

[Source: Bloomberg Businessweek]

Report: VW CEO says Seat getting its last chance originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 18 May 2010 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While some newspapers like the Times of London and the New York Times have either implemented or are expected to launch paywalls for their content, The Guardian in Britain has taken the exact opposite approach: Not only does it give its content away for free to readers, but through its “open platform” and API, it allows developers and companies to take its content as well, and do whatever they want with it — including building it into commercial applications. Are the higher-ups at the paper crazy? Not according to Chris Thorpe, The Guardian’s “developer advocate” and a member of the team that built the open platform and helps companies integrate it into their apps and services.

In an interview in Toronto on Monday, Thorpe said that the paper doesn’t want to charge its users for content, but instead wants to enable developers and companies to create businesses around that content and then partner with them. Unlike the New York Times, which restricts developers to only an excerpt of its content and doesn’t allow them to use it in commercial applications or services, The Guardian’s API provides full access to its content and allows developers and companies to use it even in revenue-generating applications.

In fact, “We not only say that you can use the content in a commercial application, we encourage it,” Thorpe said. “It gets our content to places where it wouldn’t be otherwise, and then we can build relationships with content partners around that.” The platform, which is still in the experimental stage, has attracted about 2,000 developers who have signed up for the API and created over 200 apps and web services. Platform developer Matt McAlister has called it an attempt to “weave The Guardian into the fabric of the Internet.”

Thorpe noted that the API — which he said will be coming out of beta soon — may be free, but it does come with strings attached. If you want the full text of articles to use in your app or service, you agree (by signing the licensing agreement) that The Guardian has the right to insert ads into the stream of content it sends you through the API. The paper is also working on partnerships with a number of outside companies and agencies that use content from the newspaper’s database as part of a their service or site, and some of those look to be closer to monetizing the paper’s own content better than The Guardian itself can.

For example, Thorpe said that some sites and services that are focused on a sport such as football will take The Guardian’s content related to a specific team and use that to build out their site. Using the same stories or content on The Guardian site isn’t worth much, because the newspaper doesn’t know when a diehard Arsenal fan visits the site, and therefore can’t serve them related ads. But a dedicated site for those fans can take that same content and monetize it much more effectively.

Thorpe also admits that The Guardian’s ownership structure — it’s owned by the Scott Trust — likely has something to do with the paper’s interest in an open API, and its willingness to provide its content to others despite the lack of any immediate return, since it can afford to think longer term rather than just focusing solely on quarterly earnings. The vision of the paper is to become the leading voice of liberal thought on the Internet, he said, and the newspaper’s leadership firmly believes that becoming an open platform is the best way to achieve that.

In the video embedded below, Thorpe talks briefly about the strategy behind the open API:

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This summer, 51 Climate Corps fellows will take their places on the front lines of a new movement for energy efficiency in business – a movement grounded in smart economics and fueled by the talents of the next generation of business leaders.

It’s a movement whose time has come. Climate change is the environmental challenge of our generation, and the need for action has never been greater. The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has focused the nation on the need to confront our reliance on fossil fuels. And that has renewed hope for swift action in the Senate on a climate bill.

But there’s one solution to the climate crisis that we don’t need to wait for — energy efficiency. The opportunity is enormous: a 2009 McKinsey report estimates that by 2020, the United States could reduce its annual energy consumption by 23% through energy efficiency measures alone. This would cut greenhouse gas emissions by over a gigaton – that’s a billion tons – and cumulatively save companies and consumers over a trillion dollars.

Energy efficiency is doable right now, it’s cost-effective, and it’s absolutely critical to slowing climate change. But it’s not happening fast enough. To truly take energy efficiency to scale, we need a national movement that captures the imagination of people from dorm rooms to boardrooms across the country.

That’s why Environmental Defense Fund created EDF Climate Corps. The heart of the program is the EDF Climate Corps fellow. With our partner Net Impact, we recruit students from top-tier MBA programs, provide them with intensive training and embed them in companies around the country. For 10-12 weeks, the fellows serve as champions of energy efficiency, developing customized investment plans that help their companies cut costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

In the first two years of the program, Climate Corps fellows identified almost $90 million in net operating cost savings, and 280 million kilowatt hours of energy savings – enough to power 24,000 homes annually. Even more impressive: companies report that they are implementing projects accounting for 84% of the energy savings identified by the fellows.

With results like these, it’s no wonder that the program has grown by leaps and bounds, from 7 fellows in 2008 to 51 fellows this summer. We have 47 companies on board this year, across industries from telecommunications (AT&T and Verizon), to IT (Cisco and Sungard), e-commerce (eBay and Yahoo!) retail (Target and JCPenney) and financial services (Bank of America and Wells Fargo). Several companies are returning to Climate Corps for a second year – Cisco for a third.

The beauty of EDF Climate Corps is that it gives tomorrow’s business leaders a chance to change the world today. That’s what attracted Jeremy Dommu, a 2010 fellow from George Washington University, to the program. As Jeremy writes in a blog for Business Week, “I look forward to a summer in which I am tasked with making suggestions that will have a positive impact on both the planet and a company's bottom line.”

So to Jeremy, and to our other 50 champions of energy efficiency: welcome to Climate Corps!

Sign up to receive further updates on Climate Corps 2010, including regular blog posts by our fellows.

Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) recently introduced long-awaited Senate climate change legislation. The bill seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, matching targets set in a House bill passed in 2009. The bill includes several provisions calling for transparent and participatory policies, especially relating to measures that would create new financial markets for buying and selling the right to pollute. How well such transparency would be implemented is a major question, and the success of the emissions reductions may depend on the level of openness that is built into the nation’s climate change policy.

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A lack of transparency in key parts of the financial sector is considered to be a major contributing factor to the ongoing economic hardships now afflicting the U.S. and other nations. Numerous recent market crises, such as the 2008 petroleum price spike, the crash of the subprime mortgage and credit default swap markets, and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme have raised significant concerns about the transparency and stability of financial markets. The proposed climate legislation would create enormous new financial markets in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many are concerned that a lack of transparency in U.S. climate policies would undermine progress in reducing emissions, resulting in the loss of precious time.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill, known as the American Power Act (APA), calls for an expanded greenhouse gas registry to track emissions, public disclosure of key data sets related to emissions reductions, and stresses the need for transparent and participatory design and implementation of market-based programs, which provide greater flexibility to polluters seeking emissions reductions, among other transparency measures. Requiring openness and accountability from the early stages of climate policy development would help ensure the policies make real emissions reductions and would help identify poorly performing measures.

The APA includes market-based policies for reducing emissions, such as the creation of a carbon exchange that uses quarterly auctions to trade the right to emit decreasing "allowances" of greenhouse gases, and the use of "carbon offsets," which allow polluters to meet some of their required reductions by paying for emissions reduction projects elsewhere in the U.S. or in foreign countries. According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, "Congress has the opportunity to design the carbon trading market oversight framework at a point in time before long-standing carbon trading practices and systems have been fully established."

Greenhouse Gas Registry

One fundament of a transparent, accountable climate change program is a clear and accurate system for reporting who is emitting greenhouse gases and how much. As a result of language inserted into a 2008 appropriations bill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created a mandatory greenhouse gas reporting rule for thousands of large emitters across the U.S. economy. The first reports from facilities are due in 2011. The APA calls for EPA to build on this program to meet the bill’s expanded information needs.

The APA would amend the Clean Air Act to expand the existing registry by covering additional sources such as vehicle fleets, requiring reporting on the capture and sequestration of greenhouse gases, requiring more frequent reporting, and placing limits on what information can be withheld from the public by claiming it as a trade secret. The revised registry would also authorize EPA to collect data from 2007 forward, whereas the existing registry only collects emissions data from 2010 onward.

Carbon Offsets Transparency

Carbon offsets are a mechanism whereby a polluter can meet a portion of its required emissions reductions by investing in a project that reduces emissions or sequesters carbon elsewhere. For example, a cement factory could pay to have trees planted or a refinery could pay for citizens to install solar panels. Offsets theoretically allow more flexibility for polluters to comply with the law because paying others to reduce emissions can be cheaper than reducing the polluters’ own emissions.

Transparency is again critical to realizing real emissions reductions through offsets. The U.S. Forest Service advises that to be legitimate, offsets must be real, measurable, verifiable, and additional (meaning the offset would not have occurred under a business-as-usual scenario). In a 2008 study, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that "any use of offsets for compliance that lack credibility would undermine the achievement of the program’s goals." GAO emphasized the need for transparency to ensure the offsets projects are creating reductions that are real, measurable, and would not have otherwise happened.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill establishes criteria to assure that offset credit is earned only for real and permanent actions that would not have occurred otherwise. The APA includes requirements for the public disclosure of the government’s approval or disapproval of specific offsets projects and the information relevant to making the decision. Additionally, the APA calls for audits of offsets projects; however, the results of the audits would be aggregated before being disclosed, likely denying the public information about specific projects.

The transparency of offsets projects in foreign countries receives special attention in the APA. There are many opportunities for offsets projects in developing countries, such as reforestation projects. Questionable practices surrounding past voluntary offsets programs have drawn criticism of their accountability and veracity. One section of the APA requires that "local communities (particularly the most vulnerable communities and populations in the communities and indigenous peoples in areas in which any activities or programs are planned) are engaged through adequate disclosure of information, public participation, and consultation, including full consideration of the interdependence of vulnerable communities and ecosystems to promote the resilience of local communities." Similar language calling for transparency and public participation appears elsewhere in the offsets provisions of the bill.

Scientific Review

The EPA and other relevant agencies are required to make periodic reports to Congress on new scientific information, on whether the U.S. program is meeting its goals, and on whether the nation’s efforts are sufficient to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. For example, a new technical advisory committee will be created to analyze carbon capture and sequestration technologies. All of this committee’s studies must be made public.

Auctions

The Kerry-Lieberman bill authorizes the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to create rules for the transparent operations of a carbon allowance market, including the public disclosure of carbon market participants. Bidders in auctions must disclose whom they are bidding for, and the identity of winning buyers and the final carbon price must be disclosed. The bill specifies that a greenhouse gas allowance tracking system must be available to the public on the Internet.

Other Transparency Provisions

One controversial feature of the APA calls for expedited and expanded licensing and construction of nuclear power plants. The bill calls on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to report to Congress on ways to move forward on this nuclear expansion. The bill states that the NRC’s recommendations must provide ways for "interested parties that have standing" to have their "legitimate concerns" heard.

Another significant measure in the APA is the requirement that companies drilling for natural gas that use a common yet controversial technique known as hydraulic fracturing must publicly disclose the identities of the chemicals used in the drilling process. Hydraulic fracturing has been linked to numerous cases of drinking water contamination, but the chemicals used in drilling, many of which are known to be toxic, are concealed from the public by drilling companies that claim the information is proprietary.

The prospects for the Senate bill are unclear. The House passed its bill in June 2009. Little time remains for the Senate to act on its bill, which technically is considered a "discussion draft." Climate change legislation must get through the Senate, conference committee, and a full congressional vote before the end of the session. Otherwise, a new Congress must take up the matter anew in 2011.

In my lower moments I can be found browsing various message boards, watching mere children argue over what video game console is superior, the Xbox 360 or the PS3. No, I’m not lying, sad as that may be. Eventually the PS3 supporters whip out this gem: “Yeah, well at least we don’t have to pay to play online,” which is a clever dig at Xbox Live’s $50 price tag. Don’t tell them this rumor, then: Sony will unveil a PSN Premium at E3 next month, and it will cost money.

The deal is that Sony will announce a PSN Premium of sorts at E3. It won’t affect the way you play PSN right now, so I don’t know why I raised that specter a few sentences ago. The day after it comes out, you’ll still be able to shoot your friends dead in Modern Warfare 2 totally gratis. Rather, this premium service will add all sorts of bells and whistles such as a free game every month and a music streaming service à la Spotify (which is great, I’m using it right now as I type).

Those are the only two items mentioned, a free game and a music streaming service.

Again, I must stress that this is merely a rumor, one of many pre-E3 rumors that are floating around out there, ruining people’s lives and causing public relations departments to copy-paste “It’s not our policy to comment on rumors” in e-mail after e-mail.

Depending on the game, the free game gimmick may just sorta be “meh,” but if you were able to play Racing Game with any song in this streaming service’s catalog, well, that would be neat.

What else could such a premium service add? Not being a PS3 owner, I’m only vaguely familiar with PSN’s offerings. Maybe Sony will throw unlimited (or limited!) movie rentals/streams, something along those lines.

I have no idea, clearly.

Key West park rangers found 20 3 to 8-inch tarballs Monday that had washed up onto the shores. Tarballs are blobs of oil that become weathered after travelling through the ocean.

The samples will be analyzed to figure out where they came from, but if they’re from the BP spill, it would heighten concerns that the oil has already started entering the loop current, which would transport it into the Florida Keys and the Atlantic.

A tarball won’t necessarily hurt you, but the Coast Guard says not to touch them and report any you find.

Tar balls wash up at Key West beaches; surveys continue today [Palm Beach Post]

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Devoted fans of ABC’s exiting disaster-themed drama Lost are in for a treat: Producers of the cult series are marking its conclusion by offering viewers a chance to own a piece of TV history when priceless props and mementos from the set go under the hammer at the Profiles in History Auction this summer.

“This will have every iconic item from all six seasons – up to the last episode. This will be a watershed event, the most iconic TV show to ever sell its property. One of the reasons they (producers) are doing this is that they want to give something back to the fans, who are so into this show,” says auction house owner Joseph Maddalena.

An official date for Lost: The Auction will be announced sometime in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out this sneak peek at the props up for grabs, including the show’s famed Apollo Chocolate bars, character passports, and handwritten letters…..

The 2.5 hour Lost series finale airs this Sunday, May 23.

Might We Suggest…

• Sprint Loves Your Mom, Do You?
  
  Wireless provider Sprint is doing what they can to have you looking like a champ this coming Mother’s Day.  Hesse and Co. have put together a list of Android apps designed to make mom’s life easier …

This can not be good news for Democrats and their hopes of retaining the Senate. New York Times, Raymond Hernandez reports this afternoon that Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut AG and likely Democratic candidate to fill the seat of Dodd in the Senate, has lied about his service in Vietnam. Although in an earlier video he mentioned that he did not serve in Vietnam.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. ”And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

There was one problem, Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat who is now running for U.S. Senate, never served in Vietnam. Won at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took several measures that allowed it to avoid going to war, according to records.

Blumenthal is presumed to be on the crest of an easy victory over either candidate of the Republican Party, but we’re guessing that is in doubt.

Blumenthal is part of the school activist AGS, having taken the popular struggle against big businesses, and more recently the rating agencies. In January, noted that “Wall Street’s worst nightmare” was now headed to the Senate.

No related posts.

Via Prison Planet.com » World News

Eli Clifton
Inter Press Service
May 18, 2010

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate is moving forward with a 59-billion-dollar spending bill, of which 33.5 billion dollars would be allocated for the war in Afghanistan.

However, some experts here in Washington are raising concerns that the war may be unwinnable and that the money being spent on military operations in Afghanistan could be better spent.

“We’re making all of the same mistakes the Soviets made during their time in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and they left in defeat having accomplished none of their purposes,” Michael Intriligator, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, said Monday at a half-day conference hosted by the New America Foundation and Economists for Peace and Security.

“I think we’re repeating that and it’s a history we’re condemned to repeat,” he said.

Intriligator also argued that the real, long-term cost of the war in Afghanistan may completely overshadow the current spending bill.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes estimated that the long-term costs – taking into account the costs of taking care of wounded soldiers and rebuilding the military – of the war in Iraq will ultimately cost three trillion dollars.

Intriligator suggested that a similar calculation for the costs of the war in Afghanistan would indicate a long-term cost of 1.5 to 2.0 trillion dollars.

“Why are we putting money into Afghanistan to fight a losing war and following the Soviet example rather than putting money into [our] local communities?” he asked.

The Senate has been under pressure to approve the spending bill before the Memorial Day recess at the end of the month.

On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the 59-billion-dollar bill drafted by the committee’s Chairman Daniel Inouye and Sen. Thad Cochran.

Gaining the approval of the Senate Appropriations committee may be the easy part in the push to get the bill to Obama’s desk by the end of the month.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already indicated that the spending bill will face more intense opposition in the House as congressional Democrats are predicted to offer put up some resistance to the funding for Obama’s 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan.

Experts at the event today expressed their concern with both the physical cost of the war as well as the tradeoffs in spending required by the ongoing costs of fighting the Taliban insurgency.

“The climate bill, for all its defects, if it has a prayer of passing, might provide some of the money we need to keep the momentum on building a green economy going. But so could the savings from an Afghan drawdown,” said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Intriligator emphasised the human cost of fighting a counterinsurgency campaign not just for U.S. soldiers but for Afghan civilians.

“We can’t distinguish the insurgents or Taliban from the rest of population so we kill a lot of innocent civilians,” he said.

A number of think tank events this week and the Obama administration’s push to gain support in Congress for the supplemental appropriations bill coincided with a high-profile visit last week by Afghan President Hamid Karzai who spent four days in meetings with Obama and members of his cabinet as well as with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Karzai’s trip to Washington and the warm reception afforded to him by the White House and lawmakers appeared to be part of a public relations offensive to build support in Washington for Karzai’s government and Obama’s troop surge.

Karzai’s visit came as polls have shown a major downturn in U.S. support for the war in Afghanistan and support amongst NATO allies has been dwindling.

In early April, news emerged that Karzai, in a closed door meeting, threatened to drop out of politics and join the Taliban.

A senior Obama administration official retorted that Karzai might be sampling “Afghanistan’s biggest export” – a reference to the widespread opium cultivation in Afghanistan.

The publicity campaign is facing an uphill battle this month but the administration has much to gain by putting a good face on the U.S. relationship with Karzai.

Indeed, the White House will need Karzai’s cooperation if it is to get Congressional support for passing the spending bill and will require Karzai’s assistance if Obama is to meet his goal of beginning U.S. troop withdrawals by mid-2011.

Karzai’s trip appears to have made some progress in showing off a “reset” relationship between the Obama White House and the Karzai government but a number of voices here in Washington are raising concerns over whether a U.S. victory in Afghanistan is possible by mid-2011 or at any time in the near future.

“The fear was that if we withdraw from Afghanistan there will be civil war and external great powers will take sides. Is that worse than losing American soldiers day after day? So there’s a civil war. So the regional great partners take sides. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their neighbours. It’s their borders.” said Michael Lind, policy director of the Economic Growth Programme at the New America Foundation, at Monday’s conference.

This article originally ran at Inter Press Service.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

I’m constantly reminded how slow email actually is.

On the homescreen of one of my smartphones, I’ve got the official Twitter widget and the official Facebook widget which are pretty much constantly refreshing. Likewise, my email inbox is set to refresh just as frequently. Every day, when someone sends me a message in Facebook or replies to a Tweet, the widgets tell me first, and then five minutes later I get the email alerting me again. Because of this, I have an email account just for social network updates that is overflowing with unread messages.

My fast, immediate communications have been shifted to other services, but the more heavyweight content: presentations, photos, and documents are still being sent over email.

Today, Microsoft announced it is releasing a new Windows Live Hotmail this summer to suit the “peoples’ email needs as of 2010,” which includes finding a way to organize all of that semi-relevant junkmail and a way to send even bigger attachments.

The new Hotmail inbox will let users organize their emails in new ways. Where the old inbox just let you sort your emails by date, sender, subject, or size, the new inbox will also let you sort them by category. These categories include: messages from contacts, social network updates, or messages from groups and mailing lists. Because social network updates and mailing list posts are sometimes unwanted, you can sort them by category and push them into folders and out of your principal inbox.

Microsoft is also tying in its SkyDrive cloud storage feature into Hotmail, letting users attach as many as 200 photos each 50MB in size to a single email. The same goes for Office documents like Word files, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations, you can stick 10 GB of attachments to Live Hotmail email messages.

With Office documents, a bit of productivity has been folded into Hotmail. Users can open the documents in Office Live, make changes, and push them back to the original sender with all the updates.

The update this summer will also add enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management, and even more storage.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
















Microsoft – Facebook – Windows Live Hotmail – Windows Live SkyDrive – Social network

Via Prison Planet.com » Commentary

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
London Telegraph
May 18, 2010

Europe may have to clean up its own mess after all. The US Senate has voted 94:0 to block use of taxpayers’ money for IMF rescues that make no economic sense or bail-outs for countries like Greece that far are beyond the point of no return.

“This amendment will help prevent American taxpayer dollars from underwriting dysfunctional governments abroad,” said Texas Senator John Cornyn, the chief sponsor. “American taxpayers have seen more bailouts than they can stomach, and the last thing they should have to worry about are their hard-earned tax dollars being used to rescue a foreign government. Greece is not by any stretch of the imagination too big to fail.”

Co-sponsor David Vitter from Louisiana said America had run out of money. “Our country already owes trillions of dollars in debt. We simply can’t afford to take on other countries’ debt in addition to our own.”

It is unclear where this leaves the EU’s $1 trillion “shock and uh” package. Urlich Leuchtmann from Commerzbank said the IMF share of $320bn was the only genuine money on the table, the rest being largely euro smoke and mirrors, or plain bluff.

The measure is an amendment to the US financial overhaul law. Backed by both parties, it can hardly be ignored by the Obama administration whatever Tim Geithner may or may not want to do. The bill has to go to Conference for reconciliation with the House, but the point is made.

Full article here