You thought you took home a haul at the farmers' market last week, but you've got nothin' on Wal-Mart. The big-box retailer has become the nation's largest buyer of local produce, planning to purchase and sell $400 million worth of locally grown fruits and veggies this year. Wal-Mart says it works with "hundreds" of individual farmers, and has 50 percent more partnerships with local growers than it did in 2006. During the summer months, says the company, one-fifth of available produce in Wal-Mart stores is sourced locally. An emphasis on local produce -- which Wal-Mart defines as grown and sold in the same state -- keeps the company's delivery trucks from burning about 100,000 gallons of diesel, slices its customers' farm-to-plate distance by 672,000 miles, and saves it $1.4 million each year.
by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Brad Johnson
A ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that details both the threat of global warming and our ability to address the problem has been suppressed by the White House since December. This document, produced in response to a "monumental" Supreme Court mandate, includes a "multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years" that finds "the net benefit to society could be in excess of $2 trillion" if strong carbon dioxide emissions standards for the automotive industry are issued. The proposal to increase today's fuel economy standards by 50 percent from 25 miles per gallon to 38.3 mpg by 2020 is stronger than those included in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which called for a 40 percent increase. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson used the signing of the act as the public excuse to reject the findings of his staff and block California's proposal to regulate greenhouse tailpipe emissions. In fact, congressional investigations have revealed that officials in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) refused to open the email containing the EPA plan and that Johnson has been stonewalling to prevent disclosure of President Bush's role.
Now the McCain campaign is accusing the Obama campaign of coordinating with Jim Webb to "attack" McCain's war service.
On MSNBC last night, Webb told McCain that he should "calm down" with the use of his military service in the campaign, adding that it was time to "get the politics out of the military."
Now the McCain campaign is responding to Webb, arguing that Webb's comments prove that Obama "can't control his surrogate operation." McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers sends us this:
If you didn't think this was a coordinated attack on John McCain's credentials before, it's clear now that it is. Barack Obama's surrogates are telling the McCain campaign to "calm down" about attacks on his military record? Seriously? Now somehow Wes Clark's attacks are John McCain's fault? It's absurd. If Barack Obama can't control his own surrogate operation, how can he be trusted to run the country?
The truth is that there's zero evidence that there's any coordination going on or that the Obama campaign wants this conversation to be taking place. Not that this matters: The McCain campaign is very determinedly pointing to anything it can -- Webb's comments included -- to drive the message that Obama is demeaning McCain's military service.
"The Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC's ban on handguns! Writing for the majority, Scalia said, 'It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.' He is right. Killing the Constitution is the president's job. The court's job is to overturn elections."
NEW YORK - In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project.
She felt like she was taking off. She saw colors. Then it felt like her heart was ripping open.
But she called the experience joyful as well as painful, and says that it has helped her to this day.
"I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing," said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."
Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.
Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they'd ever had.
Born Gerhard Hirsch in Vienna to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, French philosopher André Gorz, also known as Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet, was a cofounder of "Le Nouvel Observateur," journalist and theorist who above and before all else was a committed humanist. (Photo: Sydney Morning Herald)
Editor's note: After spending a literal month of Sundays with this text by André Gorz, I have been haunted by his prescience, inhabited by his ideas and charmed by his engaged humanism. Those unfamiliar with the life and thinking of this committed journalist and philosopher will find an excellent précis of his life and work in Chris Turner's obituary for The Guardian and excerpts from the deeply moving "Letter to D. A Love Story" he wrote to his wife Dorine before their joint suicide in 2007 at the "TimesonLine." ljt.
IDEA FACTORY - Philosopher André Gorz returns, in one of the last texts to appear before his death, to the dynamic of financial capitalism and the reasons why we may see guaranteed social income as an opportunity to exit capitalism. Is the universal allocation of a guaranteed social income (RSG [in French]) compatible with capitalism? If so, is the RSG objective to consolidate capitalist society, even save it? If not, can it undermine the bases of this society or smooth the transition from an economic system based on commercial value towards a fundamentally different system? I continue to encounter these questions since the end of the 1970s. I was convinced from the outset that the global system based on commodity production could not perpetuate itself indefinitely. Since the end of Fordism and the beginning of the information revolution, the system has been working with growing effectiveness towards the destruction of the foundations of its survival. "Les Chemins du Paradis" ["The Roads to Paradise," a 1983 work by Gorz] - a paradise in which, according to Leontief's prediction, people were going to die of hunger because commodity production will employ hardly any workers and will distribute hardly any more capital - was already subtitled, "The Agony of Capital"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States leads the world in rates of experimenting with marijuana and cocaine despite strict drug laws, World Health Organization researchers said on Tuesday.
Countries with looser drug laws have lower rates of abuse, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
The survey of 54,000 people in 17 countries found that 16 percent of people in the United States had used cocaine in their lifetimes -- far higher than the next highest rate, found in New Zealand, where 4.3 percent of people reported having used cocaine.
More than 42 percent of Americans admitted to having tried cannabis, closely followed by 41 percent in New Zealand, Dr. Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and an international team of colleagues found.
Americans were also the most likely to have smoked, with 74 percent saying they used tobacco at some time in their lives, although current smoking rates are far lower at 21 percent.
PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) - A former waitress has settled a lawsuit against Hooters, which she said promised to award her a new Toyota but instead gave her a toy Yoda.
An attorney for Jodee Berry said Wednesday that he could not immediately disclose the settlement's details.
"She's satisfied with it," said the attorney, David Noll. He did say that Berry can now go to a local car dealership and "pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants."
Berry, 27, won a beer sales contest in last May at the Panama City Beach Hooters. She believed she had won a new Toyota car.
She was blindfolded and led to the restaurant parking lot, but when the blindfold was removed, she found she was the winner of a toy Yoda Star Wars doll.
Berry quit the restaurant a week later and filed a lawsuit in August against Gulf Coast Wings, Inc., the corporate owner of the local Hooters, alleging breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation.
The restaurant's manager, Jared Blair, has said the whole contest was an April Fools' joke.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The latest U.S. natural disaster is triggering fresh rounds of concern and debate about how to repair America's aging infrastructure.
The worst Midwest flooding since 1993 has generated images of swamped towns, cracked roads, washed-out bridges, overwhelmed dams, failed levees, broken sewage systems, stunted crops and water-logged refugees.
The losses are in the billions of dollars and still mounting, as the costs of crop losses alone send shocks through the inflation-wracked world food system and threaten insurers.
The disaster has reminded policymakers of the decrepit state of U.S. infrastructure, stirring concerns similar to those following the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 and the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Even before the latest flooding, a group representing engineers said the United States needed to spend about $1 trillion more than it does now to bring infrastructure up to par with modern needs and standards.
Nelson Mandela was South Africa's first post-apartheid-era president
US President George W Bush has signed a bill removing Nelson Mandela and South African leaders from the US terror watch list, officials say.
Mr Mandela and ANC party members will now be able to visit the US without a waiver from the secretary of state.
The African National Congress (ANC) was designated as a terrorist organisation by South Africa's old apartheid regime.
A US senator said the new legislation was a step towards removing the "shame of dishonouring this great leader".
'Rather embarrassing'
Under the legislation, members of the ANC could travel to the United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or other parts of the United States.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called the restrictions a "rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela."
707 more votes found after recheck in West Palm race
By Mark Hollis
Palm Beach County elections officials said Friday they are investigating why they failed to quickly count more than 700 votes in a special election that marked the county's first experience with optical scanners.
A 707-vote disparity between an unofficial vote tally Tuesday and a final count two days later in a West Palm Beach City Commission race has spawned another wave of criticism and questions about Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson's ability to run an error-free election.
Unofficial results reported a few hours after the election showed 4,085 votes cast. The next day, a computerized audit signaled a problem — three vote-counting machines apparently had collected votes that weren't counted.
On Wednesday, officials rechecked the three machines and re-ran their vote-counting "cartridges" through vote tabulating equipment. The recheck found the 707 additional votes, or 14 percent of the total cast, that had not been counted on election night.
By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Now that Bill Gates no longer has to worry about running Microsoft, why not help run the country?
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder is mentioned by some in political circles as the "dream running mate" for Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, according to Politico.com.
The site asked 14 consultants, staffers, fundraisers and historians to name "their most unconventional -- but reasonably viable" vice presidential choices for McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Also making the list of eight long shots was Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of EBay Inc. and a McCain fundraiser.
Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Carly Fiorina also has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice. But Gates hasn't gotten much love as a potential veep. Talk about campaign finance reform: The world's third-richest man could help the McCain ticket obliterate Obama's Internet-fueled fundraising advantage.
The openly political director goes where some fear to tread.
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
SHREVEPORT, LA. -- IT'S A conversation any father and son might have -- a quick chat about baseball, families and world affairs. But when the speakers are President George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, even a seemingly innocuous conversation can suddenly carry great weight, especially when Oliver Stone is at the controls.
With sweat cascading down his face on a steamy June night in Louisiana, the Oscar-winning director was directing James Cromwell (playing the elder Bush) and Josh Brolin (starring as President Bush) through a critical moment in "W.," Stone's forthcoming -- and potentially divisive -- drama about the personal, political and psychological evolution of the current president. Although the father-son patter was ostensibly friendly, the subtext was anything but, hinting at the intricate parent-child relationship that Stone believes helps to explain George W. Bush's ascension.
While the Bushes in this scene from 1990 were talking about the Texas Rangers (of whom George W. once owned a share) and Saddam Hus- sein (against whom George H. W. was about to go to war in Kuwait), there was much more at stake, as Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser saw the fictional conversation unfolding.
We girls have always wanted a female Indiana Jones. Now we have one in Dr. Kara Cooney—and she's hotter than Indy. Dr. Cooney is an Egyptologist, the author of The Cost of Death: The Social and Economic Value of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Art in the Ramesside Period, a Digging for the Truth team archaeology expert on the History Channel and host of the documentary Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen on the Discovery Channel. The documentary searches for the lost tomb of Hatshepsut, one of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs. The surprising element is that Hapshetsut is a woman who posed as a man to rule over the beginning of Egypt's golden age—and the riches that King Tut would inherit.
Why is Hatshepsut so important? She's important, right, because it was a major discovery that identified her mummy and her mummy had never been identified before. Her images had been erased. Some people had assumed that her mummy had been burned or destroyed, they'd tried to erase her from the very afterlife existence that she may have wanted. So finding her mummy and making that link was a big deal for a lot of people and especially for the public. I think it really fired up the public imagination in a new way. Everybody loves Egypt. Everybody knows about King Tut and Cleopatra, to add another image or face to that story, I think, just fired up the imagination even more. Especially a female face.
Vermont Residents - Your calls to Governor Douglas worked. He allows H.267 to become law without his signature and the Attorney General's office agrees! Secretary of State Markowitz accepts bill and makes it Act No. 212.
MONTPELIER, Vermont(July 1, 2008) — Vote Hemp, a grassroots advocacy organization working to give farmers the right to grow non-drug industrial hemp, is extremely pleased that the Vermont Secretary of State's office accepted Formal Opinion #2008-1 from the Office of the Attorney General and gave H.267, the Hemp for Vermont bill, the designation of Act No. 212 last Friday. There had been a constitutional controversy as Governor Jim Douglas forwarded H.267 to the Secretary of State intending it to become law without his signature. The bill had overwhelmingly passed both the House (127 to 9) and the Senate (25 to 1). The new law sets up a state-regulated program for farmers to grow non-drug industrial hemp which is used in a wide variety of products, including nutritious foods, cosmetics, body care, clothing, tree-free paper, auto parts, building materials and much more. Learn more about industrial hemp at the Vote Hemp Web site.
Smart and effective grassroots organizing by Vote Hemp and the Vermont-based advocacy group Rural Vermont mobilized farmers and local businesses, many of which pledged to buy their hemp raw materials in-state if they have the opportunity. Rural Vermont's Director Amy Shollenberger says that "the Hemp for Vermont bill is another step toward legalizing this important crop for farmers. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't allow this crop to be grown. Looking at the Canadian experience, hemp provides a good return for the farmer. It's a high-yield crop and a great crop to mix in with corn."
Vermont grows an average of 90,000 acres of corn per year, a small amount compared to Midwest states; however, the need for a good rotation crop exists nationwide. From candle makers to dairymen to retailers, Vermont voters strongly support hemp farming. Admittedly a niche market now, hemp is becoming more common in stores and products across the country every day. Over the past ten years, farmers in Canada have grown an average of 16,500 acres of hemp per year, primarily for use in food products. In Vermont, the interest in hemp includes for use in food products, as well as in quality and affordable animal bedding for the state's estimated 140,000 cows.
Also, please click here to write to your Representative in Congress and ask them to cosponsor HR 1009, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007, today!
Vote Hemp is a national, single-issue, non-profit advocacy group founded in 2000 by members of the hemp industry to remove barriers to industrial hemp farming in the U.S. through education, legislation and advocacy. We work to build grassroots support for hemp through voter education, registration and mobilization, as well as defend against any new laws, regulations or policies that would prohibit or restrict hemp trade.
Industrial hemp is the non-psychoactive, low-THC varieties of the Cannabis sativa plant. Hemp has absolutely no use as a recreational drug. Please click here to learn more about the farmers' case in North Dakota.
Also, please check out this Vote Hemp video The Market for Hemp Products
Artist Beauford Delaney taught author James Baldwin how to see. They were standing together on a corner in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Delaney pointed down and told Mr. Baldwin, "Look." Mr. Baldwin looked and saw nothing but a puddle of water, so Mr. Delaney told him, "Look again."
This time Mr. Baldwin really saw what was there: Floating on the water was some oil, and reflected in the oil was the city. Mr. Baldwin says, "It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently."
Nationwide, two million homes sit vacant. Home sales are at a nine-year low. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says that housing finance has not been this bad since the Depression. We still don't know the full extent of the colossal subprime rip-off, but a recent Bank of America study did some guesstimating on the scale of the consequences of the "credit crisis." The meltdown in the U.S. subprime real estate market, the bank said, had led to a global loss of $7.7 trillion dollars in stock market value since October.
While many eyes are focusing on the housing meltdown and its hugely negative effect on an economy clearly moving into recession, few are paying attention to the next bubble expected to burst: credit cards. Combined with the subprime losses, such a credit card nightmare has the potential, experts say, of bringing down the entire financial system and global economy. You and your credit card have become key players in the highly unstable financial crunch. Mortgage lender cupidity and bank credit card greed wedded to financial institution deregulation supported by both political parties, have been made manifestly worse by Bush administration support-the-rich policies. It has brought us to a brink not seen since just before the Great Depression.
While campaigning in Edinburg, Texas, in February, Barack Obama met with students at the University of Texas-Pan American. "Just be careful about those credit cards, all right? Don't eat out as much," he said. After the foreclosure crisis, he warned, "the credit cards are next in line."
The coupling of home equity debt and credit card debt has gone hand in glove for years. The homeowners at risk can no longer use their homes as ATM machines, thanks to their prior re-financings and equity loans, often used in the past to pay off their credit cards. Indeed, homeowners cashed out $1.2 trillion from their home equity from 2002 to 2007 to pay down credit card debts and to cover other costs of living, according to the public policy research organization Demos.
To compound the problem, fewer people are paying their credit card bills on time. And, to flip the old paradigm, more are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages instead of the other way around.
By all standards, 18-year-old country star Taylor Swift has made it in the music industry.
When her debut single, "Tim McGraw," hit in 2006, it simultaneously landed on Billboard's top country, pop and digital charts, while also securing a spot on Apple iTunes' weekly top 10 downloads list.
Since then, Swift has won several major music awards, even receiving a Grammy nomination for best new artist. Her debut album has sold more than 3 million copies, and in a genre-bending feat earlier this month she took a spin as co-host of MTV's popular Total Request Live show.
But to the nearly 20,000 mostly unseen people working in Nashville's music industry, Swift represents far more than the latest young artist to hit it big on the country music scene.
She illustrates the industry's new benchmarks of success in an era dominated by the easy availability of digital music, an explosion of new media platforms and a decline in album sales, in a business that has seen a third of its $14.6 billion retail market evaporate since 2000.
Call it the music industry's new normal. Or call it the result of a business thrown into chaos by 10 years of corporate consolidation and rampant piracy brought on by the rise of Internet technology.
In either case, life has changed — and is changing — for just about everyone on Music Row, from the songwriters and musicians to the publishers and record labels that make up the heart and soul of this city's most famous product.
What you can learn from watching 800 minutes of George Carlin.
By Joshua David Mann
The future scholar of comedy who sets out to publish The Complete Works of George Carlin had better be prepared for a multimedia endeavor. A truly comprehensive collection of the comedian's work would have to include his Grammy Award-winning albums, his best-selling books, and a transcript of his argument before the Supreme Court in defense of his immortal "Seven Words" routine. In the meantime, mourners of Carlin, who died of heart failure earlier this week, can make do with the recently released George Carlin: All My Stuff. The retrospective box set, weighing in at more than 800 minutes of material, is comprised of 12 HBO specials, beginning with a 1977 performance at USC and ending with 2005's Life Is Worth Losing. Carlin's assiduous touring schedule (he was sometimes on the road for nearly three-quarters of the calendar year) gave him a staging ground where he could hone his material. But it was the HBO specials that gave him a truly national audience and a chance to showcase his best stuff.
Carlin's career spanned more than 40 years, remarkable longevity for a stand-up artist, and All My Stuff offers a window on how his routine adapted across the decades. Though the infamy of "Seven Words" may doom Carlin to be remembered as a blue comic, early in his career he pioneered a form of observational humor now often classified as Seinfeldian. At the USC show, he describes his vocation as sharing "little ideas that occur to me." ("Why aren't there any Chinese guys named Rusty?" he asks at one point in the performance.) In 1982's At Carnegie Hall, Carlin discusses his craft in more philosophical terms—his expertise, he says, lies in "reminding you of things you already know but forgot to laugh at the first time they happened." The bulk of the material in his early shows was concerned with such pedestrian acts as grocery shopping and, yes, walking. In one early performance, he constructs a bit around the phantom stair phenomenon, when we accidentally trick our legs into thinking a staircase has one more step than it actually does.
The stair bit works on an observational level because we have all experienced it. But Carlin also makes it work on a physical level, embellishing the joke through his wild gesticulations. Unlike Seinfeld, Carlin was also a gifted physical comic, and in his early performances, the influence of Carlin's idols—Buster Keaton, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers—is particularly evident. He contorts his face into wrinkly malformations. He squats slightly and mimes masturbatory motions. He freezes onstage in strange postures, an American ambassador to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.
The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you're getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don't know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:
An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that's close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte. Lost and confused? We were too.
Our poor mortal minds haven't been so boggled by the 'big numbers' since a legendary wag fooled his elders out of 'quite a lot' of rice by using a chess board a few hundred years ago. We've used the same unit of measurement – grains of rice – to try to put Google's electronic brain power into perspective.
Let's relate a grain of rice to a byte. A byte is normally eight binary bits, eg '10011000'. It can also be written as a two digit hexadecimal number. In terms of data, a byte is generally used to store a letter. One byte = one letter = one grain of rice.
Bearing this new representation in mind, we can now look at a kilobyte (1024 bytes) as a small bowl of rice. It's about half a portion, not enough to fill you up – and in data terms a kilobyte would only be a few paragraphs of text – not much to mentally stimulate you there either.
Next up is the megabyte – which is around the size of all the text on an average website, or a short novel. On the rice scale, a megabyte would be a 25kilo bag of rice; enough to feed over 420 people in one sitting, if you have enough chairs.
1024 times larger still is the gigabyte. Back in 1995, I bought a PC with a gigabyte of hard drive space, and managed to store everything I needed on there for the next few years.
A court ruling means processing errors by local election officials can be cause to reject new voters.
A little-noticed federal appeals court ruling this week could lead to thousands of Floridians showing up to vote in November only to be told their names are not on voter lists.
"It really penalizes voters through no fault of their own," said Ion Sancho, election supervisor for Leon County, Florida, where Tallahassee the state capital is located. "It strikes me as absolutely Kafkaesque."
At issue is Florida's so-called "no-match, no-vote" law, which allows county officials to reject new voter registration applications if the names on the forms do not match other state databases. Voter advocacy groups sued the state, claiming that database errors can cause applications to be rejected -- through no fault of would-be voters.
This week, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida sided with the state, saying it has the right to reject voter applications if they didn't match an applicant's Florida driver's license or the last four digits of their social security number. The state had been sued by a coalition of voting rights groups after election officials rejected applications from 14,000 African-American Floridians dating back to 2006.
"This ruling puts thousands of real Florida citizens at risk this November based on bureaucratic typos," stated Justin Levitt, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who argued on behalf of the would-be voters.
Thousands of new voters could be affected because Florida, like most states, has seen a spike in voter registrations in 2008.
"Voters who do everything right, who submit forms that are complete, timely, and accurate, will suddenly find themselves unregistered when they go to vote, because someone somewhere slipped on a keyboard," Levitt said. "It's unjust and it's unnecessary."
There is a sharp difference between Barack Obama and John McCain on health care.
By far the most important domestic policy issue facing the next president will be fixing the health care system. The United States stands out among wealthy countries in not guaranteeing health insurance to its citizens
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Yet, even though many people cannot get access to care, we still pay more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries. And we have the worst outcomes. Only a severely over-medicated politician would claim we have the best health care system in the world.
As bad as the current system is, it keeps getting worse. The number of people who are uninsured year round is at 47 million and rising. The costs also keep rising. Companies are increasingly dropping insurance for their workers, or forcing workers to pick up a larger share of the bill. The explosion of health care costs is the basis for all the scare stories that budget hawks use to cut "entitlements." Since half of the country's health care costs are paid by the government, if we don't fix the health care system, it will eventually destroy the economy - and also lead to very scary budget deficits
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So, what do the candidates offer? Following in the Republican tradition of referring to health care plans by the first name of their principle backer, let's see what the candidates propose.
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35, Orlando) -- The Orlando Police Department found dozens of city owned vehicles vandalized Saturday. The vandal or vandals appear to have political intentions; most of the vehicles were spray painted with anti Obama sayings, with 'Obama' misspelled several times. Some of their vehicles had their gas caps removed.
Officials said that gas caps were removed from several of the vehicles and they aren't sure if gas was stolen or if something could have been added to the tanks that will damage the engines.
The person or persons left a business card with political and other phrases such as 'How 'Bout them Gators' and 'Legalize Marijuana/ Stop Building Prisons'.
Police are investigating but have no leads and no estimate on the damages.
The price of oil continued its seemingly relentless march towards $150 a barrel today, driven by the simmering tensions between Iran and Israel.
The cost of a barrel of US crude hit $143.67 this morning, its highest-ever level. London Brent crude also reached a new peak of $143.81 a barrel. Both have more than doubled in the last twelve months, helping to fuel inflation and spark protests worldwide.
Traders said there are worries that Middle East oil supplies could be disrupted by the growing row between Iran and Israel, and speculation that military action could break out.
On Saturday the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards ratcheted up the tension by threatening to impose controls on shipping in the Gulf – through which 40% of the world's oil travels – if Israel launched an attack.
The singer has fire in his belly — with a film about his antiwar tour — but his passion is a hybrid car he thinks will save the planet
Tim Cooper
The scruffy-looking fellow hunched over a table in a roadside restaurant deep among the redwood forests south of San Francisco does not look like a rock superstar. He has a craggy face, like a weather-beaten farmer, unkempt hair swept back behind his ears, and grey mutton chops; he is wearing combat trousers, trainers and a baggy T-shirt over a modest paunch. Only the big wraparound shades and the legend on his T-shirt — a US patent-office application for the Gibson Flying V guitar — hint that this is one of the most influential musicians of the past 40 years, a figure with a body of work matched only by Bob Dylan.
Neil Young has never much cared for appearances; never needed to, and definitely doesn't now, at the age of 62. He probably looked a lot like this when he met his second wife, Pegi, here, in this same restaurant, more than 30 years ago. She was a waitress, he was a rock star, but she might be forgiven if she had taken him for a passing lumberjack. When he pulls on a huge plaid work shirt at the end of the interview, he looks as if he is about to go and fell some of the giant sequoias outside. Instead, he drives the short distance home in a cream-coloured vintage Mercedes running on biodiesel.
If Young had his way, we would all be driving on green fuel; indeed, he is developing a revolutionary motor vehicle that he hopes, one day soon, will "eliminate roadside refuelling". First, though, he must talk about another project. CSNY: Déjà Vu is the latest film from the director Bernard Shakey. Not to be confused with any of Young's other aliases: Joe Yankee, Joe Canuck, Phil Perspective, Clyde Coil, Dirigible Dan, Dr Shakes, Shakey Deal or plain old Shakey.
Somewhere in heaven, George Carlin is probably watching Lou Dobbs right about now. At the end of the Playboy Interview I did with him a few years ago, he was full of thoughts about the meaning of life, his legacy and what was next -- if anything -- after this life was done, and that's when he started musing about cable news.
Carlin was a big thinker. While conducting the interview, I spent three days with him in Las Vegas, a city he loved and hated and where he was still doing stand-up a week before his death yesterday at age 71. At each session, some of which lasted five hours, Carlin held forth on every imaginable topic -- from the color of farts to the solutions to global warming (unrelated topics, incidentally). His mind was so expansive, he kept stacks of Post-it notes around his Vegas condo so he could write down random musings that might find their way into a routine or book or letter to his daughter. Then he would record those thoughts onto various iPods and later transfer the files to his computer. Even as he approached 70, his mind was so loaded with data it needed its own zip drive.
Although he was one of the most successful comedians of his generation and a bestselling author, Carlin didn't have an easy life. He struggled for years with drugs and then heart problems and his fortunes came and went. At one point he owed four million in back taxes. Another time, on a trip to Hawaii, his daughter, Brenda, then 11, made him sign a contract so he wouldn't snort cocaine for the rest of the vacation. But by the end, Carlin had found something that looked like peace -- sobriety, financial stability and love with Sally Wade, a woman he called "the sweetheart of my life." Even growing old was interesting for him. It gave him more material.
Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. Caroline Davies reports on how the food chain became contaminated and talks to the angry allotment owners whose plots have been destroyed
Mass spraying of pesticides on farms, pictured here in Florida, is putting gardens at risk. Photograph: David R. Frazier/Alamy
Gardeners have been warned not to eat home-grown vegetables contaminated by a powerful new herbicide that is destroying gardens and allotments across the UK.
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has been inundated with calls from concerned gardeners who have seen potatoes, beans, peas, carrots and salad vegetables wither or become grossly deformed. The society admitted that it had no idea of the extent of the problem, but said it appeared 'significant'. The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based herbicide aminopyralid has been sprayed on fields.
Dow AgroSciences, which manufactures aminopyralid, has posted advice to allotment holders and gardeners on its website. Colin Bowers, Dow's UK grassland marketing manager, told The Observer that links to their products had been proved in some of the cases, but it was not clear whether aminopyralid was responsible for all of them and tests were continuing. 'It is undoubtedly a problem,' he said, 'and I have got full sympathy for everyone who is involved with this.'
He said the company was unable to advise gardeners that it was 'safe' to consume vegetables that had come into contact with the manure because of pesticide regulations. 'All we can say is that the trace levels of aminopyralid that are likely to be in these crops are of such low levels that they are unlikely to cause a problem to human health.'
The Dow website says: 'As a general rule, we suggest damaged produce (however this is caused) should not be consumed.' Those who have already used contaminated manure are advised not to replant on the affected soil for at least a year.
WASHINGTON — Democrats and the media have used the term so much that it's almost an article of faith. But the so-called "Republican attack machine" waiting with piles of unregulated cash to chew up Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is anything but.
Obama cited the threat of unregulated attack groups — called "527s" because they're authorized to raise unlimited cash under that section of the Internal Revenue Service code — to justify dropping his pledge to take public financing — along with its spending limits — for the general election campaign.
Yet there's no 2008 equivalent to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spent $22 million attacking Democrat John Kerry. Prominent groups and donors that played key roles in independent conservative 527 groups four years ago say they're sitting out this election. And while they've raised more than they did at this point four years ago, the independent pro-Republican groups still lag more than $50 million behind pro-Democratic groups.
Why? Analysts and Republican insiders point to several reasons:
_ Contributors are nervous about increased federal regulation.
_ Those who operate such groups fear a backlash, including from their better-paying corporate clients, who may not want to be associated with such attacks.
_ Few are eager to take such risks to help John McCain, who's bashed such efforts in the past and could again.
Of course, they still could jump in at any time, thanks to their ability to raise cash fast with a few huge checks.
The basics of a nontraditional method of gardening that is not only organic, earth friendly, and incredibly easy, but will enable you to accomplish more, in less time, with less work...
by Patricia Lanza ILLUSTRATIONS: ELAYNE SEARS
If someone told me years ago that he or she had found a way to do an end run around the sweat equity of traditional gardening, a way around digging, weeding, and rototilling, a way to produce more regardless of time constraints, physical limitations, or power-tool ineptness... well, I would have checked that person for a head injury. Yet such a system is actually possible, though I never would have believed it if I hadn't stumbled upon the basics myself.
Lasagna gardening was borne of my own frustrations. After my husband retired from the U.S. Navy, we began our next period of work as innkeepers. When the demands on my time became so great that I could no longer do all that was required to keep both the business and the garden going, the garden suffered. I'd plant in the spring, then see the garden go unattended. I needed a way to do it all.
Just when I was about to give up, it happened: a bountiful harvest with no work. I'd planted, late again because of a late spring. And again, when the seasonal demands of the business began claiming all of my time, my plantings were forgotten. In midsummer, I made a much belated foray into the garden. I had to hack through a jungle of weeds to find the vegetable plants—but what a payoff! I discovered basketfuls of ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, and egg plant. True, there were also basketfuls of rotted, overgrown, and unusable vegetables (the product of neglect), but the abundance was truly amazing.
The US government is putting a hold on new solar energy projects on public land for two years so it can study the environmental impact of sun-driven plants.
The Bureau of Land Management says the moratorium on solar proposals is needed to determine how a new generation of large-scale projects could affect plants and wildlife on the land it manages.
The move has angered some solar energy proponents who argue it could hold up the industry at a vital juncture, given the pressing need to secure alternative energy sources at a time of soaring oil prices. "This technology has been around for nearly three decades.
If there is an environmental concern, that can be addressed without putting a halt to this technology and helping to impact our greenhouse gas emissions and the environmental degradation from coal-fired and natural gas plants," said Brad Collins, executive director of the American Solar Energy Society.
He said the review appeared to be an arbitrary "road block" that contradicted "the stated goals of both presidential candidates, the stated goals of Congress and the American public." The Bureau of Land Management, which looks after 258 million acres of federal land, much of it flat, sun-baked terrain in the western US considered ideal for solar energy development, says the study is required by law and backed by environmental groups.
Last week, bestselling author and University of California-Berkeley environmental journalism professor Michael Pollan attracted more than 1600 hot and sticky omnivores and vegetarians to the Ira Allen Chapel, despite the threat of some seriously bad weather. Pollan told his audience, packed into the pews like so many sardines, that Americans spend more time thinking about nutrition and diet than do citizens of any other industrialized country, but still manage to be "among the most unhealthy people in the world." His solution? "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Pollan expounds on this recommendation in his most recent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which teases out where the various foods in our supermarket come from, made him a household name and a popular champion of sustainable agriculture and sensible food choices that don't sacrifice flavor.
1."0900: Link up with 2-4 IN patrol at Cross Sabers in IZ," read the message from the press center of the Multi-National Force–Iraq. That meant that at nine the next morning I should show up at the crossed-sabers monument— the giant pair of arched swords erected by Saddam Hussein on his military parade ground—in the International Zone (aka the Green Zone) to meet a convoy from the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division. The convoy was to take me to a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, where I was to spend the day embedded with the US military.
The embed had proved surprisingly easy to arrange. No one had objected to the three New York Review articles I had sent in as samples of my work. On the application form, I had written that I wanted to visit a typical Baghdad neighborhood to see how the surge was working and to get a sense of what more had to be done before the US could begin to draw down its forces in any significant number.
Though I didn't say it, I also wanted to see what the embedding process itself was like. This was introduced by the Pentagon at the start of the war to allow journalists to attach themselves to invading military units and see the fighting up close. As Iraq grew steadily more violent, embedding became one of the main ways journalists could get out into the field. Baghdad continues to be a very dangerous place for journalists, with kidnapping an ever-present concern. (Whenever I traveled outside the CBS News compound where I stayed, I had to go in three cars, two of them armored, accompanied by eight armed guards.) Embedding thus remains an important means of seeing the country.
By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer Sat Jun 28, 3:08 PM ET
MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.
But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?
Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.
"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.
Senator John McCain said he can't remember the last time he pumped gasoline or the cost of a gallon of a gas in an interview with the Orange County Register earlier this week.
The OC Register's Martin Wisckol asked McCain when he had last pumped his own gas, to which McCain replied:
"Oh, I don't remember. Now there's Secret Service protection. But I've done it for many, many years. I don't recall and frankly, I don't see how it matters," McCain said.
When you need a word's definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym, you don't have to haul an enormous tome from the bookshelf, dust it off, and ruffle through its delicate pages like your grandparents used to do—you can just hop on the internet. Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let's take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.
Online Dictionary and Thesaurus Webapps
You already know that Google can give you definitions in search results—try it, search for define thesaurus—but there are a few other dictionary webapps besides the obvious Dictionary.com that can also get you your definition fix (often with pretty pictures!).
Definr is a super-fast, suggest-as-you-type dictionary which you can add to your Firefox search box or use in bookmarklet form (original post). My favorite Definer Firefox trick?
HOUMA -- Flooding in the Midwest is swelling the Mississippi River, sending increased water through Louisiana and into the Gulf of Mexico -- a phenomenon that has left researchers confident that their dire dead-zone predictions are right on track.
Scientists have predicted that this year's dead zone -- an area of the Gulf of Mexico that lacks enough oxygen to support marine life -- will be the largest ever.
The river's flooding will help ensure that by adding more agricultural runoff and fresh water to the Gulf, said Nancy Rabalais, director of the Cocodrie-based Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and a leading dead-zone researcher.
Especially disconcerting is news that researchers have detected low-oxygen levels in the Chandeleur Sound, a miles-wide swath of water between St. Bernard Parish and the Candeleur Islands off the state's eastern coast.
"I don't think I've ever seen that happen before," said Rabalais, a pioneer in the field of dead-zone research since 1985.
DON'T fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be "a big advantage" for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto's assassination had "helped" Mr. McCain win the New Hampshire primary. His real sin is that he didn't come completely clean on his strategic thinking.
Barry Blitt
In private, he is surely gaming this out further, George Carlin-style. What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign's perspective, for this terrorist attack — before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it "help" if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?
Unlike Hillary Clinton's rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama's soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black's remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes. Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it's been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.
I am taking a break from my usual ranting to pay tribute to one of my comedy heroes and influences, George Carlin who passed away on Sunday.
When I was in college I could recite two comedy albums word for word, Firesign Theater's How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You're not Anywhere at All and George Carlin's AM and FM. Besides my father, these two LP's which were my early influences in comedy. Sure, I had heard Lenny and Cosby but I could do Carlin by heart. I could do the voice and the inflections. When I first started doing stand up in the late seventies I was doing my own stuff but still doing George's voice and mannerisms on stage.
In the mid eighties I was living in Chicago and was friends with Jimmy Wiggins. You may know the Wig if you are a fan of Last Comic Standing, he was the older guy who got screwed out of a place in the house in Vegas and caused several of the celebrity judges to walk out. Back in the eighties he opened a comedy room in Palatine, Illinois called Dirty Nellie's. Since Jimmy was a old friend of Carlin's, George had agreed to come in open the club. At the Saturday night late show Wig invited all the local guys to come to the show and we got to hang a little with the man after. I had met and worked with a number of guys who later became huge stars but no one who was already a legend like Carlin. I was truly star struck. He talked comedy for some time and was a gentleman to all.
Several years later I was breaking into the LA scene and doing a little room in West LA called Igby's. George came in with Pat McCormick and their wives. After my set I was in the back of the room when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Carlin. He said, "Nice set, very funny and a little angry, just like I like my comedy." He turned and went back to his seat. For weeks I annoyed my friends letting them know that I was one of Carlin's favorites!
