Blog

[JURIST] The Arizona Senate approved a bill on Monday that would establish one of the strictest illegal immigration policies in the nation, requiring individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants to provide proof of their legal status. The bill proposes giving the police permission to determine the immigration status of any individual who arouses reasonable suspicion, criminalizing the hiring of illegal immigrants for day labor, and allowing citizens to sue the local government if they believe the policy is not being used properly. Proponents of the bill argue that the new law would decrease illegal immigration in the state, which borders Mexico. However, the bill has also been heavily criticized by Arizona Democrats, as well as immigrant rights groups who say the proposed measures could lead to racial profiling. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) has five days to decide whether to veto or sign the bill into law.
A week after the Arizona House approved the bill, US Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) supported the bill and announced on Monday their proposal for additional federal controls on illegal immigration, such as an increased National Guard presence and a 700-mile-long fence along the Arizona-Mexico border. In 2008, Arizona voters defeated a ballot measure dealing with illegal immigrants. The initiative would have revoked the business licenses of employers that knowingly hire illegal immigrants and would have strengthened penalties for identity theft. More illegal immigrants enter the US through Arizona’s border than through any other state, and citizens have expressed frustration with the federal government’s failure to prevent illegal immigration.

Japan already has more Pokemon memorabilia that I can fit into a supersized Poke Ball, and no one’s probably ever caught them all, but that’s not stopping Nintendo from thinking up new ways to market other products

By Ryan Knutson, ProPublica

Federal investigators charged
another New Orleans police officer in connection to the Danziger
Bridge shootings, in which two civilians were killed and four were
wounded in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The Danziger Bridge
shootings are among a string of violent post-Katrina police encounters
we’ve investigated in collaboration with PBS “Frontline” and the New Orleans
Times-Picayune.

Officer Robert Barrios, who was charged with conspiring to obstruct
justice, became the fourth police officer charged in the case, and the
fifth person overall. Three former officers have already pleaded guilty
to charges related to the shooting. Barrios reportedly
resigned from the force shortly after being charged.

Marion David Ryder, a civilian who impersonated a police officer the day
of the shooting, also was indicted
this month on charges of lying to federal agents and unlawful
possession of a handgun.

The charge against Barrios came in a bill of information, which is only
allowed in cases where the defendant has waived the requirement that a
grand jury issue charges. That usually indicates the defendant is
cooperating with the case.

The Times-Picayune reports
that Barrios was in the back of a vehicle with four other officers when
they responded to a report that officers were shot while on Interstate
10, which is parallel with the Danziger Bridge.

 

Three and a half months after they announced the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus were coming to SFR in France, Palm has finally come clean with ship dates: April 27th online and May 11th in stores. One thing they’re not coming clean about: pricing. Last month we saw a survey that suggested we’d see the Pre Plus at 99 € and the Pixi Plus at 49 €. More recently Palm Pre France said they had official pricing that’s a bit better, ranging from 29 € for a subsidized Pixi Plus up to 429 € for a pre-paid Pre Plus.

SFR has a few apps already in the Official App Catalog ready to go at launchL SFR TV, SFR Mon Compte, SFR WiFi, which will allow users to automatically log in on SFR’s WiFi hotspots. Palm Mobile Hotspot will also be on-board for tethering (with additional charges to your data plan).

There’s still a launch party on April 27th and we hope it’s a big one. After waiting this long for Palm and SFR to push these devices out, the people of France certainly deserve it.

At 26, European bombshell Cheryl Cole is in chats to follow in the footsteps of teen stars Miley Cyrus, Zac Efron, and Selena Gomez as the next face of The Walt Disney Company.

The “Fight for This Love” hitmaker and Girls Aloud frontwoman — who is attempting to transform her UK sucess to the States following her split from soccer star husband Ashley Cole – is reportedly being courted by the family-friendly studio to show off her acting skills in a Disney-produced TV show or movie.

A source squealed to London’s Daily Mirror Tuesday: “Cheryl is the full package. She’s got it all – brains, beauty and a hint of bolshyness. It’s unbelievable the level of interest she stirred up in the Disney Studios following her recent trips to LA, where she was making her recent music video. That Parachute video with Derek Hough, who is massive in the States because of Dancing with the Stars, really showed just how graceful and dynamic she can be. From her experiences in Girls Aloud, she can also handle the high energy routines, so the plan is to incorporate her in a show….”

Spywitnesses claim Disney bosses are in the process of putting together a

President Obama used to blame the economy on “the last eight years.” Now that he’s been president for a year, he can’t do that, because “the last eight years, if you start counting back from a little over a year ago” isn’t a very pithy culprit for the recession. So he occasionally blames a smorgasbord of offenders from Wall Street fat cats to Main Street big spenders to all the electeds in between. But blame is like butter: spread too thin, it doesn’t leave make of an impression.

This is a good paragraph from Ron Brownstein that says clearly what others have said obliquely: now that Obama no longer has “the last eight years” to kick around anymore, his economic narrative is kind of all over the place.

When Obama first arrived, he often
arraigned his predecessor’s record. The first chapter of Obama’s
initial budget document was “Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced
Priorities.” Obama still delivers some similar jabs. But more often, he
diffuses blame for the downturn across “a perfect storm of
irresponsibility… that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to
Main Street.” Obama, at other points, has emphasized his continuity
with Bush’s approach, particularly on financial bailouts. (Liberal
critics such as Reich believe that link extends beyond rhetoric to
policy.) The result is that Obama has mostly shelved what political
scientist Stephen Skowronek of Yale University calls “the authority to
repudiate.” That’s the effort, employed by consequential presidents,
such as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, to build support by
portraying their agenda as the remedy for their predecessors’ failures.

Obama would like to draw a bright line between the Bush policies he’s extended and the new policies that are all his. Unfortunately for the president, he’s getting credit for neither. Many groups condemn him for his continuity with the Bush Team’s emergency bailout measures (some forget that the lifelines for Wall Street, AIG, Fannie/Freddie and the Detroit auto makers all began under Bush, not Obama). In addition, many groups condemn him for his failure to slow unemployment with Keynesian counter-cyclical spending increases: 62% of Americans think the stimulus did nothing, or worse (even thought they’re almost certainly wrong).

What kind of economic manager-in-chief is he? Like everything else, the real answer is fuzzy and gray. Obama is a fiscal responsibility scold living with a trillion dollar deficit. He’s a long-game strategist in an administration that is calling for more short-term stimulus. He’s a natural consensus-seeker working with a minority party so small and pugnacious it sees no electoral virtue in seeking consensus. He’s an evangelist for transformative legislation, but whereas one can propose and pass transformative legislation on health care and carbon pricing and immigration reform, you cannot legislate unemployment down to 6%. And so on the economy, he’s stuck fighting a monster, but without his best weapons.

Denise Gellene wrote:

As swine flu raced through colleges and communities last summer and fall, at least five San Diego companies with flu-related products or research programs saw their share prices surge. Investors were betting that swine flu, the predominant circulating flu virus in the U.S., presented a real opportunity for these companies.

Now comes the reckoning. The influenza season, which normally runs from October through May, is winding down. An update issued April 9 by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said influenza cases were declining or stable throughout the country, and the percentage of all doctors’ visits by patients with flu-like symptoms had fallen to 1.1 percent—well below the seasonal norm—from a high of 7.8 percent last October.

Last September, I looked at San Diego companies with stakes in swine flu. The time has come to see how they have actually performed since the World Health Organization declared a global H1N1 swine flu pandemic in June.

—I’ll begin with Quidel (NASDAQ: QDEL). The diagnostic-test maker received special government clearance last summer to market its QuickVue rapid flu test for swine flu. The company told investors last summer it expected a revenue bump from sales of the tests.

And how. Quidel reported a 38 percent increase in 2009 net sales of infectious disease-related products. Total revenue jumped 28 percent for the year, driven by global sales of influenza products. Quidel’s shares are up about 12 percent since last June.

However, Quidel has already warned investors not to expect a repeat of its 2009 financial performance. “We do not plan for or expect the influenza pandemic of 2009 to recur in 2010. Accordingly, we expect a significant decrease in our influenza test sales, related earnings, and cash flows during 2010,” Quidel said in its annual filing with the SEC.

—Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) produces equipment that runs a diagnostic test, developed and distributed by the CDC, that can determine if patients are infected with the specific strain of the influenza A virus that causes swine flu.

The test has become the de facto standard in H1N1 detection, which makes Life’s equipment a must-have for public health labs. Life experienced an equipment-buying frenzy last spring, followed by an increase in sales of reagents to run the swine flu tests. The products contributed …Next Page »

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

KNOXVILLE — Forbes Walker, associate professor of biosystems engineering and soil science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will deliver this week’s UT Science Forum lecture, “Developing Conservation Agriculture Systems in Africa.” His talk will begin at noon on Friday, April 23, in Thompson-Boling Arena Dining Room C-D.

The UT Science Forum is a weekly event where leading science researchers share their discoveries and discuss the frontiers of their fields in a way that the general public can understand.

UT Science Forum programs are free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their lunches or purchase lunch at the Café at the Arena.

For three years, Walker and other UT faculty members have been working with people in Lesotho in southern Africa to develop conservation agriculture cropping systems for small-holder farmers.

“We believe we can not only increase agricultural productivity,” Walker said, “but also have significant environmental benefits from reduced erosion. We were awarded a grant from USDA and will receive another that will enable us to continue work for five more years and expand the focus to Malawi and Mozambique.”

Walker will explain the collaboration and talk about developing the agricultural farming system. The team also plans to establish an experimental learning program for research, teaching and extension faculty and students from Tennessee to visit Lesotho.

The UT Science Forum is sponsored by the UT Office of Research. The final presentation of the semester will be on April 30 when Suzanne Lenhart, professor of mathematics, talks about “The Power of Optimal Control: From Confining Rabies to Improving CPR.”

For questions about the UT Science Forum, contact Mark Littmann, [email protected] or 974-8156, or Mike Clark, [email protected] or 974-6006.

—

C O N T A C T :

Bridget Hardy (865-974-2225, [email protected])

Poll after poll shows that the general public STILL favors the transition to clean energy.  Two new polls show that the majority of African Americans and Latinos believe that switching to clean energy will create jobs and keep the economy strong while also combating climate change.  CAP Energy Opportunity intern Sarah Collins has the story.

Not only do majorities of the polled groups feel that global warming is a serious problem that needs addressing, but majorities of both Latino and African American participants also say they will vote on climate in 2010.  African Americans were polled in Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina, while Latinos were polled in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada – all key states in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections.

On April 15^th, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change (NLCCC) and the Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change (CEAACC), a project of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, held a joint briefing at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center to release new findings in the report “Results of Multi-state Opinion Polls of African American and Latino Communities.”

Of the total 900 Latinos polled, findings include:

• Overwhelming majorities of Latino voters in Florida (80%), Nevada (67%) and Colorado (58%) say they are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senate candidate that supports proposals for fighting global warming. Virtually no one is less likely.
• About three out of four Latino voters in Florida (76%) and Nevada (74%), and about two out of three voters in Colorado (64%), consider global warming very or somewhat serious. Three out of four Latino voters in each state say Congress should take action now.
• By about three to one, Latino voters in these states say switching to a clean energy economy will mean more U.S. jobs (66% in Florida, 72% in Nevada, 64% in Colorado). Over 8 out of 10 voters in each state reject the idea that fighting global warming will hurt the American economy.

Of the total 2000 African Americans polled, findings include:

• In every state, three out of four respondents said climate change was either very or somewhat important in choosing a U.S. Senator – and in Arkansas and South Carolina, a majority said it was very important.
• About 9 out of 10 African Americans in all four states support government investment in green jobs, and even more support green vocational educational programs to help prepare students for green jobs.
• 60% said they wanted the climate change bill to pass in the Senate before midterm elections

Communities of color are considered particularly vulnerable to climate change because they have fewer available institutional resources to adapt.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed endangerment finding, from April 2009, explains:

Within settlements experiencing climate change stressors, certain parts of the population may be especially vulnerable based on their circumstances.  These include the poor, the elderly, the very young, those already in poor health, the disabled, those living alone, those with limited rights and power (such as recent immigrants with limited English skills), and/or indigenous populations dependent on one or a few resources.

In response to these inequities, the Commission recommends that, in order to ensure that the needs of colored communities are address in climate legislation, we must “addressing the impacts of climate change on the most impacted and disadvantaged communities, promote green jobs and economic opportunity, and ensure the protection of low-income communities.”  Further recommendations, as outlined by the NLCCC, involve providing consumer relief to vulnerable families to offset the loss of purchasing power, expanding employment and training to prepare for the clean energy economy, and reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions by increasing transportation options.

These polls underscore other recent survey research findings: that, even faced with conservative and mainstream media attacks on climate science, Americans still support comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation.  As Frank M. Stewart, President and COO of American Association of Blacks in Energy and Member of the Commission, noted in his opening remarks at the briefing, “climate change is both immediate and important.”

For these reasons and many more, Congress must act in 2010 to create jobs, cut carbon pollution, and speed the transition to a clean energy economy.

JR:  I’d add that pretty much every major poll in the past six months makes clear that the public supports climate and energy legislation because it achieves multiple benefits, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide…as pollutant,” 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)

Jared Diamond famously argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that only a small set of organisms have the characteristics which make them viable domesticates. Diamond’s thesis is that the distribution of these organisms congenial to a mutualistic relationship with man shaped the arc of our species’ history and the variation in wealth that we see (though his a human-centric tale, we may enslave them, eat and use them as beasts of burden, but these are also species which have spread across the world with our expansion). This thesis has been challenged, but the bigger point of putting a focus on how humans relate to their domesticated animals, and the complex co-evolutionary path between the two, is something that we need to consider. In a plain biological and physical sense animals have utility; we eat them, and for thousands of years they were critical to our transportation networks. Some have argued that the rise of Islam, Arab monotheism, was contingent on the domestication of the camel (which opened up interior trade networks previously unaccessible). In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World the argument is made that the distribution of the Indo-European languages has to do with the facility of Central Eurasian plainsmen with their steeds. And of course there is the domestic dog, arguably the one creature which is able to read our emotions as if they were a con-specific.

I suspect that the evolution and ethology of domesticated animals will offer a window into our own evolution and ethology. Konrad Lorenz famously believed that humans were going through their own process of domestication all the while that they were selecting organisms suited to their own needs. More pliable, less intelligent, faster growing and maturing, and so forth. Know thy companions, and know thyself, so to speak.

What about an animal as intelligent as a dog, but famously tasty? (the combination of the two characters causing some ethical tension in the minds of many) I speak here of the pig. A few years ago research came out which showed that pig-culture was introduced to Europe from the Middle East. That is, Middle Eastern pigs came with Middle Eastern people in all likelihood. But modern European pigs do not derive from these lineages, rather, by comparing modern genetic variation with ancient DNA the authors showed that the Neolithic pigs had been replaced by local breeds. Just as pigs can go feral and fend for themselves rather easily, it seems that their basic morph can be derived from wild boar populations easily as well (by contrast, it will perhaps take some effort to derive a pekingese from wolf populations, offering a reason for why small dogs seem to have emerged once). A new paper explores the evolutionary history and phylogeography of the pigs of the swine-loving societies par excellence, those of East Asia. Patterns of East Asian pig domestication, migration, and turnover revealed by modern and ancient DNA:

The establishment of agricultural economies based upon domestic animals began independently in many parts of the world and led to both increases in human population size and the migration of people carrying domestic plants and animals. The precise circumstances of the earliest phases of these events remain mysterious given their antiquity and the fact that subsequent waves of migrants have often replaced the first. Through the use of more than 1,500 modern (including 151 previously uncharacterized specimens) and 18 ancient (representing six East Asian archeological sites) pig (Sus scrofa) DNA sequences sampled across East Asia, we provide evidence for the long-term genetic continuity between modern and ancient Chinese domestic pigs. Although the Chinese case for independent pig domestication is supported by both genetic and archaeological evidence, we discuss five additional (and possibly) independent domestications of indigenous wild boar populations: one in India, three in peninsular Southeast Asia, and one off the coast of Taiwan. Collectively, we refer to these instances as “cryptic domestication,” given the current lack of corroborating archaeological evidence. In addition, we demonstrate the existence of numerous populations of genetically distinct and widespread wild boar populations that have not contributed maternal genetic material to modern domestic stocks. The overall findings provide the most complete picture yet of pig evolution and domestication in East Asia, and generate testable hypotheses regarding the development and spread of early farmers in the Far East.

They used conventional phylogeographic techniques to catalog the variation in modern populations, as well as supplementing their data set with ancient samples. Here the genetic variance they’re looking at is the mtDNA, the maternal lineage. Easy to get at, and easy to analyze (lots of it, and non-recombinant). In general they seem to have found that there is a common genetic heritage of East Asian domestic pigs, who are embedded geographically among varieties of wild pig who exhibit localized genetic variants. Additionally, there are other varieties of domestic pig in Southeast and South Asia who seem to have arisen from their own boar populations (though there is a Pacific pig variant which seems to have been from mainland Southeast Asia, but that original source population has now been replaced by East Asian pigs). Additionally they find a strong continuity between ancient domestic East Asian pigs and the modern populations. This is a contrast with the findings in European which exhibited disjunction between past and present. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that East Asian pigs are more genuinely indigenous, derived from local wild lineages with regional adaptations, while the Middle Eastern pigs brought to Europe were short-term kludges easily superseded by domesticates derived from European boar populations.

This figure shows the nature of haplotype sharing between wild and ancient & contemporary domestic pigs. The greater the pie, the more frequency the haplotype. The slices of the pie by color show wild (black), ancient (red) and modern domestic (white) shares of that haplotype. The line across the networks show the putative separation between the genetic variants relatively private to the wild populations, and those which lean toward a mix of wild & domesticates. The wild populations seem more diverse. 45 haplotypes out of 167 samples are found only in wild specimens, 92 haplotypes out of 339 samples are found only in domestic specimens, and 21 haplotypes are found in both 87 wild and 582 domestic pigs. One assumes that the domesticates are derived from a small subset of wild pigs, and that population underwent demographic expansion within the last 10,000 years. That’s not too different from our species, we’re descended from a small subset of H. sapiens, and we’ve undergone major demographic expansion. Our “wild” cousins among the great apes tend to have a lot more genetic variation even within their small populations because their demographic history has presumably been a bit more staid. As man was, so shall he turn his domesticates. And yet a major difference between the domestic pig and man seems to be that some variant of multiregionalism, the evolution of modern pigs from local lineages, and their subsequent hybridization to produce a genetically unified species, has been operative. One major caution with these studies is that they’re looking at mtDNA. The dog genomics work has been modified and overturned when they shifted from the mtDNA that most phylogeographers focus on to the total genome. One does not know the evolutionary history of an organism by one locus alone.

The pig is a peculiar beast, retaining its feral nature as evident by the periodic reemergence of morphs from released domestic populations which have no difficulty in going “wild.” There are 4 million feral hogs in the United States, and they can get quite large indeed. What would the pekingese do in a world without man? Probably be some other creature’s meal. But generalists like the pigs would no doubt flourish. The story of the pig is a story of piggybacking, so to speak, on the success of the upright ape and spreading across the world on the backs of the other white meat.

Let me finish from the author’s conclusion:

The evidence presented here suggests the following evolutionary history of pigs in East Asia. Having originally evolved in ISEA [Island Southeast Asia], wild Sus scrofa migrated (without human assistance) across the Kra Isthmus on the MalayPeninsula into Mainland Asia. From here, they spread across the landscape and, after traveling over land bridges, onto the islands of Japan, the Ryukyu chain, Taiwan, and Lanyu where they evolved unique mitochondrial signatures. After millennia of hunting and gathering, a major biocultural transition occurred early in the Holocene during which human populations in East Asia domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including pigs. This process took place at least once in the Yellow River drainage basin wheremilletmay have been first domesticated as early as 10,000 B.P…and may have also taken place independently in the downstream Yangtze River region where rice may have been domesticated…Two things are clear from the ancient DNA evidence presented here. First, unlike Europe, modern Chinese domestic pigs are the direct descendants of the first domestic pigs in this region. Second, despite the occurrence of a genetically distinct population of wild boar throughout modern China, this population has neither been incorporated into domestic stocks nor exterminated.

Citation: Larson, G., Liu, R., Zhao, X., Yuan, J., Fuller, D., Barton, L., Dobney, K., Fan, Q., Gu, Z., Liu, X., Luo, Y., Lv, P., Andersson, L., & Li, N. (2010). Patterns of East Asian pig domestication, migration, and turnover revealed by modern and ancient DNA Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912264107

Image credit: NASA

Charges and counter-charges are swirling around the Catholic church. Newspaper articles have raised questions about how much Pope Benedict XVI knew about particular cases and the ways in which he himself dealt with abusers. No one can predict what will happen as more cases come to light and more victims tell their stories. But it’s worth stepping back, for a moment, and remembering that Benedict is probably the greatest scholar to rule the church since Innocent III, the brilliant jurist who served from 1198 to 1216. He knows how to wield all the tools of historical research and theological and exegetical argument. No one has studied the development and meaning of the Catholic liturgy with more care and precision, or performs Mass more beautifully. His rich sense of the value of tradition—and the way it develops over time—will likely determine his response to the current crisis.

The Pope’s thinking about the Church and its relation to the faithful emerges clearly in his eloquent apostolic letter Summorum pontificum, issued in 2007, in which he specified the rules for celebrating the Tridentine (Latin) mass. There he explains that

the sacred liturgy, celebrated according to the Roman use, enriched not only the faith and piety but also the culture of many peoples. It is known, in fact, that the Latin liturgy of the Church in its various forms, in each century of the Christian era, has been a spur to the spiritual life of many saints, has reinforced many peoples in the virtue of religion and made their piety bear fruit.

The Church brings the means of devotion to its people—even to its saints.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope served as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office). In this capacity he maintained a strict eye on the orthodoxy of Catholic theologians. He showed notable severity towards Leonardo Boff and other representatives of Latin American Liberation Theology. Among many other duties, he also oversaw the papacy’s dealings with priests accused of sexual abuse. As Prefect he cultivated a fierce clarity about what is, and what is not, Catholic doctrine, and what distinguishes Catholicism from other religions and other forms of Christianity.

The pope is capable of showing equal clarity when dealing with scandalous violations of the rules that govern priestly conduct. For years, accusations of abusing teenage boys swirled around Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ and a special favorite of John Paul II. His privileged position, and wads of cash, kept him safe. In 2004, however, the then Cardinal Ratzinger reopened an investigation of Maciel and ordered a Vatican official to interview Legionaries and alleged victims of abuse worldwide. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “asked” Maciel “to retire to a private life of penance and prayer, giving up any form of public ministry.” (In late March, the Legionaries of Christ acknowledged in an unusual public statement that Father Maciel “had fathered a daughter in the context of a prolonged and stable relationship with a woman, and committed other grave acts.”)

Under pressure in recent weeks, the Pope has confessed in general that the church made grave errors, and should “do penance” to address its “sins.” He has also clarified the procedures for reporting accused sexual abusers to the police authorities. On April 17, he travelled to Malta to meet with alleged victims of abuse, and was reportedly tearful in this private encounter, experiencing “shame and sorrow” over what “the victims and their families suffered,” according to a Vatican statement.

Those who want more—who want emotional public scenes of reconciliation with former victims, and a clear, detailed accounting—are not likely to find satisfaction. The Pope seems to have seen priestly abuse of children, for a long time, as an American problem, rather than the general one it clearly is. He still seems to regard journalistic discussions of it as part of a broad, deliberate attack on the Church, a line that his surrogates and some outside defenders have made their own. He responds to accusations defensively, in the first instance, like many long-serving officers in powerful established institutions whose members wear uniforms and live, in some ways, outside the normal social world—think of the armed forces or the police. At bay, as he is now, he has not yet acknowledged, and may never accept, the wisdom that any competent PR consultant would offer: cover-ups are always worse than the crimes they are meant to conceal. Instead, for the most part, he has turned his spikes outward, as hedgehogs do.

That stiffly protective attitude towards the institution helps to explain some of the pope’s past conduct—such as the masterly inactivity with which he greeted pleas from the Oakland Diocese to unfrock a priest who “had been sentenced in 1978 to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay area church rectory.” Ratzinger’s office met a long series of urgent requests from the States with every known bureaucratic delaying tactic, from a claim to have lost the dossier to a Latin letter in which the cardinal, after four years, explained the need for further study and the harm that might be done to the “Universal Church” by releasing so young a priest from his vows. One wonders what exactly was said to Bishop Cummins of Oakland when he visited the Congregation in September 1982.

But that is no reason for Catholics—or non-Catholic admirers of the Church, like the present writer—to despair. Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing. Under Innocent III, the Curia crystallized as a superbly effective institution, intent on rights and revenues, rather than tending to the poor and sick who were crowding into Europe’s rapidly growing industrial and trading cities.

But when Francis of Assisi founded an order of men who were willing to give up all they had and minister to the urban poor, and Dominic founded a second one of men dedicated to preaching the truth and rooting out heresies, Innocent III immediately gave both of them vital encouragement. Three centuries later, between 1534 and 1549, a very different pope, the politician and aesthete Paul III, offered warm support when Ignatius Loyola arrived in Rome with a few tattered followers and a plan to preach to former Catholics in Protestant lands and to non-Christians overseas, and when St Angela Merici created a new form of religious life for women.

It seems unlikely that Benedict is the man to transform the Church, so that it freely and frankly confronts what many priests have done to the children in their charge, and what many of their superiors did to conceal their crimes. Still less does he seem likely to remake the church into an institution that not only worships in an orderly, beautiful and theologically clear way, but also ministers to the world as it is now. But he is a great scholar, with a mind as crisp and deep as Innocent’s. He knows that the church, whatever its resources, needs its saints, and has often found them far outside the Curia. History matters to the Pope, and that gives some reason to hope that he is not looking for another Dominic, since he himself has played that role so well, and that he too will recognize the Francis or the Angela Merici of our time when he or she appears before him.

In the past we’ve seen some impractical supercars and public transportation combinations including a Ferrari Taxi and a Lamborghini Taxi, but now we have one that seems somewhat practical since it seats three passengers plus a driver – a Porsche Panamera Turbo Taxi.

The Panamera Turbo Taxi sits four and is powered by a 4.8L turbocharged V8 making 500-hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. It goes form 0-60 mph in 4 seconds and also has room for some luggage in the boot.

Click here to get prices on the 2010 Porsche Panamera.

Check out a video of the Porsche Panamera Turbo Taxi in action (warning: it’s in German).

Refresher: The $89,800 Porsche Panamera S is powered by a 400-hp V8 allowing for a 0-60 mph time of 5.2 seconds with a top speed of 175 mph. $93,800 Panamera 4S is powered by the same 400-hp V8. The $132,600 Porsche Panamera Turbo is powered by a turbocharged V8 making 500-hp allowing for a 0-60 mph time of 4.0 seconds with a top speed of 188 mph.

2010 Porsche Panamera:

2010 Porsche Panamera:

– By: Omar Rana

Source: Motofilm (via CarScoop)

     Armstrong’s face lit up when he saw me. My heart melted as he lunged forward, wrapping his little arms and legs around me.

     “He must remember you,” Armstong’s adoptive father, Scott Dice, said as I held the one year-old.  Armstrong and I hadn’t seen one another since January, when the baby boy was living in the back of a box truck at an earthquake-damaged orphanage, La Maison des Enfants de Dieu (The House of God’s Children) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

 

 

     That was just days the quake.  Now here Armstrong was, at his new home in Denver… smiling and happy… taking my face in his hands and pulling me toward him until we were forehead to forehead… looking each other in the eyes.

 

 

     When the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on January 12th, 2010 Armstrong’s soon-to-be-parents Cherie and Scott Dice had no idea if the child they’d spent their life savings adopting was now living… or dead.

     For them, and many other hopeful moms and dads still working to transfer their adopted kids to the states, media reports were their only lifeline to orphanages across Haiti where more helpless parents were abandoning their children every day. There were more than 300,000 children living in Haitian orphanages before the earthquake struck.  After the quake, that number tripled to nearly a million as now homeless and jobless parents dropped their kids off, hoping they will find new homes.

     Fox News Correspondent Jonathan Hunt and I were doing a series of reports about La Maison des Enfants de Dieu which was hit hard by the earthquake, leaving some 130 children without adequate food and water.  Babies, like Armstrong, were in danger of dying from dehydration. The orphanage was out of formula, so caretakers were forced to feed the babies real milk which was giving them diarrhea.

     The Dices had been reading my articles online and contacted me, asking if I could find baby Armstrong and post a photo of him if I could.  I didn’t realize at the time that this photo was the Dices’ only proof that Armstong was alive.

 

 

      During one of Jonathan Hunt’s live reports on Studio B, I received an email from another frantic parent. Lisa Harris of Littleton, Colorado was concerned the two children she was adopting would get lost in the shuffle as Haiti started allowing the kids to travel to the states.  She asked me to find Guimara and Davinson and write their names on their arms. 

 

 

     Guimara and Davinson Harris made it safely to their new home in Colorado.  I visited the kids this weekend to find them living worlds away from the crowded cribs and dirty mattresses at the orphanage.  Two-year-old Guimara’s favorite color is purple and she loves playing dress up with beads and feather boas.  Eighteen-month-old Davinson enjoys playing with his plastic power tools, but appeared to like following his older siblings around more.

     In addition to Guimara and Davinson, Lisa and Rich Harris have two biological children: Zach, 10, and Rachel, 9, as well as two children adopted from China, Josh, 6, and Olivia, 4.

 

      Despite the fact that Mr and Mrs Harris have four adopted kids, they believe adoption should be a last resort for desperate families in Haiti, not their only option.  The couple has created The Road To Hope, a non-profit organization, that’s raising money to help orphaned and abandoned Haitian as well as Haitian parents who are struggling to keep their children in their own care.  The group’s board has agreed to personally cover all of the organization’s expenses, which means 100% of the donations will go directly to projects in Haiti.

     For their first project, The Road To Hope is teaming up with Haitian Orphan Rescue to build a new facility for orphans and families called  “Nouvo Vilaj” (New Village) in Arcahaie, Haiti.  Haitian Orphan Rescue is run by two sisters from Pittsburgh, Jamie and Ali McMurtrie.  The sisters have spent the past eight years living in Haiti, working at orphanages.  They lost their home in the earthquake.

 

      The sisters have plans to build a new $5 million dollar facility that would not only house as many as 70 orphaned and abandoned children, but would give work to Haitians during the building’s construction, and once completed offer instruction in things like farming and breastfeeding.  The sisters say the future of Haiti depends on its people becoming self-sustaining.

     They tell the story of a man who lives near the land where the new facility will be built. He has eight children, all of which he has offered to give up for adoption because he is struggling to feed them.  Instead, the sisters plan to hire him, so he can afford to raise his children himself.

     For more on the McMurtries’ and Harris family’s partnership, check out their websites www.TheRoadToHope.org and www.HaitianOrphanRescue.org.

Sam Sifton, the newish restaurant critic for the New York Times, has been writing and blogging about the massive caloric intake required by his job. He has even gone so far as to track his diet and exercise habits for a week and show the net calorie consumption day by day. Not surprisingly, on one day he had a net intake of over 4,000 calories thanks to fried oysters, rabbit livers and a couple of meat pies.

The restaurant critic calorie confidential seems to be turning into something of a blogging subgenre. Recently, Dallas Morning News critic Leslie Brenner tracked her own 20-pounds-in-20-weeks “Restaurant Critic’s Diet.” Like Sifton, she kept track of everything she ate and energy expended through exercise with calorie counts. Unlike Sifton, she restricted her daily caloric intake by only taking bites of the food she reviewed and cooking sensibly at home.

I don’t know if the AJC’s Meridith Ford Goldman counts calories, but I do know she shows amazing restraint at the table. …

Brazen:

Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made their move, shooting him with a pistol, said Zalmy Ayoubi, a government spokesman.

The New York Times describes Yarmal as one of the few Kandahar public officials whom locals view as honest and untouched by corruption. While a Taliban spokesman described the assassination as retribution for Yarmal’s work for “this puppet government,” that gives his death strategic importance: in a battle for legitimacy, NATO will need legitimate local partners in Kandahar — precisely what the Taliban seek to deny the coalition ahead of a possible offensive to clear the Taliban from the city this summer.

Just as I discover the $45 TRON hoodie (a combination of my two favorite things short of “pork fornication,” which just sounds bad), I discover it’s sold out. Some t-shirt sizes are still available, however. [Threadless via TheDailyWhat via DVICE] More »

We tend to think that the Internet is impossible to ‘destroy.’ It was designed initially by the US military to survive a nuclear attack. And, with billions of computers and equipment linked together, all operating pretty much independent from each other, what could possibly happen to seriously… (read more)

Filed under: Motorsports, Renault

Imagine you’re running an F1 team. You’re spending millions to shave precious pounds off the car’s weight. And then you hire a driver who’s carrying an extra few pounds around the middle, and the advantage is lost.

That’s essentially what’s happening at Renault F1 this season with their rookie Vitaly Petrov. The Russian driver is almost as tall as his team-mate Robert Kubica, but crucially weighs some 10 kilograms (or 22 lbs) more. Kubica made headlines in the last few years at BMW-Sauber, where he went on an extreme weight-loss regimen in order to improve his performance.

Petrov, meanwhile, just managed to finish his first grand prix and score his first championship points this past weekend in Shanghai, having failed to make it to the finish line in the three previous rounds.

According to reports, the French team has instructed its driver to lose a few pounds. Trimming weight off the driver’s body mass allows the engineers to play around with extra ballast (required to reach the minimum curb weight allowed under regulations) and trim the car’s handling accordingly.

[Source: Autocar]

Renault: You’re too fat, Vitaly Petrov! originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

As the leaders of the IBSA and BRIC groupings met in Brasilia last week IPS hosted an official meeting of leading media editors from Brazil, India and South Africa. IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin presented the recommendations from the meeting to President Lula, Prime Minister Singh, President Zuma, their Ministers and delegations, in a segment broadcast live on Brazilian national television.

The IBSA Editors Forum is the latest initiative of IPS’s strategy to foster strengthened South-South communication and media channels, to accompany the new global geography of power. The Forum in Brasilia was supported by the Government of Brazil and the World Bank with the South-South Cooperation Unit of UNDP joining the meeting.

More than twenty media editors and senior journalists participated in the Forum, concluding with proposals including that IBSA add an official working group on communication, create a web site for information about IBSA, and establish a programme to wake journalists up to these new developments.

“Our countries should not continue to receive news about each other via New York or London,” but directly, said the Brazilian ambassador to South Africa, Jose Vicente Pimentel, at the Editors Forum, where Brazil’s deputy minister for communication, Ottoni Fernandes, proposed cooperation between public television broadcasters across IBSA.

Read more IPS coverage of the Forum, and other news from the IBSA and BRIC meetings at the IPS website on South-South co-operation.

We alluded yesterday that the higher resolution screen on the Phantom iPhone of Redwood City would more-than-likely have double the horizontal and vertical pixels of the current iPhone screen (therefore quadrupling the pixel count), and now the ever-reliable John Gruber has weighed in on the likelihood of a new-and-improved double-PPI resolution.

The main take-away here is that while the current iPhone screen is gorgeous, Apple are trying to make the screen on the next iPhone look as clear as the print found in expensive glossy magazines. The new screens would have a pixels per inch (PPI) resolution of around 325. To put this in context, all previous iPhones have about 162 PPI, and the current line of MacBooks have about 133 PPI. Put simply, this new screen will blow your mind, and probably your eyeballs.

From a technical perspective, the new pixel count makes sense, as (presumably) all existing iPhone apps will easily, simply — and most importantly — laglessly scale up to fit the new screen. While these lower resolution apps may look a little donky on the large iPad screen, the re-scale will be undetectable on the smaller iPhone screen.

You can read John Gruber’s full analysis over at Daring Fireball.