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The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.

What do you call a Yugo with twin tailpipes? A wheelbarrow. What do you call a Yugo with a flat tire? Totaled.

Jason Vuic has heard ’em all. That’s because he’s an assistant professor of modern European history and happens to be an expert on all things Yugoslavian. Which explains his fascination with what is widely regarded as the most wretched car ever to sully American highways, the Yugo.

Keep Reading: Yugo, Going, Gone – Book Review

No related posts.

We don’t need much proof that the federal government sucks at almost everything it does. But in case you wanted it, here’s proof that it sucks at marketing, too. A quick survey of the municipal posters aimed at getting people psyched to participate in the 2010 Census reveals some of the most sleep-inducing visual work since Andy Warhol trained a camera at the Empire State Building for 24 straight hours and called it a movie.  

  One poster, spotted at a local post office, features a sexy profile shot of a mailbox and blares the headline: "A Census form will arrive at your home address in March 2010." (We’d better stay home and wait for that, huh maw?) Another, seen recently in Littleton, Colo., makes a photo-montage of a U.S. map—stock headshots, each more thrilling than the last—and asks the cliffhanger question: "Have you been counted?" Perhaps the worst of the lot uses a field of baby blue inexplicably rendered as a film strip and reads: "Come to your senses and fill out your Census." (Wow, lemme at them forms!)  

  Granted, the Census isn’t the most exciting thing in the world to sell to people, but isn’t that exactly where good marketing is needed most? Uncle Sam would have done a lot better to farm this PR job out. Take, for example, what the civil-rights group The Leadership Conference did. Its Census poster shows a silhouette of the Holy Family on their way to Bethlehem on a donkey’s back. "This is how Jesus was born," the headline reminds the faithful. "Joseph and Mary participated in the Census." Now, that’s one marketing message that’s tough to argue with.

—Posted by Robert Klara

by Jeff Biggers

All coal mining safety laws have been written in miners’ blood.

My grandfather, who barely survived an explosion in a coal mine in
southern Illinois, taught me this phrase. He also taught me about the
150-year-old battle in the coalfields over reckless production at the
cost of responsible safety measures.

As our prayers and condolences go out to the many coal mining
families in Raleigh County, W.Va., I think about the needless
safety violations and subsequent disasters that have taken place over
the past century.

Over 104,000 Americans and immigrants have died in our coal mines.
According to one inspector, many, if not a majority of those
“accidents” should not be considered mishaps, but acts of negligent
homicide.

As a coal miner’s widow from Raleigh County, W.Va. told me
on the phone last night, every time she sees a miner just off his
shift, draped in coal dust, standing at the convenience market, she
knows that mine is rife with violations.

Three coal miners still die daily from black lung disease—one of the most flagrant safety issues and scandals overlooked in our nation.

While we are still waiting for the details on the Performance Coal
Co. Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, and whether methane gas buildup—the release of highly flammable and toxic gas that has haunted coal
miners for centuries—led to the explosion that has taken at least 25
lives, reports are now coming out of the mine’s history of safety
violations. According to Ry Rivard in the Daily Mail:

In March alone, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration

officials cited the mine, which is owned by Massey subsidiary

Performance Coal Co., for failing to control dust; improperly planning

to ventilate the mine of dust and the combustible gas methane;

inadequate protection from roof falls; failing to maintain proper

escapeways; and allowing the accumulation of combustible materials.

Since 1995, there have been more than 3,000 violations at Upper

Big Branch, though it was not immediately clear how that compared to

other mines of its size.

Massey, of course, has become infamous for its devastating mountaintop removal operations.

But the company also pleaded guilty to criminal violations for a
January 2006 fire at the Aracoma mine in Logan County, W.Va., which took
the lives of two miners. As Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward noted:

A huge problem at Aracoma was also that Massey officials

had removed key ventilation walls, or stoppings, allowing smoke to

enter that primary escape tunnel in the first place—a move that U.S.

District Judge John T. Copenhaver later said “doomed two workers to a

tragic death.”

In a now infamous internal memo to employees that was used in the Aracoma mine trial, Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship
openly declared: “If any of you have been asked by your group
presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything
other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or
whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal,” the complaint quotes
the memo. “This memo is necessary only because we seem not to
understand that coal pays the bills.”

Nonetheless, Massey is ramping up its mine productions and profits, especially in its hurry to export coal to India and China.  Last year, nearly 3,000 coal miners died in China’s own mines.

When my grandfather was in the mines in southern Illinois, a group
of UMWA miners from Centralia, Ill., outraged by the political
machinations in the Department of Mines and Minerals, wrote a letter in
1946 urging the governor to take action on clearly dangerous buildups
of coal dust. The letter described the mine’s situation, the politics,
and then made a desperate request for intervention:

In fact, Governor Green, this is a plea to you, to please

save our lives, to please make the Department of Mines and Minerals

enforce the laws at No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Company at

Centralia, Ill., at which mine we are employed, before we have a

dust explosion at this mine like just happened in Kentucky and West W.Va.

Despite numerous inspections, recommendations, and noted violations,
the mine owners did not consider the dust situation to be of imminent
danger. On March 25, 1947, an explosion ripped through the Centralia
mine and killed 111 miners. Half of them died from carbon monoxide
poisoning. Three of the four men who had written the governor also died
in the explosion.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out, a crime was
committed at Centralia. Just like modern operators, the Centralia Coal
Company had made it a habitual practice to violate mining safety laws
and simply pay the fines.

And the violations and the deaths continue today.

I can’t get the words of an old Welsh coalfield ballad out of my mind:

Oh what will you give me, say the sad bells of Rhymney
Is there hope for the future, say the brown bells of Merthyr
Who made the mine owners, say the blackbells of Rhondda
And who killed the miners, say the grim bells of Blaenau …

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Obama’s mountaintop-removal crackdown could mean more than offshore drilling

Appalachians hail EPA’s great victory for Clean Water Act and justice

Not even four months after the event, we are already seeing a reevaluation of the U.N.’s Copenhagen climate summit and the accord that came out of it.

The Vine blog had a piece yesterday reporting that the initiatives that came out of Copenhagen have a good chance of holding warming to 2 degrees celsius by 2100. Today, FT Energy Source follows up with a report that is slightly more pessimistic but much sunnier than anything we were seeing in December.The Vine leans heavily on research by Trevor Houser at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who found that the Copenhagen commitments give the world a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees by 2100.

Still, the blog notes that the United States’ commitment to emissions curbs, or lack thereof, is the crucial variable.

FT Energy Source tempers Houser’s conclusions with the projections from Project Catalyst and the Center for American Progress (CAP), both of which are guessing that warming could top out at 3 degree Celsius.

The U.N. says that 110 countries have signed onto the accord, FT reports.

The business-as-usual scenario is about 4.8 degrees, according to CAP.

One bonus: since the Copenhagen accord was not legally binding countries could still manage to negotiate a more ambitious goal.

Following the conventional wisdom, we were negative about Copenhagen in December too.

At best, it still looks like a work in progress.

Despite burning curiosity, I have no idea what the Dalai Lama writes in his personal emails. But somewhere in China, hackers know.

China-based hacking operations have moved from murmurs to the front page since the fracas between the Chinese government and Google flared up three months ago. Besides the communist government’s flagrant and unapologetic Internet censorship, the search giant also accused China of harboring hackers who were behind politically motivated cyber attacks, like the targeting of Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. This week, computer security experts at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto announced that they’ve been trailing a group of China-based attackers they dub the “Shadow Network” for eight months. And they say they can show that those hackers have stolen a plethora of politically sensitive materials.

The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages. The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan [The New York Times]. They also took political documents that outlined India’s concerns about its relations with Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. The core servers for the operation seem to be based in the city of Chengdu in southwest China.

The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive [Los Angeles Times]. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu bemoaned the widespread coverage of this, and insisted that the government has nothing to do with the attacks. But while the researchers behind the report, “Shadows in the Cloud,” don’t explicitly blame the Chinese government, they say they are watching to see whether the government takes any action to shut down these hackers.

Meanwhile, Google’s spats with governments aren’t over. As we reported last week, the company says that opponents to a bauxite mining project in Vietnam have been inadvertently downloading malware, and McAfee, the company that discovered the attack, says the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam. “We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz [PC World]. Like the Chinese government, Vietnam’s denies these allegations and calls them “groundless.”

Related Content:
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: Hillary Clinton to China: Internet Censorship Is an “Information Curtain”
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave

Image: flickr / abhikrama

OK, I thought it was pretty remarkable that the Mets allowed Alex Cora(notes) to bat leadoff in their opener on Monday. He’s a career .245 hitter with only modest speed. His lifetime on-base percentage is just .313.

But then I saw the A’s opening day lineup, and realized that Oakland is fielding an entire team of Alex Coras this year. Check the box score:

That’s really a civic embarrassment. The 3-4-5 hitters in the A’s lineup have career OPSs of .727, .741 and .726. It should not surprise you to learn that Oakland had the American League’s lowest team slugging percentage last year (.397). They can’t seriously expect to score enough runs to be competitive in 2010, right?  

As a bewildered Jack Cust(notes) said after he was designated for assignment over the weekend, "It’s messed up. … The fact is, this team has no power and they’ve just released a guy who (averaged 28 homers) the last three years. That’s amazing."

It really is amazing. I cannot explain why the A’s have put themselves in this predicament, but I know a fantasy opportunity when I see one. Here are all the starting pitchers who are likely to face Oakland this week:

Tuesday – Ian Snell(notes) (vs. Dallas Braden(notes))
Wednesday – Ryan Rowland-Smith(notes) (vs. Justin Duchscherer(notes))
Thursday – Doug Fister(notes) (vs. Brett Anderson(notes))
Friday – Matt Palmer(notes) (vs. Gio Gonzalez(notes))
Saturday – Jered Weaver(notes) (vs. Ben Sheets(notes))
Sunday – Joe Saunders(notes) (vs. Dallas Braden)

Most of them are available in standard mixed leagues. Stream as needed. 

—

Photo via AP Images 

Some new owners of Apple’s slate computer, the iPad, are having issues with the device’s Wi-Fi connection. Multiple forum postings, both on Apple’s own support site and elsewhere, have users reporting that they’re experiencing weak signals in an area where their other Internet-connected devices have no issues. Another common complaint, which appears to be related, is a dropped connection. Some iPads lose their connection to the Wi-Fi network, then prompt the user to re-enter the network password. But doing so doesn’t work. The only “fix” seems to be either shutting Wi-Fi off and back on again via the settings, or worse, rebooting the computer…err…iPad.

Sponsor

Network Password?

There doesn’t seem to be any determinable factor connecting the users experiencing the problems – different models of the iPad are in use, different routers, different security settings, etc. However, one name came up dozens of times in the forums: Verizon FiOS. A number of the complaints came from customers of Verizon’s high-speed, fiber-to-the-curb service known as FiOS. Along with TV and phone, Verizon provides Actiontec-branded Internet routers to establish the home’s Ethernet (cabled) and wireless networks.

We got in touch with the company, who had yet to hear of the problem at the time. After much research on Verizon’s part, including speaking with members of their hardware teams and call center operations, it appears the issue has simply not crossed their radar.

According to Verizon’s Media Relations Director, Jim Smith, the call center has not received calls from iPad owners about failed connections on the iPad, although some have phoned in for help setting up WEP security connections on the devices. He did, however, hear from one person on his team who said Apple had advised iPad owners to turn off WEP security. We could not confirm this to be the case, but it does match up with a few of the recommendations found on user forums. Those forums are hosted on Apple.com, so this is where the confusion may lie. For example, a customer reading the forums may have mistakenly assumed these were suggested fixes from Apple itself, and not from other affected users.

Smith also told us that, as of now, Verizon has no evidence that the connection issues iPad owners are experiencing are related to Verizon’s broadband services in any way. iPad users among the company’s own employees have also not reported any trouble, he says.

Apple Bug Resurfaces

We typically believe that statements like these are just PR gloss-overs of an issue, but in this case, we tend to believe Verizon. The reason? This Wi-Fi bug is not a new issue. It happened to iPhone users, too, when the iPhone 3.0 software, a mobile operating system upgrade released via iTunes, was launched a year ago. Several iPhone owners then experienced issues that mimic those now being reported by iPad users. In July 2009, owners of the latest iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, which had launched the prior month, also reported similar issues. Despite rumors that the fix would be included in iPhone OS 3.1 in September 2009, the issues remained. There have even been three additional minor OS upgrades since then, to no avail.

Apparently this is a bug that Apple just can’t quash.

As far as we can tell right now, some people are having limited success by either disabling WEP altogether on their wireless network – not a good idea from a security perspective as it opens up your home network to public access – or by setting their routers to “G” only, when formerly set to B/G or “mixed” mode. (To the non-technical, those letters refer to wireless networking standards. “G” routers are newer than “B” routers, but older than “N” routers. Routers can broadcast in B mode, G mode, N mode or a “mixed” mode where they support connections to devices of varying ages and supported standards.) For what’s it worth, neither of those workarounds resolved the issue in my tests.

Unfortunately, adjusting router settings isn’t something everyday, mainstream users would think to do. Many of them buy Apple products because they’re marketed as devices that “just work.” Hopefully, Apple will soon live up to the image they’ve created for themselves and fix the Wi-Fi bug for good. In the meantime, learn how to reboot your iPad.

Discuss

(This guest post previously appeared at the author’s blog)

We’ve joked about the recent rally and how, if you were new to the market, you might think that there was an SEC ban on all selling.  We all know the stats by now.  Stocks have risen in 70%+ of all sessions for over double digit gains over the last 2 months.  Monday’s are almost guaranteed 1% rallies. Volume is always low.  Declines are never more than 0.2%.  But this all pales in comparison to what has happened in the banking sector. The banks have rallied a jaw-dropping 83% of the time during the recent rally.  Out of the 41 previous sessions just 7 of them have been to the downside and just 3 of those were 1% declines.   Over the course of the move the banks have surged 21.5%.  You could certainly call the banks the most hated sector in the entire U.S. economy so it’s only appropriate that the banks surge over the course of the world’s most hated rally….

Read more market commentary at PragCap.com >

Join the conversation about this story »

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

In August 2008, the Federal Communications Commission issued a cease and desist order to cable company Comcast, demanding it stop throttling BitTorrent traffic. It was considered the first citation ever for the violation of net neutrality rules.

Comcast then filed suit against the FCC, contesting that the Commission overstepped its boundaries because net neutrality guidelines were not a law. They’re not.

Under US law, telecommunications service may be directly regulated by the FCC. But in 2002, the Commission classified broadband as an “information service,” which is subject to different rules. However, the FCC does have some authority to regulate the Internet on an “ancillary” basis. The FCC argued that this was all it had done.

Last January, this argument didn’t look like it would stick, and many believed that the Court was going to side with Comcast.

The three-judge panel today issued its ruling in favor of Comcast, overturning the FCC’s citation on the grounds that Congress has never given the FCC the power to regulate an ISP’s network management policies.

Net Neutrality advocates are already speaking out against the decision.

“Because this case has turned into a lawyers’ debate over technical issues, it is easy to lose sight of its importance to freedom of speech and expression,” Parul P. Desai, Vice President of Media Access Project, said. “ISP interference to lawful uses of the Internet must not be tolerated, and the Commission must have the power to adopt rules to prohibit such practices.”

“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet and to policies that will bring the enormous benefits of broadband to all Americans. It will rest these policies — all of which will be designed to foster innovation and investment while protecting and empowering consumers — on a solid legal foundation,” FCC Spokesperson Jen Howard said this afternoon. “Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open Internet. But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open Internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

After months of imagining all the kitchen possibilities for the iPad, one of the first things we did when our household received its new tablet was head straight for the Epicurious app. Cue the heavenly choirs! To be sure, the iPad is not a necessity, but we must admit we’re pretty smitten.

Read Full Post

Filed under: Budget, Sedan, Plants/Manufacturing, Chevrolet, GM, Rumormill

General Motors may be giving the Chevrolet Cruze a once-over before the car debuts here in the States. According to Paul Tan, the sedan is getting a few upgrades ahead of American consumers getting a crack at the company’s new compact fighter. The majority of the changes seem to be geared towards making the car quieter, and include a new acoustic laminated windshield and extra sound deadening in the doors. GM has also cranked the total air bag count up to 10 to improve its safety rating.

While the thought of additional weight in a car with just 138 horsepower slows our pulse, there is some good news: The General may be ditching the torsion bar rear suspension in the global Cruze in favor of a Z-link set up, meaning there may be some hope for the four-door when it comes to the twisties.

[Source: Paul Tan]

North American Chevy Cruze getting market-specific upgrades? originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At the end of last month we told you about Sharp’s plans to offer two Android MID’s with full QWERTY keyboards. Specs and pictures are here. Recently, two videos surfaced with these new devices in action. This video was posted by Gigazine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The screen looks pretty good and navigation seems smooth. Multi-touch is a welcome addition also and a must have for some. The video lacked substance; I would’ve loved to see the keyboard in action and a few other things like the market, maps and maybe a few apps. Hopefully the next video will show these things and more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bill 5744 would change ‘open and obvious’ defense to better protect Michigan residents

How bad is Michigan’s “open and obvious” premises liability law?  So bad that in one fell swoop in 2002, it wiped out over 65 years of human factors science. Our “open and obvious” law essentially wipes out slip and fall cases. The Michigan Supreme Court declared that no typical person could ever blame the premises owner for falling in a pothole or on a sidewalk, if he or she were able to see the hazard.

When I moderated and spoke at a premises liability seminar for Michigan personal injury lawyers on “open and obvious,” I pointed out that the entire assumption behind our current law has been proven false. Yet this outdated law still stands, wiping out hundreds of legitimate cases of severely injured state residents every year.

Worse yet, the public policy behind the “open and obvious” law could not be worse in Michigan. We actually reward property owners to create more dangerous conditions for people by letting these dangerous conditions, if they become “open and obvious” enough, become a complete bar to liability.

Finally, we may be able to change this ridiculous law. The Michigan House Judiciary Committee heard testimony recently on  a bill that would alter the premises liability “open and obvious” defense into a question of comparative negligence. The committee will vote in a future session.

The bill, HB 5744 would add a section to the comparative negligence statute found under MCL 600.2959 of the Revised Judicature Act, to state “whether a condition is open and obvious may be considered by the trier of fact only in assessing the degree of comparative fault, if any, and shall not be considered with respect to any other issue of law or fact, including duty.”

The open and obvious doctrine first appeared 18 years ago in the Supreme Court case of Riddle v. McLouth Steel, a 1992 case that held that a property owner owes no duty to a person who already knew of a hazard.

Okay, that makes some sense, but the definition was then widely expanded in 2002 to become the basis for our current premises liability mess in Michigan.  In Lugo v. Ameritech, the Michigan Supreme Court held that not only did the owner not have a duty to warn of an “open and obvious hazard,” but an owner also has no duty to repair a hazard either. Read here for a list of 38 judicial travesties of the Michigan Supreme Court.

The bill’s supporters, including Representative Kandrevas, say that the intent of HB 5744 is to return Michigan’s personal injury premises liability law back to the Riddle standard.

Why HB 5744 Should Become Law

As I said, the current public policy behind our premises liability law in Michigan could not be worse.  The Lugo decision created a disincentive for property owners to keep their premises safe. And it actually creates a perverse incentive for property owners to make their property more unsafe – more dangerous – because the more dangerous and hazardous a condition can be shown to be, the more likely that property owner cannot be sued.

Alice in Wonderland anyone? It’s actually in a property owner’s best interest to leave a property as dangerous as possible rather than repair it. Unfortunately, that is not what is best for Michigan residents.

I applaud Democratic attorney general candidate Richard H. Bernstein, who testified to the Committee and said that the current doctrine is, in reality, also a disability rights issue. This is because Lugo created an objective standard that doesn’t take into account the condition of the plaintiff, thus making it a question of law for a judge to decide.

Bernstein, who is legally blind, pointed to Sidorowicz v. Chicken Shack, where the Michigan Court of Appeals held that a blind man who slipped and fell in a handicapped bathroom because of standing water was barred from recovery because a “normal” plaintiff would have seen the hazard.

This is an insane law we have in Michigan. A blind person was barred from bringing a lawsuit for his injuries because it was argued that a person with sight would have seen and avoided the danger – but what about the fact that the danger existed for all of us, in a place the public is encouraged and invited to use?

The real problem with our law goes beyond people with disabilities. The fact that our law punishes, actually punishes people with disabilities means that it also fails to protect other members of our society such as seniors citizens and young children. And as the study of human factors science has now proven, people cannot always pay 100 percent attention in real life.

Looking for cars in a parking lot means sometimes you don’t see the pothole by the store entrance.  Looking at displayed merchandise on store shelves, something by the way that store owners spend thousands of dollars hiring experts in human factors science to do, means sometimes you don’t see the grape on the floor.  Divided attention is a part of our world, and property owners should be making premises as safe as reasonably possible to protect people when this happens, as they sure as sure can be, know it will.

By the Way…

As I said, I applaud Richard Bernstein.  I also think he would make a fantastic Attorney General for Michigan and strongly support him.

And while we are on the topic, shame on the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for opposing this bill without stating why. The Chamber is potentially an invaluable tool for improving Michigan today. But somewhere along the way, it became politically knee-jerk in opposing all efforts to improve civil justice, no matter how reasonable, because someone  apparently decided protecting Michigan residents must be bad for businesses.  I would argue quite the opposite, but that is another thought for another day.

– Steven M. Gursten is recognized as one of the nation’s top experts in serious car and truck accident injury cases and automobile insurance no-fault litigation. Michigan Auto Law has received the largest reported jury verdict for an automobile accident case in Michigan in seven of the past 10 years, including 2009, according to published year-end verdicts and settlements reports.

– Photo courtesy of Creative Commons, by puliarf

Related information:

Michigan No-Fault Law

Help for Michigan Lawyers Handling Car Accident Cases

Help for Michigan Attorneys Handling Truck Accident Cases

Michigan Auto Law is the largest law firm exclusively handling car accident, truck accident and motorcycle accident cases throughout the state. Call (800) 777-0028 if you’ve been injured in an auto accident, and would like to speak to a lawyer.

It’s springtime and there’s a bumper crop of unweaned animals being sold illegally on the sidewalks of L.A.’s downtown fashion district.

Los Angeles police Officer Matthew Shafer, who patrols the streets and lots around the Santee Alley shopping mecca, was routinely scouring a Wall Street parking garage on Easter Sunday when he spied a man rustling plastic in a van and went to investigate.

In the van, Shafer found 118 turtles. In another van next to it, he discovered 23 underage rabbits.

"I thought, ‘Getting bunnies on Easter — this is awesome,’" said Shafer who had arrested another illegal sidewalk vendor selling rabbits and turtles the previous weekend on 12th Street and Maple Avenue.

Counterfeit handbags and DVDs are not the only problems for police downtown. The illegal sale of animals — often unweaned and malnourished or sick — is a perennial problem, according to Los Angeles police, downtown security officers and the city’s animal service officials.

When animal services officials can certify that animals are in bad condition, their vendors can be charged with animal cruelty — as was Raymundo Hernandez, the man Shafer arrested in the parking garage.

The animals were confiscated and turned over to Lejla Hadzimuratovic, a rabbit rescuer who runs an organization called Bunny World Foundation.

Vendors who are arrested generally are back on the street dodging officers shortly afterward, said Shafer, who energetically pursues them nonetheless.

“Sometimes, it’s hit or miss,” Shafer said of the search for vendors and their animal wares. “It’s like fishing.”

Shafer and the yellow-shirted fashion district security officers are practically heroes in the eyes of animal rescuers.

Hadzimuratovic takes on the task of nursing the tiny rabbits — often just days old — with a mixture of kitten formula, goat milk and colostrum pills. If they live — and sometimes they don’t — she and volunteers work to keep them all fed and cared for until she can adopt them out.

In the last 10 days, she has taken in about 40 of the furry creatures. The unweaned rabbits that officials confiscated more than a week ago and turned over to her have survived.

“All seven buns are alive and kicking,” she said.

— Carla Hall

Photo: A box of unweaned rabbits confiscated Easter Sunday in a downtown parking garage. Credit: Lejla Hadzimuratovic.

A pedido de Leo, el cual se comunico vía facebook, les dejo a su disposición estos dos libros, que son de suma ayuda y necesidad para aquellos que se quieren dedicar a especialidades relacionadas al Sistema Respiratorio.

No hace falta que les repita que mi blog se encuentra a disposición de ustedes; mis lectores; siempre y cuando pueda ayudarlos con gusto lo haré. Los pedidos lo pueden hacer via mail, via facebook o via twitter.

Libro: Fisiología Respiratoria
Autor: West
Tamaño: 48,72 mb
Formato: pdf

Libro: Fisiopatología Respiratoria
Autor: West
Tamaño: 15,4 mb
Formato: pdf
DESCARGAR

In recent times, acquiring sales with business website is now in trend as many people have received remarkable and matchless exposures through their web design. Most of the businesses promote their business online which helps them in achieving their sales targets. One can acquire international business market too through online marketing. Designing a website is a hassle free task now as it is very common these days and many professional experts are easily available to design websites for you. There is no need to take tension for the designing part as nobody is aware of the parameters on which a professional website designing company has to be selected. A faulty choice can ruin your business sales as well as the reputation of the business.

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to attract new customers and communicate with the existing ones. And this is the most reliable source of information for anyone to know about the company.

The logo is the identification mark of the company and is placed on the top of the website so the logo design should be very attractive as it reflects the image of the company. The genuineness and the sophistication of the company are being judged on its basis. The graphic designer should design the logo knowing the purpose of serving it, he should consider certain factors like its placement, the colors, and the fonts used. Placing good graphics and assigning the relevant content in correct manner can get a good ranking on the search engine. Some basic requirement to be fulfilled in a web layout is proper usage of graphics and content, the graphics files make the web page so heavy that the visitors face difficulty in loading the website, thus the file format for the graphic files should be used accordingly. And as we all know that the visitors will not waste their valuable time on that particular site to get loaded rather they will click to the other link available at the search results.

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By now you’ve likely seen the rather horrifying Collateral Murder website, put together from the video leaked to Wikileaks (for which, apparently, US intelligence officials investigated some of the Wikileaks folks). While there’s a lot of ongoing back-and-forth over what the video really shows, there’s no doubt that the release of the video is a journalistic scoop.

And yet, we keep being told that if newspapers fail, no one will be left to do investigative journalism?

So what were the traditional journalists doing to get this story? Rob Hyndman points to a story from a year ago about the mad dash of traditional DC reporters to butter up sources. And what great stories have been broken by the White House Press Corp. over the past year?

There’s nothing inherent in newspapers that says that only they can do investigative reporting. As we’ve seen over and over and over and over again, investigative reporting comes in many forms, and it need not come directly from newspapers.

Perhaps the real question is why the traditional press never set up anything like Wikileaks itself. I guess they’re too busy trying to butter up some source in the White House who they hope will feed them a story for political purposes, rather than breaking any real news.

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Apple’s new iPad apps—iBooks, Pages, Keynotes and Numbers—wouldn’t be accepted into the App Store if they were submitted by an outside developer. That’s because they use private APIs that other devs don’t have access to. Yet. More »

updated with filing date from Cook County Clerk’s office..

I just saw your post about Claypool entering the assessor race. http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2010/04/forrest_claypool_tells_why_he.html

Please know the deadline to file petitions is June 21, not June 22.
Sincerely,

Courtney Greve
Senior Public Information Officer
Cook County Clerk’s Office

Below, Claypool release…..

Claypool calls on voters to “declare their independence” from insider deals that raise property taxes
Independent candidate will be first County Assessor to refuse contributions from clout-heavy property tax lawyers

Chicago, IL – Speaking today at the Hotel Allegro with neighborhood leaders and activists from across Cook County, Commissioner Forrest Claypool declared his candidacy for Cook County Assessor.

“Those of us who’ve been fighting for years to change Cook County government are not willing to stand by and concede this office to Joe Berrios and the insider politics he represents,” said Claypool.

Claypool will seek the ballot as an Independent, requiring him to assemble 25,000 signatures from Cook County’s 2.9 million voters by June 22nd. Claypool, a proven reformer who has battled insiders in Cook County government before, pledged to bring true Independence to the office of Assessor by refusing campaign contributions from lawyers who make their living filing property tax appeals.

“If elected the independent assessor of Cook County, I’ll continue to stand up for taxpayers – not big businesses or their clout-heavy law firms. I’ll start by declaring my independence from the tax appeal lawyers who fund Joe Berrios.

“I pledge to you today: I will not take their money,” he stated.

Claypool clearly laid out the case for why voters will support his independent candidacy. He called out Berrios for his support of policies and politics that are squeezing the taxpayers of Cook County.

“Not only did he fail to support the seven-percent assessment cap, but Berrios has shifted millions of dollars in property taxes from big businesses onto the backs of average homeowners,” said Claypool

“He’s in the pocket of the special interests, and that’s affecting our pocketbooks.”

Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool, 52, is the former Superintendent of the Chicago Park District, a $400 million agency with 3,200 employees. He has also served as deputy state treasurer, deputy commissioner of the Cook County Board of (Property Tax) Appeals, and Chief of Staff to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

He was first elected to the 12th district of the Cook County Board in 2002 by standing up for taxpayers and taking on an incumbent commissioner who practiced the same insider politics that voters have grown tired of in Cook County.

On the county board, he fought against tax increases levied by both the late John Stroger and current board president Todd Stroger. He was instrumental in passing whistleblower legislation to ferret out fraud and an ordinance requiring disclosure of hidden interests in government contracts.

Remarks as prepared for delivery:

Thank you for coming here today.

Across Cook County, people and families are suffering the effects of the economic recession. Thousands of our neighbors have lost their jobs, their healthcare, even their retirement savings.

To add insult to injury, residents of Cook County are burdened with skyrocketing property taxes that make it increasingly difficult to stay in their homes.

The Cook County Assessor can be a key ally of hard-pressed residents and home-owners by using his power to work for a fairer and more transparent tax system. And for the past decade, we’ve been fortunate to have such an ally in Jim Houlihan.

Among his other efforts, Assessor Houlihan has championed the seven-percent assessment cap, which protected homeowners from huge jumps in their property taxes. The 7% cap is similar to the Save Our Homes ordinance that I introduced at the same time in the Cook County board.

The cap saved taxpayers millions of dollars. But the General Assembly allowed that cap to expire. When property tax bills are issued later this year, homeowners will suffer the consequences.

After years of effective and progressive public service, Jim Houlihan has decided to retire from office. The Democratic nominee to replace him, Joe Berrios, represents a clear threat to homeowners and senior citizens across Cook County. Those of us who care about reform and tax fairness cannot sit by and allow him to take control of this office.

The Better Government Association has called Berrios, quote, pay-to-play personified. Not only did he fail to support the seven-percent assessment cap, but Berrios has shifted millions of dollars in property taxes from big businesses onto the backs of average homeowners.

He’s in the pocket of the special interests, and that’s affecting our pocketbooks.

As a longtime member of the Cook County Board of Review, and as chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, Berrios has taken millions in campaign money from the law firms that file tax appeals before the very board that he sits on.

In return, Berrios has given tax breaks worth hundreds of millions to the businesses those law firms represent. And county residents without clout or connections have made up the difference.

It’s a cozy little arrangement. And it’s all too typical of a government of, by and for the insiders.

Despite all his campaign money and political connections, Berrios received only 39 percent of the vote in the recent Democratic primary for Assessor – just barely enough to win a three-person race.

Normally, that would be the end of the story. County Republicans have put up a nominee for Assessor who is unknown and underfunded.

But those of us who’ve been fighting for years to change Cook County government are not willing to stand by and concede this office to Joe Berrios and the insider politics he represents.

And that’s why, today, I’m announcing an independent candidacy for Cook County Assessor.

You see, I have a very different view of government from that of Mr. Berrios and his clout-heavy supporters. I believe government should work for the taxpayers – not the other way around.

As head of the Chicago Park District, I cut more than a thousand patronage jobs, eliminated a huge budget deficit, and restored hundreds of neighborhood parks that had long been neglected. I left after five years with property taxes for the parks lower than when I started.

As a Cook County Commissioner, I introduced an ordinance to cap property tax assessment hikes. I led the fight against Todd Stroger’s friends and family hiring practices. And I consistently spoke and voted against his ill-conceived county sales tax hike.

If elected the independent assessor of Cook County, I’ll continue to stand up for taxpayers – not big businesses or their clout-heavy law firms. I’ll start by declaring my independence from the tax appeal lawyers who fund Joe Berrios.

I pledge to you today: I will not take their money.

Now, I know this campaign won’t be easy – and I just made it harder. Joe Berrios will have more money. He’ll have the precinct organizations. But I’ll have some-thing more important: support from thousands of taxpayers across this county who are tired of playing second-fiddle to those with clout and connections.

I’m running to give Cook County voters a choice. You can declare your independence from politics as usual – but only if you’re willing to do your part in this campaign.

I’ll need your help to collect the signatures to get my name on the ballot.

I’ll need your help to raise the money to run an effective campaign.

I’ll need your help to battle the mud and smears that will be directed my way.

But with your help, I know we can win.

This November, we can declare independence from the politics of the past.

We can send a powerful message that we’re not going to take it anymore.

We can vote to end insider politics and put taxpayers first for a change.

Thank you.

–30–

Cinéma Vélocité: Provide your friends with undeniably convincing evidence that you’re every bit as smooth as Senna was.

Admit it: You’ve always wanted to make your own version of Rendezvous but lack a proper camera to capture the lunacy of running flat-out through the streets of Paris. Or maybe the only thing keeping you from bursting onto the Formula 1 scene is the absence of some decent in-car footage of  you slicing up an autocross course in your sleek Ford Probe. Listen up: Car-friendly and affordable cameras are now widely available to help you document your driving greatness. We rounded up four such devices: two simple video cameras and two track-themed units with more features. All four have wide-angle lenses with panoramic views. The perfect camera depends on your needs; the affordable cameras are more versatile, but the pricier units let you delve deeper into driving analysis with their integrated data. Now hop to it, Spielberg.

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