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Posted by Michelle Manchir and Ray Long at 4:42 p.m.

SPRINGFIELD—House Democrats today advanced their party’s proposal to change the way legislative districts are drawn, rejecting a rival Republican proposal in a feisty political fight.



The Democratic plan—which already passed the Senate—would ask voters this fall to put in place a process that would give lawmakers a strong hand in drawing the legislative boundaries following the once-a-decade census.

The full House could vote as early as Wednesday on putting the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot. Democrats are a vote shy of the three-fifths tally needed for approval, however.

The Democratic-controlled committee also defeated a Republican version of redistricting reform, which has the backing of a variety of reform groups, including the League of Women Voters.  Nine Democrats voted against the proposal, seven Republicans voted for it. But Rep. John Fritchey, D-Chicago, refused to vote against the proposal, opting to vote “present.” He said he supported the Democratic proposal because he believed it deserved a floor vote.



Republicans argued that their proposal kept the redistricting process out of the hands of lawmakers and put it into the hands of the public.

Poor Athens can’t even collect property taxes.

Greeks have built thousands of illegal constructions in recent years without penalty, according to Kathimerini. They don’t pay taxes on these properties.

What’s more, Greeks have prevented via civil court efforts by the government to impose penalty or tax.

A new plan from Athens offers homeowners a guarantee of 40 years without threat of demolition or further fines in exchange for paying a penalty today. The Greeks are very skeptical:

Kathimerini:

This time, the government is trying to sidestep the paradox of legalizing the illegal by placing a time limit on it. This may just work in court. What is not as simple is getting citizens to believe that they should accept the deal and finally contribute toward imposing some order on the chaos. For this problem to be solved, Greece has to complete its land registry and its zoning laws and – at long last – begin to plan ahead where people will build and what they will build. Otherwise, we are not only cheating the revenue service but we are also destroying our countryside and undermining our quality of life.

This is why Greece is worse off than other debt threats: no one trusts or respects the government.

Don’t miss: 10 Facts About The Greek Pension System Destroying Any Hope Of A Bailout

Join the conversation about this story »

Jeff Harris, of Beckley, W.Va., is an underground coal miner who once worked for Massey Energy. For that experience, he was on Capitol Hill this afternoon testifying about the company’s safety record. And his story doesn’t even remotely resemble the picture Massey has tried to paint this month of a company dedicated to the safety of its workers.

“I feared for my safety the whole time that I worked for them,” Harris said, adding that he quit for that reason after about six months. “I’d rather starve to death.”

Of note, many of Harris’ experiences are strikingly similar to those of Chuck Nelson, another former Massey miner who spoke with TWI from his West Virginia home last week.

Here, for example, is Harris describing Massey’s ventilation systems:

When we got to a section to mine coal, they’d tear down the ventilation curtain. The air was so thick you could hardly see in front of you. When an MSHA inspector came to the section, we’d hang the curtain, but as soon as the inspector left, the curtain came down again.

And here’s Nelson describing the ritual of Massey officials when a safety inspector gets to the gates:

They call and tell us to start hanging our curtains, start cleaning the coal dust up, start rock-dusting the ribs — get everything right because he’s on his way in there. … But as soon as they’re on their way outside — before they get outside — these line curtains are jerked down again. They’re back to doing the same old business as usual.

Harris on Massey’s adherence to methane-detecting policies:

Sometimes, if we had heard that there was too much gas, we’d be told the problem was taken care of and not to worry. We might not believe them that the problem was fixed, but we had a job to do and we worked. Then when an inspector came by, he would find excess gas and shut us down. This showed us that the Company couldn’t be trusted.

And Nelson:

They had sniffers — what they called sniffers — and whenever you hit a pocket of methane [above a certain level], it shut the power off the [coal harvester]. … But I’ve seen these sniffers bridged out.

Harris on so-called “lost-time accidents”:

Reports about Massey’s lost time accidents are also misleading. I was lucky and never got hurt while I worked for Massey, but I know plenty of other guys who did get injured. If you got hurt, you were told not to fill out the lost time accident paperwork. The Company would just pay guys to sit in the bathhouse or to stay home if they got hurt – anything but fill out the paperwork.

Nelson discussing the same trend:

I’ve hauled people out of the mines on a stretcher, at Massey mines. … And the very next day you’ll see ‘em walking up the hill, coming back to the mine office on crutches and [in] neck braces — just to keep from having a lost-time accident, to keep ‘em from filling out an accident report.

Here’s Harris describing why workers didn’t complain about the safety conditions:

Either you worked or you quit. If you complained, you’d be singled out and get fired. Employees were scared, but like me they have to feed their family. Jobs are scarce, and good paying coal mining jobs are hard to come by.

Nelson on the same topic:

I knew that if I said something, I wouldn’t have a job tomorrow.

Harris, who has also worked for union mines, said that, on safety issues, the difference between union and non-union mines is night and day. Union miners, he said, can report safety concerns without the fear of losing their jobs. “Those men at Massey,” he said, “they don’t have that right.”

Nelson said much the same thing last week:

When we were all union, if there was something that came up, it wasn’t no problem at all to shut that mine down until everything was fixed. Non-union [workers], they ain’t got that right.

Although no one from Massey appeared at Tuesday’s hearing, Bruce Watzman, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, played the part of surrogate defender.

“I don’t think there’s much value in ostracizing an individual or an organization,” Watzman said in response to a question from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about Massey’s safety record. Watzman also said that policymakers shouldn’t overreact to this month’s deadly mining blast by enacting new mine safety regulations. The current safeguards, he said, are plenty tough enough when they’re properly enforced.

Congress, though, seems poised to disagree.

Families need help during a recession, said Rep. Diana Urban, D-North Stonington, when introducing a bill on the House floor today.

The bill aims to help children and their families during tough economic times, and the House passed it 137-7.

The goal is to tap into all available federal funds and streamline state services to make them as accessible as possible, Urban said. The bill directs state agencies to lead, she said, adding that there is an accountability measure included in the legislation. 

“This is not a poverty issue like we’ve known before,” Urban said, referring to the current recession.”There is a precedent for working together in an emergency…This is an emergency.” 

Families are hungry and the shelters are full, she said.

Lawmakers say that the current recession is expected to drive 35,000 children in Connecticut into poverty at an annual cost of $800 million in lost earnings and developmental and health problems.  

Urban said a legislative task force that she chaired has worked hard over the past year to craft the bill discussed by the House today, getting input from people throughout the state. Connecticut would be the first state in the United States to focus on the economic downturn’s impact on children and families, she said. 

Lawmakers should not just help children during a recession, said House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero. They should help those in need at all times, he said.

Cafero was particularly critical of a provision in the bill that would require the Child Poverty and Prevention Council, or a subcommittee of the council, to meet quarterly if the state’s unemployment rate is 8 percent of greater for the proceeding three months.The council would help state agencies mitigate the long-term impact of economic recessions and provide appropriate resources to families.

“Why aren’t they doing their job now?” Cafero said of state agencies and the council, explaining that more bureaucracy is not the answer. “Let’s get to the root of the problem.”

Rep. DebraLee Hovey, R-Monroe, said the bill is an outgrowth of frustration with state agencies, such as the Department of Social Services and the labor, education, public health and children and families departments. It is a bill that micromanages those agencies, she said, noting that it is beyond comprehension that legislation is needed to get state residents the help they need.

House Bill No. 5360 still needs to be approved by the Senate before heading to the governor’s desk.  

With the name “Battlefield” you’d hope to see a rugged, war-proof camera which could withstand anything. Instead, this pinhole cam looks like it belongs in an art gallery, displaying an example of retro-futurism or something. More »

Filed under: Motorsports, Performance, Chevrolet

And not just a track, either. The National Corvette Museum wants to build an entire motorsports complex, including two road courses, a kart track, a ten-acre autocross course and a quarter-mile drag strip in Bowling Green, Kentucky. If that wasn’t ambitious enough, the museum wants to do it on the opposite side of I-65 from the main museum and Corvette manufacturing plant. If the plan goes through, the two will be connected via a series of bridges and tunnels.

The main track borrows elements from some of our personal favorite courses, including the Carousel from the Nürburgring and the infamous Bus Stop from Watkins Glen. Even better, the museum says its courses will be FIA and SCCA compliant, meaning that when finished, we may actually see some impressive competitions take place on the new grounds.

The whole kit and caboodle is expected to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 million, excluding the price tag of all those bridges, etc, and the Corvette Museum has to come up with the majority of that figure before breaking ground. We’re not sure exactly how the non-profit plans to come up with all of that coin, but we’re betting Corvette owners can expect a polite request for donations sometime soon.

[Source: Motorsports Park]

Corvette Museum wants to build race track across the highway originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The sales of the Nexus One have been less than stellar (T-Mobile’s Behold II moved more units), but Google maintains that the first phone offered in their web store is a profitable business.

Vodafone began taking pre-orders for the Nexus One yesterday and now reports are coming in that the device sold out. One of our readers ordered the device after it was announced and received the following email.

“Thank you for placing your order, reference number [redacted]. Unfortunately we have suffered a surprisingly high demand for the Nexus One From Google, which means that it is unexpectedly out of stock. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused. We hope to have further stock available within 7-10 working days and will contact you again once your order has been dispatched.”Vodafone Customer Care

No shortages were reported for the U.S. launch, so this might come as a surprise to some. If we receive any updates on the Nexus One’s availability in the UK, we will update this post later.

Related Posts

• Nexus One launching on Vodafone this Friday and at a quarter past never on Verizon
• Nexus One learns a new trick, Wireless N
• Official Nexus One car dock en route
• Sprint joins the Nexus One party
• AT&T Nexus One now available, Canada too

This post is part of the Entrepreneurship series – sponsored by AcceptPay from American Express, a new online solution that lets you electronically invoice customers and accept online payments-all in one place. Offer more payment options, manage your cash flow and get paid faster with AcceptPay. Learn more here.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

Just recently, we discussed yet another in a long line of studies suggesting that imitation is often the most successful strategy for businesses to take. It appears that this topic may get a lot more attention soon, which is a good thing. Copycense points us to a fantastic Boston Globe article that discusses “the imitation economy” and the “myth” that copying is a bad thing. It’s based on a forthcoming book, called Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge that tries to dismiss the myths about copying being automatically “bad.”

The article mentions — as we’ve pointed out for years — that for all of Apple’s success, it’s really mostly been good at taking existing ideas and packaging them up nicely. But that’s incredibly valuable. There’s very little that’s new in the iPhone or the iPad — but the way they’re put together and the way they’re sold is what has made them a success and made them so valuable. It highlights the value of the process of taking ideas and making them useful, rather than just assuming that the idea is the most important part.

As a part of that, the article highlights how the common argument against copying is effectively a myth. The idea that if you have a good idea some big company will just come along and copy it, rarely works:

That means when companies copy they often do it clumsily. Shenkar offers the example of the legacy airlines in the United States and their response to the low-cost threat of Southwest Airlines. Most set up copycat airlines of their own: United with TED, Continental with CALite, Delta with Song. All quickly failed.

The problem, Shenkar argues, is that in their scramble to copy Southwest, the bigger airlines failed to see the ways that central pillars of Southwest’s strategy — lower pay, short point-to-point flights, a fleet of identical smaller planes — were incompatible with the union contracts, hub-and-spoke route structures, and larger craft the traditional carriers were saddled with.

Indeed. We’ve pointed out this kind of “cargo cult copying” in the past as well. Copying is not nearly as “easy” as some make it out to be, because those doing the “copying” often are only copying the superficial aspects, without recognizing the underlying reasons why something works. It’s why IBM failed at copying Microsoft years ago. It’s why Microsoft failed at copying Google. They tried to directly imitate on the surface, rather than understanding the underlying aspects of what’s happening.

That’s why copying, by itself, isn’t as “dangerous” as some make it out to be. And, in fact, it’s quite beneficial in many cases. And, it turns out that this hatred of imitation is a rather recent phenomenon:

Shenkar traces our innovation fetish back to the late 18th century. Before that — for most of Western history, in other words — copying was valued just as highly as creation, and sometimes more. “In the Roman Empire, where imitation was used to align the diverse cultures and institutions of the far-flung empire under a single umbrella, it served as the official pedagogy,” he writes in his book. Centuries later, Adam Smith wrote that imitation should be given “the status of a creative art.” But the Romantic Age, with its celebration of the sui generis and the solitary genius — philosophers like Rousseau, poets like Shelley, and scientist-inventors like Humphry Davy — began to change that. Copying came to be seen as disreputable, as a refuge for the unimaginative.

The book sounds great. It points out that there are benefits to allowing copying — since it allows for more actual innovation in the form of taking what others have done and improving on it, while pointing out that pure copying usually isn’t enough to be effective. In other words: allowing copying is good because it drives innovation, but the actual practice of innovation goes beyond just a straight copy. So we shouldn’t be so against copying at all. We should be encouraging smart copying that drives innovation forward.

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ActionComplete for Android has now made it’s way to a Web version all in an effort to give you tools for Getting Things Done (GTD). ActionComplete 5 latest version offers and full sync between Web and Android app. Check out parts 1 & 2 of how to sync GTD tasks between Web and Phone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zAZuW_9D8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRZbJr6NZ8U

Check out the app  from the link above and website actioncomplete.com for more!

2010 LSA 6.2L V8 Supercharged (Cadillac CTS-V)

GM announced this morning that it will invest $890 million to build cleaner, more fuel-efficient engines across five plants. The investment will go towards producing cleaner and more efficient next-generation V8 small block engines, the Detroit automaker said.

The current fourth-generation small block engine powers the Chevrolet Corvette, Cadillac CTS-V and the GMC Yukon as well as many other models.

GM said that the Gen IV engines are characterized by refinements and advanced technology such as variable valve timing and Active Fuel Management. Variable valve timing enables improved torque, fuel economy and emissions while Active Fuel Management disables the combustion process of half the engine’s cylinders in certain driving conditions. The latter enables fuel savings of up to 5 percent in trucks and 12 percent in cars.

GM also said that many Gen IV variants can run on gasoline, E85 ethanol or any combination of the two. The new line will also be lighter.

GM is working on the new engines to meet this decade’s federal fuel-economy standards, which require a fleet average of 35.5 mpg in the 2016 model year, compared with 27.3 mpg in 2011.

– By: Omar Rana

Posted by Michelle Manchir at 4:30 p.m.



SPRINGFIELD — Taxpayers won’t have to pay for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s portrait to hang alongside his predecessors in the Capitol if Gov. Pat Quinn signs a measure the Senate sent to him today.



The legislation, which passed the Senate 52-1, still would allow private funds to pay for a portrait if one is ever put on display, an honor bestowed on even the biggest of the rogues in the gallery of former governors that stretches along a wing of the statehouse.

The taxpayer-funded collection includes ex-governors who were sent to prison after their time in office, among them Otto Kerner, Dan Walker and George Ryan. But Blagojevich, who is about to stand trial on federal corruption charges, is the first governor that lawmakers booted out of office.



The single “no” vote came from Sen. Mike Jacobs, D-East Moline, who said the former governor should at least be convicted before the portrait privilege is taken away.



“I just think that, if you’re governor of Illinois, that people have elected you twice, that you ought to get your picture hung in the gallery,” Jacobs said.



The bill’s sponsor said Blagojevich or is supporters could pay for a photograph to hang in the Capitol, a more affordable option to a costly painting.



“We’re not trying whitewash it,” said Sen. Michael Frerichs, D-Champaign. “But for someone who misused office — really abused the trust of the public — the public shouldn’t pay for his portrait.”



Lawmakers have estimated it could cost up $25,000 for a portrait.

El mundo del automóvil está demasiado concentrado en Pekín y eso implica apartar la atención de lanzamientos tan espectaculares como el del nuevo superdeportivo de Alfa Romeo. El nuevo Alfa Romeo TZ3 Corsa simplemente brilla por si solo, diseño nostálgico y grandes prestaciones.

Alfa Romeo no ha escatimado en esta nueva creación y ha puesto todo su arsenal, lo mejor que tenía. Esta maravilla italiana presentará unos 400 CV en un 8C Competizione que se encargarán de movilizar la irrisoria cifra de 850 kg de peso, lo que nos lleva hasta los 100 km/h en tan solo 3.5 segundos, a una velocidad máxima de 300 km/h.

El diseño ha sido perfectamente cuidado para darle un aire antiguo de competición que no pasa desapercibido. Cualquiera recordará los grandes Alfa cuando presencie esta línea, a lo que ayudan unas llantas de 18 pulgadas con neumáticos Slik Pirelli PZero. Impresionante.

La velocidad no es lo único en lo que esta maravilla de la mecánica ofrece grandes prestaciones. Haber montado una suspensión Ohlins Push también contribuye enormemente a que el TZ3 Corsa se comporte como un auténtico deportivo.

Vía | Coches-es

The fact that this video was made in 2003 leads me to believe that this is a tongue-in-cheek parody and not an earnest attempt at rap. But when it comes to NASCAR having their finger on the pulse of Black culture, I am still hesitant to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Without further ado, the rap video no one asked for, by the one and only…uhhh….Vanilla P.

After watching, I recommend you proceed here.

Thanks to All Left Turns for the tip.

Related posts:

1. Who Knew NASCAR Women Were So Hot?
2. Palm Pre-Crazed Granny Slams Car into Sprint Store
3. The Best 2009 News Bloopers

per Mike Levine and Justin Fishel

A former U.S. Air Force intelligence specialist forced an Atlanta-bound flight to land in Bangor, Maine, after he claimed to have explosives in his luggage, according to several U.S. officials.

Federal air marshals restrained the man as Delta flight 273, carrying 235 passengers and 13 crew members from Paris, landed in Bangor around 3:30 pm ET, one official told Fox News.

Law enforcement officials, including representatives from the Transportation Security Administration and FBI, took the man into custody and were still interviewing him early Tuesday evening.

As of early Tuesday evening, authorities were still trying to determine whether the man was in fact carrying any explosives. He also claimed to have boarded the flight with “fake” documents,” but authorities believe the man’s travel documents are authentic, according to one official.

Homeland Security Secretary recently said diverted flights are never an overreaction.

“Where airline security and air security is concerned, those are judgments that should not be second-guessed,” she told Fox News in an interview last week. “There’s really not room for error there.”

A TSA statement said Tuesday’s flight was diverted “out of an abundance of caution.”

Authorities would not identify the suspect, but two officials said he served as an Air Force intelligence specialist from June 2005 to June 2009.

No charges have been filed yet.

Damien Paletta at The Wall Street Journal has gotten a look at a 20-page Republican counter to Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill. The proposal is impossible to parse, as the reforms are complex and the details scarce, so take this with a grain of salt. But Paletta says the Republican proposal includes a “resolution authority” provision without a bank-funded “bailout fund,” much maligned by Republicans such as Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Instead, Republicans put the resolution process through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which would be required to recoup its costs before paying back counterparties.

The bill also reportedly limits the amount of funds the Federal Reserve can disburse in a financial emergency; creates a kind of consumer protection council; creates a supermonitor for financial stability; and gives regulators the authority to put swaps on exchanges.

The bill additionally contains a series of reforms of the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dodd and the Democrats plan to deal with housing finance in a separate comprehensive bill, though Republicans have said they want housing finance reforms in financial regulatory reform.

Michigan’s Attorney General Mike Cox is “looking at other legal avenues” to pursue the carp battle.

Photo by Jason Lindsey

By Steve Kellman
Circle of Blue

Michigan’s effort to bring the Asian carp fight to the U.S. Supreme Court came to an abrupt end Monday with a terse two-sentence denial from the court.

The ruling effectively ends Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox’s four-month effort to convince the nation’s highest court to wade into the legal debate over the invasive species threatening Lake Michigan. Cox sought to reopen a decades-old lawsuit against Chicago’s diversion of Lake Michigan water to force the closure of Chicago-area locks that threaten to let the carp into the freshwater body.

“The fight to protect Michigan’s jobs and environment now falls to President Obama and Congress,” Cox said in a statement. “While President Obama has turned a blind eye to the millions of Great Lakes residents who do not happen to live in his home state of Illinois, it is now up to him to save thousands of Michigan jobs and our environment.”

Asian carp have been making their way up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades since being imported to clean catfish ponds in southern parts of the country, while government workers also attempted to use the fish for weed control sewage disposal. Established populations now live just a few miles from Lake Michigan, in the Illinois River and the canals that transport Chicago’s municipal waste away from the city.

Midwest officials and environmentalists fear that the invasive fish could devastate the Great Lakes ecosystem and destroy the region’s $7 billion sport fishing industry if a breeding population becomes established in the lakes. DNA tests suggest that at least some fish have already made their way past the electric fish barriers.

But the high court dismissal does not end the attorney general’s legal options, according to spokesperson Joy Yearout.

“We are looking at other legal avenues including action in federal district court, but we’re reviewing those options right now,” Yearout told Circle of Blue. “Even while that legal review is happening, the attorney general is still committed to doing what he can to raise public awareness and put pressure on Washington to take action.”

“Both the president and Congress could take action to solve this problem; it doesn’t need to be a legal solution,” Yearout added.

Nick Schroeck, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, said the attorney general has several legal options, including suing the state of Illinois and the federal government in federal court. He could also a file suit in state court in Illinois against the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which oversees the network of locks and canals that threaten to let the carp into Lake Michigan.

Environmental groups could take up legal action in state court as well, Schroeck said, “perhaps using the Illinois Endangered Species act.”

“Other states could sue too,” Schroeck noted. “The other interesting case is that Canada may now choose to get involved.”

The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, an independent, not-for-profit group of environmental attorneys working to protect the lakes, supported Cox’s efforts.

Since the case was reopened in December, the Michigan case generated more than two dozen motions, responses, memoranda, appendices and friend of the court briefs. The states of Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Washington all weighed in with motions in support of Michigan’s efforts, as did the Queen in Right of Ontario. Ontario is the only Canadian province to border the Great Lakes, and Ontario officials fear that Asian carp could devastate the province’s fishing industry.

Illinois state officials oppose the closure attempts on economic grounds, noting that the locks and canals are used for flood control and to transport some 7 million tons of cargo a year. The U.S. Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, sided with Illinois and noted that the federal government is already taking several steps to block Asian carp from getting past the locks and into the lake.

“In a host of ways, the federal government has demonstrated its commitment to protecting the Great Lakes from the expansion of Asian carp,” Kagan wrote in her memorandum in opposition to Michigan’s request. “Nothing in federal law warrants second-guessing its expert judgment that the best information available today does not yet justify the dramatic steps Michigan demands.”

Kagan’s argument—and the fact that the U.S. government took sides in the dispute—might have helped doom Michigan’s motion to reopen the Illinois lawsuit.

“The federal government weighing in on Illinois side was a very big hurdle to overcome,” he said.

“On the other hand, the federal government’s got ownership of the issue now,” Schroeck said. “If the carp get in and there’s a reproducing population of Asian carp in Lake Michigan, the feds are going to have to answer for that.”

Cox is just one of several Michigan politicians seeking to block the carp from getting into Lake Michigan. U.S. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich) has sponsored a bill called the CARP ACT (Close All Routes and Prevent Asian Carp Today) that would close the locks, erect barriers in channels and rivers keep carp out of Lake Michigan during floods, and reinforce the current carp blocking and monitoring efforts. He introduced the bill following the Supreme Court’s first rejection of Cox’s preliminary injunction request.

The bill has won nine co-sponsors: from Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, and is now before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich) introduced a version of Camp’s CARP ACT in the Senate, where it has garnered six co-sponsors and been referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

On Friday, the day before the opening day of fishing season in Michigan, Camp sent out an e-newsletter to his supporters seeking signatures on a petition supporting his bill.

Cox, who is running on the Republican ticket for governor, praised current Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm and the state’s Department of Natural Resources & Environment for their efforts to block Asian carp in his statement on Monday. He also called on Congress to pass the CARP ACT while urging concerned citizens to call the White House, sign the online petition he posted on his StopAsianCarp.com website, and post comments on the campaign’s Facebook page.

Cox spoke with Circle of Blue during a public rally in Traverse City in February, noting that 80,000 people had signed the petition at stopasiancarp.com.

Steve Kellman is a reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach Kellman at [email protected] and check out more of our Asian carp coverage here.

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on.

As of yesterday, the tool was also showing some information that most users had not made public. Yee — a Canadian-born programmer who works for Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, and developed the “people finder” tool used after the Haiti earthquake — found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well).

Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default (the developer says that his experiments with the Facebook API were the result of “personal dabbling” and don’t have anything to do with his work for Google).

Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing!”

Facebook has come under fire from a number of sources over privacy related to its new features, particularly the fact that users have been “opted in” to services such as “instant personalization,” which allows several sites that Facebook has partnered with to show users personalized content by drawing on their Facebook profile. Four senators sent the social network a letter today complaining about this kind of behavior, one of whom has also written a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user dirac3000

The Man

The NY Times has a great little interview with Google VP Andy Rubin where he talks about Android’s future among other things.  When asked his thoughts on the recent Steve Jobs comments about Android offering porn, Andy says he doesn’t quite get where Jobs was coming from.  “I don’t really have a rationale for that,” he said. “It’s a different style of interacting with the public and the media.”

Rubin believes that Android will overtake iPhone in terms of handsets sold although he didn’t specify as to when.  “I don’t know when its might be, but I’m confident it will happen. Open usually wins.”  The NY Times wondered whether or not the typical customer cares about open versus closed and if it really matters in the end.  Rubin believes consumers will, adding, “When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea.”

The rest of the interview touches on Chrome and Android tablets, how Android addresses API’s, and Flash coming to the next release of Android.  Flash and Froyo can now be officially mentioned in the same breath.

So how would the head Android himself handle a lost protoype?

“I’d be happy if that happened and someone wrote about it.  With openness comes less secrets.”

Might We Suggest…

• Automatic App Updating Coming in Android 2.2
  
  One Android feature that our readers have been asking for is the ability to update all applications and games to the latest release.   It’s not uncommon for the average user to see 15 or more notifi…

2010 Ford Fusion

Many have complained that the chrome grille on the 2010 Ford Fusion and Ford Fusion Hybrid appears to be just a little too much bling for the mid-size sedan. Well, Ford has finally heard your complaints and will capitalize on your wants with the new Monochrome Appearance Package.

Click here to get prices on the 2010 Ford Fusion.

For just an additional $890 dollars (or $15 a month), you can get 18-inch aluminum wheels with painted pockets, a rear spoiler, a unique finish on the instrument panel spears and center stack, unique cloth seats, leather-wrapped steering wheel and shift knob and… a body-colored grille.

To be honest, we had no idea that the 2010 Ford Fusion came with a body-colored grille until we came across this.

Check out our review of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid here.

Review: 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid:

All Photos Copyright © 2009 Omar Rana – egmCarTech.

– By: Kap Shah

Source: Ford (via TTAC)