New Approach to Explaining Evolution’s Big Bang
Around 520 million years ago, many major groups of animals appear in the fossil record for the first time. Trilobites belonged to the same lineage as today's crustaceans and insects.
By CARL ZIMMER
New York Times
September 19, 2013
The name Myllokunmingia may not ring a bell, but it is worth knowing. This 520-million-year-old creature was the size of a guppy, with a tiny swordfish-like fin running high over its back. The fossils it has left behind preserve traces of a skull.
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Humans have a skull, too. This and a number of other traits we share with Myllokunmingia reveal it to be one of the oldest, most primitive vertebrates yet found. It is, in other words, a hint of where we came from.
Myllokunmingia emerged during one of the most important phases in the history of life, an evolutionary boom known as the Cambrian explosion (named for the geological period when it took place). Over the course of about 20 million years, the oldest known fossils of most of the major groups of living animals appear, revealing a rapid diversification of life that led directly to humans.
“It’s rapid in geological terms, but it’s probably not rapid to anyone who’s not a geologist,” said Paul Smith, the director of the Oxford Museum of Natural History.
By some estimates, the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago. But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils. For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.
Recently, Dr. Smith and his colleague David Harper of the University of Durham took a look at the hypotheses that have been offered about what caused the Cambrian explosion. “It became apparent just how many hypotheses there were out there,” Dr. Harper said. “Thirty-plus over the past 10 years.”
The scientists found that many of those explanations had boiled the cause down to just one trigger. Geologists suggested geological causes. Ecologists proposed ecological ones. Many of those ideas have merit, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue in a commentary in this week’s Science, but it’s a mistake to search for a single cause. They propose that a tangled web of factors and feedbacks were responsible for evolution’s big bang.
Long before the Cambrian explosion, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, one lineage of animals had already evolved the genetic capacity for spectacular diversity. Known as the bilaterians, they probably looked at first like little crawling worms. They shared the Precambrian oceans with other animals, like sponges and jellyfish. During the Cambrian explosion, relatively modest changes to their genes gave rise to a spectacular range of bodies.
But those genes evolved in bilaterians tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion put them to the test, notes Dr. Smith. “They had the capacity,” he said, “but it hadn’t been expressed yet.”
It took a global flood to tap that capacity, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper propose. They base their proposal on a study published last year by Shanan Peters of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Gaines of Pomona College. They offered evidence that the Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks.
“There’s a big kick that correlates with the sea level rise,” Dr. Smith said of the fossil record. He and Dr. Harper propose that this kick happened thanks to the new habitats created by the sea level rise. These shallow coastal habitats were bathed in sunlight and nourished with eroding nutrients like phosphates. Animals colonized these new fertile habitats, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, and evolved to take up new ecological niches.
But these great floods also poisoned the ocean. The erosion of the coastlines released calcium, which can be toxic to cells. In order to survive, animals had to evolve ways to rid themselves of the poison. One solution may have been to pack the calcium into crystals, which eventually evolved into shells, bones, and other hard tissues. Dr. Smith doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that several different lineages of bilaterians evolved hard tissues during the Cambrian explosion, and not sooner.
These shells and other hard tissues sped up animal evolution even more. Predators could grow hard claws and jaws for killing prey, and their prey could evolve hard shells and spines to defend themselves. Animals became locked in an evolutionary arms race.
This new ecological food web grew even more complex. Bigger predators evolved that could eat smaller predators. Meanwhile, some bilaterians burrowed into the sea floor for the first time, allowing oxygen-rich seawater to flow into the sediment. Those first burrowers profoundly transformed the world’s oceans, creating yet another habitat that other oxygen-breathing animals could also invade. “That drives the diversification onward,” said Dr. Smith.
Kevin Peterson, a biologist at Dartmouth, praised Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper for pointing to the right way to study the Cambrian explosion. “We are long past identifying single triggers for the event,” he said. Dr. Peters agreed that taking a holistic view of the Cambrian explosion would lead to a better understanding of it. “It’ll be a fun next decade,” he predicted.
But Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol does not think the links Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper use in their hypothesis are tight enough yet. Questions still remain, for example, about how long vertebrates and other animals groups already existed before they left behind fossils like Myllokunmingia. If animals diversified earlier, then scientists will need to look at earlier causes.
“Timing,” said Dr. Donoghue, “is everything.”
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Syria: 'Bashar al-Assad ordered me to gas people - but I could not do it'
Syria: 'Bashar al-Assad ordered me to gas people - but I could not do it'
General Zaher al-Sakat tells Richard Spencer that he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people in Syria - but he could not go through with it.
Richard Spencer
Telegraph
21 Sep 2013
Few thought that the Syrian regime's promise to destroy its chemical weapons would be the end of the story. Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat, a former chemical weapons chief in President Bashar al-Assad's own army, certainly did not.
Gen Sakat says he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people, but could not go through with it and replaced chemical canisters with ones containing harmless bleach. He also insists that all such orders had to come from the top – President Assad himself – despite insistent denials by the regime that it has never used chemical weapons. Now he also claims to have his own intelligence that the Syrian president is evading the terms of a Russian-brokered deal to destroy his chemical weapons by transferring some of his stocks to his allies – Hizbollah, in Lebanon, and Iran. Gen Sakat spoke to The Sunday Telegraph last week, his first interview with a western newspaper, as Mr Assad confirmed for the first time what he and much of the rest of the world already knew – that regime possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, and the delivery systems to go along with them. The Syrian leader's admission came in the form of written declarations on Friday and Saturday to the United Nations' Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was an extraordinary and unexpected outcome of the wrangling between the United States and Russia which followed the murderous attack on the Damascus suburbs of East and West Ghouta a month ago. But now attention is turning to whether Mr Assad will comply with the deal's terms – and whether it will lead to a wider opportunity to bring the warring parties together. On that score, both sides' backers, pleased with progress so far, profess less optimism. Gen Sakat's personal history gives new insight into the extent to which, it is said, the Assad regime gradually turned to the use of chemical weapons, despite angry public denials, after rebels encroached on Damascus and Aleppo, the country's two biggest cities, in the summer of last year. As chief scientific officer in the army's fifth division, he ran chemical weapons operations in the country's southern Deraa province, where the uprising began in March 2011. He says he witnessed the first uses of violence against peaceful protesters – and the first use of "dirty tricks", placing weapons in the mosque where the protests started to suggest the protesters were armed. Gen Sakat said the regime wanted to "annihilate" the opposition using any means, and said he received his first orders to use chemical weapons in October last year. On three occasions, he said he was told to use a mixture of phosgene and two other chlorine-based agents against civilian targets in Sheikh Masqeen, Herak, and Busra, all rebel-held districts. However, under cover of darkness, he said he had replaced the canisters containing the chemicals with ones containing water mixed with dilute bleach which would give off a similar chlorine smell. At first, his trick worked. "They were completely convinced that this was the same poisonous material," he told the Sunday Telegraph in an interview. "In this way I saved hundreds of lives of children and others." But after the third occasion, in January, his bosses became suspicious at the lack of deaths in his "attacks" and he began to plot his escape to Jordan, where he has been based since the spring. Gen Sakat believes chemical weapons have now been used 34 times, rather than the 14 occasions cited by international intelligence agencies. But he agrees with a variety of assessments that differing substances and concentrations are used, which would account for the differing death rates, with some attacks killing very few or none. Although phosgene has been banned internationally since the 1920s, it is much less potent than sarin, the chemical now known to have been deployed in Ghouta. The army was concerned not to use the most dangerous chemicals in the far south because of its proximity to Israel, Gen Sakat said. In other parts of the country, notably the Damascus suburbs, Homs and Aleppo, the regime was subsequently accused of using small quantities of stronger chemicals, culminating in the attack on Ghouta, where UN inspectors found traces of sarin across wide areas. The US, and the rebels themselves, believe that more than 1,400 people were killed there. Now the world waits to see whether Mr Assad will comply with the Russian-led deal to dismantle his nuclear stocks which saw American missile strikes postponed indefinitely. Last week, more details emerged of the behind-the-scenes negotiations which preceded the deal, and which make it seem like much less of a victory for Mr Assad. He will no doubt be aware of the subsequent fates of the two most recent Arab leaders to have abandoned their chemical weapons at the West's command – Saddam Hussein and Col Muammar Gaddafi. The proposal for Mr Assad to hand over his weapons had been discussed previously between the United States and Russia, so that the suggestion by John Kerry, the secretary of state, that it might be a way out of the missile crisis was less off-the-cuff than it appeared. Russia then enforced the deal on Mr Assad, despite Moscow's public claims that it was the rebels rather than the regime which perpetrated the Ghouta massacre. In another sign of Moscow's apparent scepticism, President Vladimir Putin said last week he was not "100 per cent sure" Mr Assad would comply, and the Kremlin's chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said on Saturday it was making contingency plans if he were to fail to do so. "I am speaking theoretically and hypothetically, but if we become convinced that Assad is cheating, we can change our position," he said. Gen Sakat says the deception has already begun. "Before the Lavrov deal, they were already mobilising them to move to Lebanon and even Iraq," he said. "There have already been weapons handed over to Hizbollah." Both the political opposition and the armed rebels have complained that the deal lets Mr Assad off the hook, making their claims that Mr Assad is now trying to hide his chemical weapons stocks convenient. Their claims cannot be verified, but they cite a variety of sources for their allegations. American newspapers have already reported western intelligence agencies' allegations that Unit 450, the central command-and-control structure of the chemical weapons programme, has been dispersing the arsenal to different sites inside the country. "We, along with many other international sources learned, through documents and other evidence about the transfer of Syrian chemical weapons to Hizbollah in Lebanon nearly three months ago," Fahad al-Masri, a spokesman for the western-backed Free Syrian Army said. He said the rebels had a network of informers inside the regime's chemical weapon apparatus, who sympathised with the rebels but were being prevented by threats to their lives from defecting. He said the FSA had also been shown intelligence estimates by western governments which said the same thing. He said the weapons were being stored at four sites under the direct control of Hizbollah. Gen Sakat says he has his own sources: a network inside the country of activists who are specifically monitoring the programme. One member, calling himself Abu Mohammed, told The Telegraph he had hacked into Unit 450 computer systems and read orders, including some relating to the transfer to Hizbollah. Gen Sakat said a team of his activists had observed a column of more than 20 vehicles, some identifiable as belonging to the programme, heading towards the Lebanese border. He also alleged that other stocks were being transferred through Iraq to Iran. "They saw these shipments start before Lavrov appeared and mentioned the deal," he said. International agencies are monitoring the possible transfer of weapons to Lebanon closely, and Israel has declared this its own "red line" – and it has already bombed Syria twice since the start of the uprising, including Unit 450's presumed base north of Damascus. Israeli intelligence sources would not comment on the allegations. But one retired Israeli Major-General and former attache to Washington, Gadi Shamni, said: "I am positive they're already trying to move things from one location to another to hide it. "It will be very hard to cheat in one week. But November is a very long time away – in winter, the sky is cloudy, and visibility is low. US satellites cannot be very effective – it's a very problematic issue and the Syrians understand it very well." Additional reporting by Inna Lazareva
General Zaher al-Sakat tells Richard Spencer that he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people in Syria - but he could not go through with it.
Richard Spencer
Telegraph
21 Sep 2013
Few thought that the Syrian regime's promise to destroy its chemical weapons would be the end of the story. Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat, a former chemical weapons chief in President Bashar al-Assad's own army, certainly did not.
Gen Sakat says he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people, but could not go through with it and replaced chemical canisters with ones containing harmless bleach. He also insists that all such orders had to come from the top – President Assad himself – despite insistent denials by the regime that it has never used chemical weapons. Now he also claims to have his own intelligence that the Syrian president is evading the terms of a Russian-brokered deal to destroy his chemical weapons by transferring some of his stocks to his allies – Hizbollah, in Lebanon, and Iran. Gen Sakat spoke to The Sunday Telegraph last week, his first interview with a western newspaper, as Mr Assad confirmed for the first time what he and much of the rest of the world already knew – that regime possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, and the delivery systems to go along with them. The Syrian leader's admission came in the form of written declarations on Friday and Saturday to the United Nations' Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was an extraordinary and unexpected outcome of the wrangling between the United States and Russia which followed the murderous attack on the Damascus suburbs of East and West Ghouta a month ago. But now attention is turning to whether Mr Assad will comply with the deal's terms – and whether it will lead to a wider opportunity to bring the warring parties together. On that score, both sides' backers, pleased with progress so far, profess less optimism. Gen Sakat's personal history gives new insight into the extent to which, it is said, the Assad regime gradually turned to the use of chemical weapons, despite angry public denials, after rebels encroached on Damascus and Aleppo, the country's two biggest cities, in the summer of last year. As chief scientific officer in the army's fifth division, he ran chemical weapons operations in the country's southern Deraa province, where the uprising began in March 2011. He says he witnessed the first uses of violence against peaceful protesters – and the first use of "dirty tricks", placing weapons in the mosque where the protests started to suggest the protesters were armed. Gen Sakat said the regime wanted to "annihilate" the opposition using any means, and said he received his first orders to use chemical weapons in October last year. On three occasions, he said he was told to use a mixture of phosgene and two other chlorine-based agents against civilian targets in Sheikh Masqeen, Herak, and Busra, all rebel-held districts. However, under cover of darkness, he said he had replaced the canisters containing the chemicals with ones containing water mixed with dilute bleach which would give off a similar chlorine smell. At first, his trick worked. "They were completely convinced that this was the same poisonous material," he told the Sunday Telegraph in an interview. "In this way I saved hundreds of lives of children and others." But after the third occasion, in January, his bosses became suspicious at the lack of deaths in his "attacks" and he began to plot his escape to Jordan, where he has been based since the spring. Gen Sakat believes chemical weapons have now been used 34 times, rather than the 14 occasions cited by international intelligence agencies. But he agrees with a variety of assessments that differing substances and concentrations are used, which would account for the differing death rates, with some attacks killing very few or none. Although phosgene has been banned internationally since the 1920s, it is much less potent than sarin, the chemical now known to have been deployed in Ghouta. The army was concerned not to use the most dangerous chemicals in the far south because of its proximity to Israel, Gen Sakat said. In other parts of the country, notably the Damascus suburbs, Homs and Aleppo, the regime was subsequently accused of using small quantities of stronger chemicals, culminating in the attack on Ghouta, where UN inspectors found traces of sarin across wide areas. The US, and the rebels themselves, believe that more than 1,400 people were killed there. Now the world waits to see whether Mr Assad will comply with the Russian-led deal to dismantle his nuclear stocks which saw American missile strikes postponed indefinitely. Last week, more details emerged of the behind-the-scenes negotiations which preceded the deal, and which make it seem like much less of a victory for Mr Assad. He will no doubt be aware of the subsequent fates of the two most recent Arab leaders to have abandoned their chemical weapons at the West's command – Saddam Hussein and Col Muammar Gaddafi. The proposal for Mr Assad to hand over his weapons had been discussed previously between the United States and Russia, so that the suggestion by John Kerry, the secretary of state, that it might be a way out of the missile crisis was less off-the-cuff than it appeared. Russia then enforced the deal on Mr Assad, despite Moscow's public claims that it was the rebels rather than the regime which perpetrated the Ghouta massacre. In another sign of Moscow's apparent scepticism, President Vladimir Putin said last week he was not "100 per cent sure" Mr Assad would comply, and the Kremlin's chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said on Saturday it was making contingency plans if he were to fail to do so. "I am speaking theoretically and hypothetically, but if we become convinced that Assad is cheating, we can change our position," he said. Gen Sakat says the deception has already begun. "Before the Lavrov deal, they were already mobilising them to move to Lebanon and even Iraq," he said. "There have already been weapons handed over to Hizbollah." Both the political opposition and the armed rebels have complained that the deal lets Mr Assad off the hook, making their claims that Mr Assad is now trying to hide his chemical weapons stocks convenient. Their claims cannot be verified, but they cite a variety of sources for their allegations. American newspapers have already reported western intelligence agencies' allegations that Unit 450, the central command-and-control structure of the chemical weapons programme, has been dispersing the arsenal to different sites inside the country. "We, along with many other international sources learned, through documents and other evidence about the transfer of Syrian chemical weapons to Hizbollah in Lebanon nearly three months ago," Fahad al-Masri, a spokesman for the western-backed Free Syrian Army said. He said the rebels had a network of informers inside the regime's chemical weapon apparatus, who sympathised with the rebels but were being prevented by threats to their lives from defecting. He said the FSA had also been shown intelligence estimates by western governments which said the same thing. He said the weapons were being stored at four sites under the direct control of Hizbollah. Gen Sakat says he has his own sources: a network inside the country of activists who are specifically monitoring the programme. One member, calling himself Abu Mohammed, told The Telegraph he had hacked into Unit 450 computer systems and read orders, including some relating to the transfer to Hizbollah. Gen Sakat said a team of his activists had observed a column of more than 20 vehicles, some identifiable as belonging to the programme, heading towards the Lebanese border. He also alleged that other stocks were being transferred through Iraq to Iran. "They saw these shipments start before Lavrov appeared and mentioned the deal," he said. International agencies are monitoring the possible transfer of weapons to Lebanon closely, and Israel has declared this its own "red line" – and it has already bombed Syria twice since the start of the uprising, including Unit 450's presumed base north of Damascus. Israeli intelligence sources would not comment on the allegations. But one retired Israeli Major-General and former attache to Washington, Gadi Shamni, said: "I am positive they're already trying to move things from one location to another to hide it. "It will be very hard to cheat in one week. But November is a very long time away – in winter, the sky is cloudy, and visibility is low. US satellites cannot be very effective – it's a very problematic issue and the Syrians understand it very well." Additional reporting by Inna Lazareva
Sunday, August 25, 2013
March on Washington 50-year anniversary
Photo: The Oklahoman, Jim Beckel
Peja West, 6, waves a pair of American flags above her head while dancing at the foot of the steps on the north side of the Capitol. West, from Spencer, came to the rally with her grandmother, mother and her baby sister.
A diverse crowd of about 300 people rallied on the north side of the State Capitol Saturday Aug. 24, 2013, to commemorate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Most of the crowd marched more than a mile from Stiles Park, walking up Lincoln Blvd., to the statehouse. Many in the crowd carried signs or banners, and some wore shirts bearing images of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his impassioned oratory to a crowd of nearly 250,000 on the Washington Mall on Aug. 28, 1963.
At the time, it was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital. King's remarks to the crowd, now known as the "I Have A Dream" speech, brought a national focus to the civil rights struggle in America and is credited with being a large influence to secure enough votes in Congress for the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year.
Youth see march anniversary as chance to lead
BY SHAQUILLE BREWSTER
Associated Press
August 25, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mary-Pat Hector of Atlanta was operating much like a 1960s civil rights activist as she laid plans for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. She was constantly on the phone as she confirmed event details, tweaked the draft of the speech she gave at Saturday's rally at the Lincoln Memorial and prepared for a presentation.
Mary-Pat is 15 years old.
Just as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott at age 26, and Rep. John Lewis helped to lead freedom rides at 23, young Americans like Mary-Pat are not letting age get in the way as they seek more than a contributing role in the push for social reform...
Friday, August 16, 2013
Daddy's Girl: How An African 'Princess' Banked $3 Billion In A Country Living On $2 A Day
Isabel dos Santos, Africa's Richest Woman (Photo credit: Bruno Fonseca/EPA/Newscom)
Kleptocracy ("rule by thieves") is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service. This type of government corruption is often achieved by the embezzlement of state funds.
Daddy's Girl: How An African 'Princess' Banked $3 Billion In A Country Living On $2 A Day
By Kerry A. Dolan and Rafael Marques de Morais
Forbes
8/14/2013
LAST DECEMBER Isabel dos Santos commemorated her tenth wedding anniversary to Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo with a party. Subtlety wasn’t on the menu. She jetted in dozens of friends and relatives from as far as Germany and Brazil, who joined with hundreds of local guests in Angola for three days of lavishness, including a bash at the Fortress of Sao Miguel in the capital city of Luanda and a beachside Sunday brunch on the posh Mussulo peninsula. The invitation, according to one attendee, came in a sleek white box, promising a celebration of “a decade of passion/ a decade of friendship/ a decade worth a hundred years. …”
Sindika Dokolo
A decade worth $3 billion is more like it. At 40 Dos Santos is Africa’s only female billionaire, and also the continent’s youngest. She has quickly and systematically garnered significant stakes in Angola’s strategic industries–banking, cement, diamonds and telecom–making her the most influential businessperson in her homeland. More than half of her assets are held in publicly traded Portuguese companies, adding international credibility. When FORBES outed her as a billionaire in January the government disseminated the news as a matter of national pride, living proof that this country of 19 million has arrived.
The real story, however, is how Dos Santos–the oldest daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos–acquired her wealth. For the past year FORBES has been tracing Isabel dos Santos’ path to riches, reviewing a score of documents and speaking with dozens of people on the ground. As best as we can trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action. Her story is a rare window into the same, tragic kleptocratic narrative that grips resource-rich countries around the world.
President José Eduardo dos Santos
For President Dos Santos it’s a foolproof way to extract money from his country, while keeping a putative arm’s-length distance away. If the 71-year-old president gets overthrown, he can reclaim the assets from his daughter. If he dies in power, she keeps the loot in the family. Isabel may decide, if she is generous, to share some of it with her seven known half-siblings. Or not. The siblings are known around Angola for despising one another.
“It is not possible to justify this wealth, which is shamelessly displayed,” former Angolan prime minister Marcolino Moco tells FORBES. “There is no doubt that it was the father who generated such a fortune.”
Isabel dos Santos declined to speak with FORBES for this article. Her representatives failed to respond to detailed questions sent months ago but last week issued this statement: “Mrs. Isabel dos Santos is an independent business woman, and a private investor representing solely her own interests. Her investments in Angolan and/or in Portuguese companies are transparent and have been conducted through arms-length transactions involving external entities such as reputed banks and law firms.” In turn, the spokesman accuses this article’s coauthor, an Angolan investigative journalist, of being an activist with a political agenda. The Angolan government jailed Marques de Morais in 1999 over a series of articles critical of the regime and has brought new criminal defamation charges against him over his 2011 book, Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola.
Finally, a representative of Mrs. Dos Santos said that any allegations of illegal wealth transfers between her and the government are “groundless and completely absurd.” That could well be. When your father runs the show, and can dictate which national assets are sold and at what price, what’s theft of public resources in one country can be rendered legal with a swipe of the pen.
President José Eduardo dos Santos could not be reached for comment. That is unfortunate, because the Dos Santoses, as Moco notes, have “some explaining to do.”
FOR THREE CENTURIES the Portuguese extracted wealth from this mineral-rich country on Africa’s southwestern coast. Almost immediately after Angola won independence in 1975, various internal factions began battling one another for the right to do the exact same thing. From this chaos, which lasted 27 years, Dos Santos, who had studied oil engineering in Soviet Azerbaijan and served as foreign minister upon independence, eventually emerged as president in 1979. He’s held on to power ever since, making him the planet’s third-longest-serving nonroyal head of state.
The president met his first wife (he’s been married at least twice), Tatiana Kukanova, while a student in Azerbaijan, and his first child–Isabel–was born there. By age 6 Isabel dos Santos was in Angola’s presidential palace, and while the family’s lifestyle wasn’t over-the-top by profligate African dictator standards (save the president’s dalliances–at least five of his children are from various mistresses), the family had Christmas trees flown in from New York and $500,000 worth of bubbly imported from a Lisbon restaurateur. There was decadence enough for Isabel to earn the nickname “the Princess.”
During Isabel’s upbringing the Angola economy sputtered, crippled by two factors: ongoing civil war and Dos Santos’ socialist policies. “In the 1980s you’d go to the supermarket and there would only be noodles on the shelves. There wasn’t much there,” says University of Southern California associate professor emeritus Gerald Bender, who’s been studying Angola since 1968. For cloistered Isabel that reality was likely invisible; she eventually attended King’s College in London, where her mother, now a British citizen, lives, and earned an undergraduate degree in engineering.
However, as civil war resumed by the end of 1992, Isabel left for Angola’s capital city, Luanda, in a rush, allegedly after receiving death threats in London.
By the late 1990s, when the civil war was winding down –a ceasefire was formally declared in 2002–President Dos Santos, like the Soviets he had studied under in the 1960s, was embracing a grab-what-you-can form of capitalism. Over the past decade Angola has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. GDP grew at an 11.6% annual clip from 2002 to 2011, driven by a more than doubling of oil production to 1.8 million barrels a day. The government budget sits at $69 billion, up from $6.3 billion a decade ago.
But predictably, precious little of the windfall has made it to the people. Some 70% of Angolans live on less than $2 a day. And by the government’s own count, 10% of the country’s population is scrambling for food due to drought and bureaucratic neglect. So where’s the money going? Start with a paranoid president-for-life. The state security apparatus sucks more funds from the budget than health care, education and agriculture combined. A lot is clearly stolen: Between 2007 and 2010 at least $32 billion of oil revenue went missing from the federal ledger, according to the International Monetary Fund, which later tracked most of the money to “quasi-fiscal operations.” Angola comes in at 157 out of 176 nations ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. It trails shining stalwarts of participatory democracy such as Yemen and Kyrgyzstan. And it’s within this environment that Isabel dos Santos has surfaced with an estimated net worth of $3 billion.
Page 2 of 2
ISABEL DOS SANTOS’ formative business experience came at Miami Beach. Not the Florida city, but rather a rustic chic beachside bar and restaurant in Luanda that tries to emulate its namesake, down to the mediocre food and indifferent service. In 1997 the owner, Rui Barata, was having issues with health inspectors and taxmen. His solution: bringing in Isabel dos Santos, then 24, as his partner, with the idea, contemporaries say, that her name would keep pesky government regulators at bay. Her initial investment was negligible, according to a source with knowledge of the deal, and the restaurant thrived: Sixteen years later it’s still a weekend hot spot.
The lesson–the equity stake available to those with a gilded name–couldn’t have been lost on Isabel dos Santos, who was entering adulthood at the exact same time Angola’s riches were being unlocked. Here’s what followed:
First, Grab the Diamonds. Angola is the world’s fourth-largest diamond producer, selling an estimated $1 billion in gems every year from mines situated in the country’s northeast. The mines’ exclusive concession-holder is the state-owned company, Endiama.
In 1999 President Dos Santos pushed Endiama to form a diamond-selling partnership. Three Israeli diamond merchants, including Lev Leviev, who FORBES now estimates is worth $1.5 billion, promised contacts and expertise. The power behind the venture, according to British court records, was Russian arms dealer Arkady Gaydamak–a former confidant of President Dos Santos during the civil war of 1992-2002. The new company would be called Ascorp.
Leviev and his partners, including Gaydamak, would wind up with 24.5% of Ascorp. The government would retain 51%. The most surprising major shareholder? Isabel dos Santos, who emerged with a 24.5% stake through a Gibraltar investment company, Trans Africa Investment Services, that she had set up with her mother, according to TAIS’ annual report. (Leviev did not respond to a request for comment, and Gaydamak could not be reached at press time.)
Angola’s 2010 constitution bars the president from stealing public money and acts of corruption, which would seem to prohibit the use of his position for the private enrichment of his family. No matter: Angola’s Council of Ministers, controlled by her father, approved the Ascorp deal anyway. “In a country with separation of powers and real democracy, these presidential actions to enrich his family would have caused legal procedures for his impeachment,” says lawyer Salvador Freire, president of the human rights group Maos Livres. “In Angola he is the law.”
Ascorp was a cash cow, yielding millions of dollars in dividends per month, according to British court documents, but as the “blood diamond” business attracted international scrutiny in the middle of the 2000s, Dos Santos transferred to her mother total control of TAIS, now renamed Iaxonh Limited, according to Gibraltar’s Registry of Companies records accessed by FORBES. It’s quite a parking spot, safely under the control of a British citizen, with Isabel dos Santos conveniently sitting in Angola as her mother’s sole heir. The mother could not be reached for comment.
Telecom: Father Knows Best. In 1997 President Dos Santos issued a decree concerning the increasingly valuable telecommunications spectrum it controlled: The government must undertake a public bidding process for new telecom licenses.
Two years later he defied his own decree–by issuing a new one. The government could grant such a license without a public tender, as long as the grantee was a joint venture with the state. Eleven months after that the president, backed by his rubber stamp Council of Ministers, granted Unitel the right to be the first private mobile telephony operator in the country–with the condition that he had sole power to approve the project and to decide on the shareholding structure of the company, since it involved state funds. The state-owned oil company got a 25% stake, and Isabel emerged with her own 25% stake. A spokesman for Isabel dos Santos said she contributed capital for her Unitel stake but declined to specify how much. A year later Portugal Telecom paid $12.6 million for another 25% stake.
It was one hell of an investment. Mobile phones have revolutionized Africa, and as one of just two mobile phone networks in Angola, Unitel had amassed 9 million subscribers. Revenue last year was $2 billion, making it Angola’s largest private company.
Her share is worth at least $1 billion, based on discussions with several analysts who follow Portugal Telecom.
Banking: A Friend in Europe. As Isabel dos Santos diversified her Angolan business interests, in 2005 she diversified her network of powerful patrons. Enter Americo Amorim, a Portuguese billionaire worth $4.3 billion who has spent his life expanding his family’s business empire from cork to real estate, tourism and, especially, oil. The billionaire, who did not comment for this story, was early to seek deals in Angola after hostilities ended. When the Dos Santos clan made a move into banking in 2005, they did so in partnership with Amorim and Fernando Teles, a Portuguese national who had been CEO of another Angolan bank. They formally opened Banco Internacional de Credito, known as BIC, according to the company’s annual reports.
The hand of Isabel’s father again played a role: President Dos Santos, as head of the Council of Ministers, formally authorized the foreign investment in the capital of the bank. Specifically how it was financed is murky, as there is no public record showing who put money into the bank. BIC’s latest annual report shows that Amorim owns 25% of the bank. Various documents reveal that another 25% is held through an investment vehicle controlled by Isabel dos Santos. Her spokesman says she was a founding member of the bank and had independent means to pay her share from her early business ventures.
Regardless, BIC was a hit, in large part because of a deal to lend money to … the Angolan government. BIC made loans to the state worth $450 million, in addition to more than $350 million made to private ventures. BIC had assets of $6.9 billion in 2012. Isabel dos Santos’ stake is worth at least $160 million, FORBES estimates, based on the bank’s book value listed in its latest annual report. BIC officials could not be reached for comment.
Oil: A Strange Partnership. Oil is Angola’s greatest natural asset. The country produces 650 million barrels per year, most of it exported. The state-owned oil firm, Sonangol, is so profitable that it was only a matter of time before the Dos Santos family would start looking for ways to hitch a ride on its success. Isabel’s banking partner, billionaire Americo Amorim, would play the key role.
In 2005 Amorim set up a subsidiary, Amorim Energia. He would control it with a 55% stake. The remaining 45%, at least originally, went to Sonangol via a Netherlands holding company called Esperaza Holding B.V. At the end of that year Amorim Energia went shopping, acquiring 33.3% of Galp Energia, Portugal’s former state-owned oil company, for roughly $1 billion, according to press reports. At the end of 2006, according to investigative not-for-profit Global Witness, 40% of Sonangol’s stake in Esperaza ended up with a Swiss company called Exem Holding. No documents could be found that definitively tie Exem Holding to Isabel dos Santos, but her fingerprints are everywhere. Her husband, Sindika Dokolo, was put on the Amorim Energia board at the request of Esperaza, according to Global Witness. And the chairman of Isabel dos Santos’ holding company is also on the boards of Fidequity, a subsidiary of Exem Holding, and entities called Exem Energy and Exem Oil & Gas, according to public filings. Last year Amorim Energia paid $726 million for an additional 5% of Galp. Isabel’s estimated 6.9% stake in Galp is worth a recent $924 million.
Cement: Safeguarding the “Public Interest.” For most of President Dos Santos’ reign there’s only been one cement factory in Angola, owned by a firm called Nova Cimangola. By mid-2004 the government owned 39.8% of it, state-owned oil company Sonangol’s captive bank, BAI, owned 9.5%, and the remaining 49% was owned by Swiss firm Scanang, which was in the process of being taken over by Portuguese cement company Cimpor. The government began demanding a bigger stake, arguing that the factory was a strategic asset for national reconstruction in the aftermath of the war. On Oct. 29, 2006 the president’s Council of Ministers’ Resolution 78/06 approved a $74 million payment to buy out Cimpor, declaring that the expenditure was necessary to safeguard “public interest, to restore the legality and to maintain the shareholding control of Nova Cimangola by national entities, incorporated in Angola.” The $74 million payment, according to an Angolan newspaper, came from BIC, the bank half-owned by Amorim and Isabel dos Santos. The government would now own 89%, while BAI and Angolan individuals would control the remaining 11%.
What followed, however, showed that the larger goal wasn’t to give Angola a larger stake but rather certain Angolans. Prior to the council’s approval a company called Ciminvest was incorporated in Angola. Ciminvest was initially fronted by the president’s former legal counsel, according to the articles of incorporation he signed. At one point Portuguese billionaire Americo Amorim owned an estimated 30% of Ciminvest, but his representative confirms that he transferred his stake in 2009. He would not comment on who took over the stake or what was paid for it. The real owners are now widely understood to be Isabel dos Santos and her husband, though documents detailing ownership are not publicly available. However, Isabel admits on her resume that she chairs the board of Nova Cimangola, which she controls through Ciminvest. Without much ado, at no apparent cost, the company that was presidentially mandated to be controlled by “national entities” had become controlled by Isabel dos Santos.
ISABEL DOS SANTOS’ holdings are more than just squirreled away assets to be unearthed in case of a rainy day. They throw off hefty dividends that allow her to buy yet more assets in businesses seemingly unrelated to the exploitation of Angolan properties, such as her $500 million stake in Portuguese media firm ZON.
Meanwhile, her father has taken steps to legally protect himself from all the plundering. Under Angolan law President Dos Santos’ decision to grant a license to Unitel for the personal benefit of his daughter could be considered an abuse of power. To cover his legal bases, in 1992 the president fiddled with the law to reduce it to two grounds: taking bribes or betraying the country. Technically, he can argue, neither was violated in the case of Unitel.
The larger strategy, though, is to portray Isabel as a hero. In January, after FORBES declared her a billionaire, the Angolan regime’s mouthpiece (and the country’s only daily newspaper), Jornal de Angola , claimed that “while we give our best for Angola without poverty, we are elated with the fact that businesswoman Isabel dos Santos has become a reference in the world of finances. This is good for Angola and it fills Angolans with pride.” Angolans should be mortified, not proud.
Co-author Rafael Marques de Morais is an Angolan investigative journalist based in Luanda. He runs the corruption watchdog website Maka Angola.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Religious family, angry at US gov't, comes home to America after "leap of faith" leaves them lost at sea
Mr. Gastonquay and child
What's the difference between a "leap of faith" and simply not bothering to think? Why would God give these people brains if he didn't want them to be used? Especially when they have two small children.
Religious family leaves US, gets lost at sea
By Greg Moore
Salon.com
Aug 10, 2013
PHOENIX (AP) — A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly home Sunday.
Hannah Gastonguay says she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith” when they took their two small children and her father-in-law then set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.
But just weeks into their journey the Gastonguays hit a series of storms that damaged their small boat, leaving them adrift. They were eventually picked up by a fishing vessel, transferred to a cargo ship and taken to Chile where they are resting.
Their flights home were arranged by U.S. Embassy officials. The State Department was not available for comment.
Monday, August 05, 2013
Have Mexicans forgotten the billions looted from PEMEX by government officials? Peña Nieto struggles to reform PEMEX
PEMEX is the only oil company in the history of the world to lose money. The money went by the billions into the pockets of corrupt government officials appointed to run the company.
In 1928 President Cardenas nationalized the oil companies because he thought Mexico was being exploited by American oil companies. It turned out that corruption cost the Mexican people far more than American profiteers ever did. The national oil company was a drain on Mexico's finances when it should have been a windfall.
Now Peña Nieto wants to open the out-dated, inefficient oil company to international investment, and many lawmakers and citizens oppose it.
It seems they would prefer to lose large amounts of money to rich Mexicans rather than lose small amounts of money to rich Americans. Ironically, rich Mexicans tend to spend and invest a good deal of money in the U.S. Poor Mexicans then have to leave their homes to go to the U.S. to harvest food and wash dishes--often for rich Mexicans! Resentment is often irrational. It reminds me of the Bernie Madoff affair: Jews just couldn't believe that a fellow Jew would rip them off on such a mind-boggling scale.
AP Photo by Edward Verdugo: Explosion at Pemex headquarters 2013 (See third article below.)
Mexico's president on dangerous ground as he pushes Pemex reform
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto wants to open the Pemex oil monopoly to private and foreign investment. To many Mexicans, that's blasphemy.
By Tracy Wilkinson and Richard Fausset
Los Angeles Times
August 5, 2013
MEXICO CITY — If Mexico had a crown jewel, it would be the giant state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Year after year, it has poured billions of dollars into the state treasury, historically paying for schools, hospitals, dams, highways, ports and more.
The seizure of foreign oil companies 75 years ago that created the company is a cause for annual celebrations affirming Mexico's fierce sense of independence from outside interference.
Yet even as the country's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, credits Pemex with building the nation, his administration acknowledges that the notoriously inefficient conglomerate is in trouble: If it is not opened to private and foreign investment, Mexico, the world's ninth-largest oil producer, will become a net energy importer by 2020, officials say.
As Peña Nieto moves ahead with a plan to overhaul Pemex, he is navigating the most perilous political minefield of his young presidency. He is toying with taboos and challenging revered perceptions surrounding the nation's top revenue earner. And he is meeting with impassioned opposition.
At the back of a recent rally for Pemex, Jesus Castillo Sanchez, a 46-year-old handyman, waved a giant Mexican flag as if he'd just taken a hill in battle. Booting the foreign oil companies in 1938 "gave Mexico its true independence from the great powers," Castillo said. "After [the foreigners] bring their oil platforms, they will bring their armies and their troops."
The president is expected to introduce landmark energy reform legislation, including proposals addressing Pemex, as early as this week.
The government and industry experts contend that Mexico needs advanced technical expertise from outside companies to find and retrieve oil and gas from deep water and shale-rock formations that are believed to hold more than half the country's estimated 14 billion barrels of reserves.
But "Pemex is not allowed … to choose associations … to reduce the level of risk that you run" in deep-water exploration, Carlos Morales Gil, Pemex director of exploration and production, said in an interview. "What Pemex needs is budget autonomy and flexibility" to form joint ventures, he said.
Making that possible could require changing the constitution, and that could prove a bruising battle for Peña Nieto. The matter is so sensitive, so wrapped up in Mexico's ability to assert its independence from foreign meddling, that when Peña Nieto, speaking in London, suggested that the other major political parties had already agreed to reform, several politicians back in Mexico went ballistic.
Yet the problems plaguing Pemex are legendary. With corruption, poor management, a union that demands enormous benefits and a corporate structure that fosters duplicate jobs, Pemex is a model of how not to run an oil company.
According to a 2011 study by the Texas-based Baker Institute, Pemex, with about 140,000 employees, produced revenue of $585,000 per employee, a quarter of the per-employee revenue of British oil giant BP and about half that of the partially state-owned Brazilian oil company Petrobras.
Morales, the Pemex executive, acknowledged that Mexico was 30 years behind the industry standard in deep-water exploration. Pemex, he said, hadn't felt pressure to pursue the riskier search because it had so much readily accessible shallow-water and inland oil. Consequently, Mexican engineers did not keep up with the widening technological know-how that has benefited competitors.
A case in point is the Cantarell oil field, in the Bay of Campeche. It was discovered in 1976 by a fisherman who noticed his nets were being ruined by oil. Pemex engineers soon realized he had stumbled on one of the largest oil fields in the world.
But in the mid-2000s, production at Cantarell peaked, and it has declined rapidly, while a second big find, Ku-Maloob-Zaap, has already been bled of two-thirds of its reserves.
In all, Pemex's production of crude has declined steadily to 2.6 million barrels a day — from a high in 2004 of 3.5 million — stabilizing only in the last year or so.
There's plenty more out there, but experts say Mexico can't get to it without outside help.
"Mexico, outside of the U.S., probably has the widest array of energy plays that anybody has in the world: shallow water, deep water, shale gas, shale oil, tremendous marginal fields that have largely been neglected over the last 40 years," said John Padilla, managing director of the international energy consulting firm IPD Latin America. "It's too much for any one company to handle. There's nobody in the world that could do that."
The Mexican Constitution says that raw materials found in the land, like oil and gas, belong to the state, requiring a constitutional amendment for future agreements that might touch on ownership of resources.
Private operators could pay a tax, based on percentage of revenue or profit, for the right to pump. Or they could enter into joint-venture agreements with Pemex, each side sharing risks and benefits.
But how outside investors share revenue, and Mexico's long-standing refusal to cede any ownership of the oil itself, remain a key obstacle...
WORLD BUSINESS BRIEFING: AMERICAS; PEMEX DIRECTORS OPPOSED
PETROLEOS MEXICANOS, Carlos Slim Helu
New York Times
February 23, 2001
Mexican lawmakers opposed to President Vicente Fox want to remove four businessmen from the board of the state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, saying Mr. Fox's appointments violate the Constitution. ''Private citizens can't be members of Pemex's board as representatives of the state,'' said Carlos Aceves, a legislator from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mr. Fox stunned the nation when he named the billionaire Carlos Slim Helú and three other top executives to ...
PEMEX Blast: Gas Leak Caused Explosion At Mexican Oil Company Headquarters
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Huffington Post
2/05/13
MEXICO CITY — A water-heating system may have leaked gas into a tunnel beneath the headquarters of Mexico's national oil company for more than seven months before it was accidentally detonated by a maintenance crew's improvised lighting system, officials said Tuesday, adding fresh detail to the narrative of the petroleum giant's worst disaster in a decade.
Mexico's attorney general said Monday night that a gas buildup was responsible for the explosion that collapsed three floors of the administrative building in Petroleos Mexicanos' Mexico City headquarters complex, killing 37 people and leaving dozens hospitalized. He said the investigation had detected traces of methane. Methane is the primary component of most of the natural gas used for cooking and heating in homes and businesses. It also is found in coal mines, and is naturally produced by the decomposition of organic matter in sewers and landfills...
In 1928 President Cardenas nationalized the oil companies because he thought Mexico was being exploited by American oil companies. It turned out that corruption cost the Mexican people far more than American profiteers ever did. The national oil company was a drain on Mexico's finances when it should have been a windfall.
Now Peña Nieto wants to open the out-dated, inefficient oil company to international investment, and many lawmakers and citizens oppose it.
It seems they would prefer to lose large amounts of money to rich Mexicans rather than lose small amounts of money to rich Americans. Ironically, rich Mexicans tend to spend and invest a good deal of money in the U.S. Poor Mexicans then have to leave their homes to go to the U.S. to harvest food and wash dishes--often for rich Mexicans! Resentment is often irrational. It reminds me of the Bernie Madoff affair: Jews just couldn't believe that a fellow Jew would rip them off on such a mind-boggling scale.
AP Photo by Edward Verdugo: Explosion at Pemex headquarters 2013 (See third article below.)
Mexico's president on dangerous ground as he pushes Pemex reform
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto wants to open the Pemex oil monopoly to private and foreign investment. To many Mexicans, that's blasphemy.
By Tracy Wilkinson and Richard Fausset
Los Angeles Times
August 5, 2013
MEXICO CITY — If Mexico had a crown jewel, it would be the giant state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Year after year, it has poured billions of dollars into the state treasury, historically paying for schools, hospitals, dams, highways, ports and more.
The seizure of foreign oil companies 75 years ago that created the company is a cause for annual celebrations affirming Mexico's fierce sense of independence from outside interference.
Yet even as the country's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, credits Pemex with building the nation, his administration acknowledges that the notoriously inefficient conglomerate is in trouble: If it is not opened to private and foreign investment, Mexico, the world's ninth-largest oil producer, will become a net energy importer by 2020, officials say.
As Peña Nieto moves ahead with a plan to overhaul Pemex, he is navigating the most perilous political minefield of his young presidency. He is toying with taboos and challenging revered perceptions surrounding the nation's top revenue earner. And he is meeting with impassioned opposition.
At the back of a recent rally for Pemex, Jesus Castillo Sanchez, a 46-year-old handyman, waved a giant Mexican flag as if he'd just taken a hill in battle. Booting the foreign oil companies in 1938 "gave Mexico its true independence from the great powers," Castillo said. "After [the foreigners] bring their oil platforms, they will bring their armies and their troops."
The president is expected to introduce landmark energy reform legislation, including proposals addressing Pemex, as early as this week.
The government and industry experts contend that Mexico needs advanced technical expertise from outside companies to find and retrieve oil and gas from deep water and shale-rock formations that are believed to hold more than half the country's estimated 14 billion barrels of reserves.
But "Pemex is not allowed … to choose associations … to reduce the level of risk that you run" in deep-water exploration, Carlos Morales Gil, Pemex director of exploration and production, said in an interview. "What Pemex needs is budget autonomy and flexibility" to form joint ventures, he said.
Making that possible could require changing the constitution, and that could prove a bruising battle for Peña Nieto. The matter is so sensitive, so wrapped up in Mexico's ability to assert its independence from foreign meddling, that when Peña Nieto, speaking in London, suggested that the other major political parties had already agreed to reform, several politicians back in Mexico went ballistic.
Yet the problems plaguing Pemex are legendary. With corruption, poor management, a union that demands enormous benefits and a corporate structure that fosters duplicate jobs, Pemex is a model of how not to run an oil company.
According to a 2011 study by the Texas-based Baker Institute, Pemex, with about 140,000 employees, produced revenue of $585,000 per employee, a quarter of the per-employee revenue of British oil giant BP and about half that of the partially state-owned Brazilian oil company Petrobras.
Morales, the Pemex executive, acknowledged that Mexico was 30 years behind the industry standard in deep-water exploration. Pemex, he said, hadn't felt pressure to pursue the riskier search because it had so much readily accessible shallow-water and inland oil. Consequently, Mexican engineers did not keep up with the widening technological know-how that has benefited competitors.
A case in point is the Cantarell oil field, in the Bay of Campeche. It was discovered in 1976 by a fisherman who noticed his nets were being ruined by oil. Pemex engineers soon realized he had stumbled on one of the largest oil fields in the world.
But in the mid-2000s, production at Cantarell peaked, and it has declined rapidly, while a second big find, Ku-Maloob-Zaap, has already been bled of two-thirds of its reserves.
In all, Pemex's production of crude has declined steadily to 2.6 million barrels a day — from a high in 2004 of 3.5 million — stabilizing only in the last year or so.
There's plenty more out there, but experts say Mexico can't get to it without outside help.
"Mexico, outside of the U.S., probably has the widest array of energy plays that anybody has in the world: shallow water, deep water, shale gas, shale oil, tremendous marginal fields that have largely been neglected over the last 40 years," said John Padilla, managing director of the international energy consulting firm IPD Latin America. "It's too much for any one company to handle. There's nobody in the world that could do that."
The Mexican Constitution says that raw materials found in the land, like oil and gas, belong to the state, requiring a constitutional amendment for future agreements that might touch on ownership of resources.
Private operators could pay a tax, based on percentage of revenue or profit, for the right to pump. Or they could enter into joint-venture agreements with Pemex, each side sharing risks and benefits.
But how outside investors share revenue, and Mexico's long-standing refusal to cede any ownership of the oil itself, remain a key obstacle...
WORLD BUSINESS BRIEFING: AMERICAS; PEMEX DIRECTORS OPPOSED
PETROLEOS MEXICANOS, Carlos Slim Helu
New York Times
February 23, 2001
Mexican lawmakers opposed to President Vicente Fox want to remove four businessmen from the board of the state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, saying Mr. Fox's appointments violate the Constitution. ''Private citizens can't be members of Pemex's board as representatives of the state,'' said Carlos Aceves, a legislator from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mr. Fox stunned the nation when he named the billionaire Carlos Slim Helú and three other top executives to ...
PEMEX Blast: Gas Leak Caused Explosion At Mexican Oil Company Headquarters
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Huffington Post
2/05/13
MEXICO CITY — A water-heating system may have leaked gas into a tunnel beneath the headquarters of Mexico's national oil company for more than seven months before it was accidentally detonated by a maintenance crew's improvised lighting system, officials said Tuesday, adding fresh detail to the narrative of the petroleum giant's worst disaster in a decade.
Mexico's attorney general said Monday night that a gas buildup was responsible for the explosion that collapsed three floors of the administrative building in Petroleos Mexicanos' Mexico City headquarters complex, killing 37 people and leaving dozens hospitalized. He said the investigation had detected traces of methane. Methane is the primary component of most of the natural gas used for cooking and heating in homes and businesses. It also is found in coal mines, and is naturally produced by the decomposition of organic matter in sewers and landfills...
Friday, August 02, 2013
Does George Zimmerman’s car hero story add up?
George Zimmerman was never mentioned until days after this SUV turned over. Then the policeman who reported the accident, and Zimmerman himself, began to mention the connection. The policeman was an enormous fan of Mr. Zimmerman.
Does George Zimmerman’s car hero story add up?
These conspiracy theorists are convinced Trayvon Martin's killer staged a car crash to boost his beleaguered image
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Salon.com
Jul 26, 2013
It seemed stranger than fiction, as even his lawyer acknowledged, that George Zimmerman’s first appearance just days after he was acquitted for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be to rescue a nice family of four from their overturned SUV. But that’s what reportedly happened on July 17, leading his defenders to call him a hero and some critics to claim the event was a hoax aimed at boosting his popularity.
It does seem like an odd coincidence: Zimmerman just happened to be on the scene of the crash at the right moment, and happened to have a fire extinguisher with him to put out the flaming car. And now the family he saved abruptly canceled the press conference they had planned to thank Zimmerman. It’s all too much to believe for the Zimmerman Rescue Truthers, who emerged immediately after the news broke.
“Even if we had a videotape of the accident, they would still say it was made up. So you can’t really respond to people who just don’t want to listen to the truth,” Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara told CNN. “The idea that this was made up — it’s just the same people who refuse to accept the jury’s verdict, just want to be angry, just want to hate George Zimmerman, are still going to hate him.”
He’s probably right. As we’ve noted, conspiracy theories are basically impossible to stamp out. And in this case, the circumstances are just too weird, and the potential public relations benefit for Zimmerman — and thus the perceived incentive to stage the scene — too obvious to explain away for those who are upset about the verdict. Fox News, whose opinion hosts have pretty openly sided with Zimmerman, reported that at an NAACP meeting, “there was a lot — a lot — of skepticism, people saying they don’t believe a word of this.”
“Zimmerman can pull someone from a burning car, but he can’t a push 17-year-old, 150 pound boy off of him?” asked one tweeter. On Twitter, the skeptics appeared to be be predominantly liberal and disproportionately minorities — the same kinds of people who have been pushing for harsher punishment of Zimmerman all along — while others questioned the police officers involved.
“There’s something fishy about this #Zimmerman Rescue,” another person tweeted. “Feels too perfectly timed and convenient.”
One blog advancing the conspiracy narrative that went viral posted screen shots of what appears to be the Facebook page of the officer who responded to the crash, which shows that he posted numerous photos and messages supporting Zimmerman days before and after the accident. Most criticized the media and liberals who turned the case into a race issue. “If Trayvon Martin had been killed in Afghanistan, Barack Obama wouldn’t even know his name,” reads one popular image macro the officer posted. Yet the officer, who posted about other activities of his duty life, didn’t post anything about his run in with Zimmerman. The only reference to the accident was a few days later, when he linked to a local news story and wrote, “I sorta made the news…”
That conspiracy blog even claims that it has a source, whom it does not identify, who saw phone records showing that the officer alerted Zimmerman about the crash before authorities arrived so Zimmerman could end up in the police report and look like a hero. We asked the unnamed blogger for more info about his or source, but the blogger didn’t respond.
Theorists have also speculated that Zimmerman might have a police scanner, given his work as a neighborhood watchman and his current fear for his own safety, and that he used it to respond to the crash before authorities could get there.
They also wonder why none of the multiple 9-1-1 calls mention Zimmerman, though some mention two men on the scene, and why O’Mara says his client didn’t mention the crash when they met the next day. And why none of the family members in the crash mentioned the crash on their Facebook or Twitter pages. And why are there no photos of the crash? All the data points don’t really make sense together — was the entire crash staged, or did Zimmerman show up to intentionally take credit for saving the family? — but various skeptics differ on how much of the accident they think was staged.
Still, even O’Mara acknowledged that the whole thing is a bit weird. “I will acknowledge it was coincidental four or five days after the verdict, but it was not set up, or staged. Really, do you think we would’ve set up a family of four on the side (of the road), destroying an SUV?” the defense lawyer told a local TV station.
The family Zimmerman helped save, he said, didn’t feel comfortable coming forward given all the heat on Zimmerman at the moment. Indeed, TV news trucks have been staked out near their house, much to their dismay, but in refusing to speak with the press, even just to confirm that Zimmerman was on the scene, they’ve helped fuel the conspiracy narrative.
Does George Zimmerman’s car hero story add up?
These conspiracy theorists are convinced Trayvon Martin's killer staged a car crash to boost his beleaguered image
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Salon.com
Jul 26, 2013
It seemed stranger than fiction, as even his lawyer acknowledged, that George Zimmerman’s first appearance just days after he was acquitted for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be to rescue a nice family of four from their overturned SUV. But that’s what reportedly happened on July 17, leading his defenders to call him a hero and some critics to claim the event was a hoax aimed at boosting his popularity.
It does seem like an odd coincidence: Zimmerman just happened to be on the scene of the crash at the right moment, and happened to have a fire extinguisher with him to put out the flaming car. And now the family he saved abruptly canceled the press conference they had planned to thank Zimmerman. It’s all too much to believe for the Zimmerman Rescue Truthers, who emerged immediately after the news broke.
“Even if we had a videotape of the accident, they would still say it was made up. So you can’t really respond to people who just don’t want to listen to the truth,” Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara told CNN. “The idea that this was made up — it’s just the same people who refuse to accept the jury’s verdict, just want to be angry, just want to hate George Zimmerman, are still going to hate him.”
He’s probably right. As we’ve noted, conspiracy theories are basically impossible to stamp out. And in this case, the circumstances are just too weird, and the potential public relations benefit for Zimmerman — and thus the perceived incentive to stage the scene — too obvious to explain away for those who are upset about the verdict. Fox News, whose opinion hosts have pretty openly sided with Zimmerman, reported that at an NAACP meeting, “there was a lot — a lot — of skepticism, people saying they don’t believe a word of this.”
“Zimmerman can pull someone from a burning car, but he can’t a push 17-year-old, 150 pound boy off of him?” asked one tweeter. On Twitter, the skeptics appeared to be be predominantly liberal and disproportionately minorities — the same kinds of people who have been pushing for harsher punishment of Zimmerman all along — while others questioned the police officers involved.
“There’s something fishy about this #Zimmerman Rescue,” another person tweeted. “Feels too perfectly timed and convenient.”
One blog advancing the conspiracy narrative that went viral posted screen shots of what appears to be the Facebook page of the officer who responded to the crash, which shows that he posted numerous photos and messages supporting Zimmerman days before and after the accident. Most criticized the media and liberals who turned the case into a race issue. “If Trayvon Martin had been killed in Afghanistan, Barack Obama wouldn’t even know his name,” reads one popular image macro the officer posted. Yet the officer, who posted about other activities of his duty life, didn’t post anything about his run in with Zimmerman. The only reference to the accident was a few days later, when he linked to a local news story and wrote, “I sorta made the news…”
That conspiracy blog even claims that it has a source, whom it does not identify, who saw phone records showing that the officer alerted Zimmerman about the crash before authorities arrived so Zimmerman could end up in the police report and look like a hero. We asked the unnamed blogger for more info about his or source, but the blogger didn’t respond.
Theorists have also speculated that Zimmerman might have a police scanner, given his work as a neighborhood watchman and his current fear for his own safety, and that he used it to respond to the crash before authorities could get there.
They also wonder why none of the multiple 9-1-1 calls mention Zimmerman, though some mention two men on the scene, and why O’Mara says his client didn’t mention the crash when they met the next day. And why none of the family members in the crash mentioned the crash on their Facebook or Twitter pages. And why are there no photos of the crash? All the data points don’t really make sense together — was the entire crash staged, or did Zimmerman show up to intentionally take credit for saving the family? — but various skeptics differ on how much of the accident they think was staged.
Still, even O’Mara acknowledged that the whole thing is a bit weird. “I will acknowledge it was coincidental four or five days after the verdict, but it was not set up, or staged. Really, do you think we would’ve set up a family of four on the side (of the road), destroying an SUV?” the defense lawyer told a local TV station.
The family Zimmerman helped save, he said, didn’t feel comfortable coming forward given all the heat on Zimmerman at the moment. Indeed, TV news trucks have been staked out near their house, much to their dismay, but in refusing to speak with the press, even just to confirm that Zimmerman was on the scene, they’ve helped fuel the conspiracy narrative.
Can corporations have religious beliefs?
All Corporations Go to Heaven
The Supreme Court will soon decide if CEOs can impose their religious convictions on the people who work for them.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate.com
Aug. 1, 2013
Remember the big dustup last summer over the contraception mandate in President Obama’s health reform initiative? It required companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance, including for contraception, as part of their employees’ health care plans. The constitutional question was whether employers with religious objections to providing coverage for birth control could be forced to do so under the new law. The Obama administration tweaked the rules a few times to try to accommodate religious employers, first exempting some religious institutions—churches and ministries were always exempt—and then allowing companies that self-insure to use a separate insurance plan to pay and provide for the contraception. Still, religious employers objected, and lawsuits were filed, all 60 of them.
A year later, the courts have begun to weigh in, and the answer has slowly begun to emerge: maybe yes, maybe no. It all depends on whether corporations—which already enjoy significant free-speech rights—can also invoke religious freedom rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
Last Friday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the contraception mandate, rejecting a challenge from a Pennsylvania-based cabinetmaker who claimed that as a Mennonite he should not be compelled to provide contraceptive coverage to his 950 employees because the mandate violates the company’s rights under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The owner considers some of the contraception methods at issue—specifically, the morning-after and week-after pills—abortifacients.
The appeals court looked carefully to the precedent created by Citizens United—the 2010 case affording corporations free-speech rights when it came to election-related speech—to determine whether corporations also enjoy constitutionally protected religious freedom. Writing for the two judges in the majority, Judge Robert Cowen found that although there was “a long history of protecting corporations’ rights to free speech,” there was no similar history of protection for the free exercise of religion. “We simply cannot understand how a for-profit, secular corporation—apart from its owners—can exercise religion,” he concluded. “A holding to the contrary … would eviscerate the fundamental principle that a corporation is a legally distinct entity from its owners.”
Cowen also flagged the absolute novelty of the claims, noting that there was almost no case law suggesting that corporations can hold religious beliefs. “We are not aware of any case preceding the commencement of litigation about the Mandate, in which a for-profit, secular corporation was itself found to have free exercise rights.” Finally he took pains to distinguish the corporation, Conestoga, from its legal owners. “Since Conestoga is distinct from the Hahns, the Mandate does not actually require the Hahns to do anything. … It is Conestoga that must provide the funds to comply with the Mandate—not the Hahns.”
Judge Kent Jordan, dissenting at length in the case, said that for-profit, secular corporations can surely avail themselves of the protections of the religion clauses. “To recognize that religious convictions are a matter of individual experience cannot and does not refute the collective character of much religious belief and observance ... Religious opinions and faith are in this respect akin to political opinions and passions, which are held and exercised both individually and collectively.”
The 3rd Circuit decision creates a significant split between the appeals courts, because a few short weeks earlier, the Colorado-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., finding by a 5–3 margin that corporations can be persons entitled to assert religious rights. Hobby Lobby is a chain of crafts supply stores located in 41 states. The 10th Circuit upheld an injunction blocking the contraception requirement because it offended the company owners’ religious beliefs. The majority in the 3rd Circuit wrote that it "respectfully disagrees" with the 10th Circuit. A split of this nature makes Supreme Court review almost inevitable.
The Supreme Court will soon decide if CEOs can impose their religious convictions on the people who work for them.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate.com
Aug. 1, 2013
Remember the big dustup last summer over the contraception mandate in President Obama’s health reform initiative? It required companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance, including for contraception, as part of their employees’ health care plans. The constitutional question was whether employers with religious objections to providing coverage for birth control could be forced to do so under the new law. The Obama administration tweaked the rules a few times to try to accommodate religious employers, first exempting some religious institutions—churches and ministries were always exempt—and then allowing companies that self-insure to use a separate insurance plan to pay and provide for the contraception. Still, religious employers objected, and lawsuits were filed, all 60 of them.
A year later, the courts have begun to weigh in, and the answer has slowly begun to emerge: maybe yes, maybe no. It all depends on whether corporations—which already enjoy significant free-speech rights—can also invoke religious freedom rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
Last Friday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the contraception mandate, rejecting a challenge from a Pennsylvania-based cabinetmaker who claimed that as a Mennonite he should not be compelled to provide contraceptive coverage to his 950 employees because the mandate violates the company’s rights under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The owner considers some of the contraception methods at issue—specifically, the morning-after and week-after pills—abortifacients.
The appeals court looked carefully to the precedent created by Citizens United—the 2010 case affording corporations free-speech rights when it came to election-related speech—to determine whether corporations also enjoy constitutionally protected religious freedom. Writing for the two judges in the majority, Judge Robert Cowen found that although there was “a long history of protecting corporations’ rights to free speech,” there was no similar history of protection for the free exercise of religion. “We simply cannot understand how a for-profit, secular corporation—apart from its owners—can exercise religion,” he concluded. “A holding to the contrary … would eviscerate the fundamental principle that a corporation is a legally distinct entity from its owners.”
Cowen also flagged the absolute novelty of the claims, noting that there was almost no case law suggesting that corporations can hold religious beliefs. “We are not aware of any case preceding the commencement of litigation about the Mandate, in which a for-profit, secular corporation was itself found to have free exercise rights.” Finally he took pains to distinguish the corporation, Conestoga, from its legal owners. “Since Conestoga is distinct from the Hahns, the Mandate does not actually require the Hahns to do anything. … It is Conestoga that must provide the funds to comply with the Mandate—not the Hahns.”
Judge Kent Jordan, dissenting at length in the case, said that for-profit, secular corporations can surely avail themselves of the protections of the religion clauses. “To recognize that religious convictions are a matter of individual experience cannot and does not refute the collective character of much religious belief and observance ... Religious opinions and faith are in this respect akin to political opinions and passions, which are held and exercised both individually and collectively.”
The 3rd Circuit decision creates a significant split between the appeals courts, because a few short weeks earlier, the Colorado-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., finding by a 5–3 margin that corporations can be persons entitled to assert religious rights. Hobby Lobby is a chain of crafts supply stores located in 41 states. The 10th Circuit upheld an injunction blocking the contraception requirement because it offended the company owners’ religious beliefs. The majority in the 3rd Circuit wrote that it "respectfully disagrees" with the 10th Circuit. A split of this nature makes Supreme Court review almost inevitable.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Exemption Gives Rich People Obscene Real Estate Tax Breaks
Exemption Gives Rich People Obscene Real Estate Tax Breaks
Gothamist.com
July 14, 2013
The requirements for New York's tax abatement program to entice developers to build new housing tightened in 2008, but rules tend to mean very little when money is involved. This weekend Times reports that recently passed state legislation exempted several luxury buildings under construction from certain requirements for the tax break, including One57 and 30 Park Place. The law gives property owners a 10-year pass on real estate taxes—so the buyer of the $115 million penthouse at One57 would have an annual bill of under $18,000, when they would typically owe $300,000.
The abatement law, known as the 421A program, is complicated and controversial. Created in the '70s to spur economic growth, it has since added affordable housing requirements and tighter restrictions, restrictions that developers apparently had no trouble skirting.
“The idea of the program was that tax subsidies can be an important tool to create residential housing and affordable housing that otherwise wouldn’t be built,” said Vicki Been, the faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “I don’t see how giving a tax break to a building like One57 helps either of those goals.”
As if to offer some warped concept of "balance," the article notes that these tax breaks could be offset by obscenely high hidden fees tacked on to the sale agreements (the proceeds of which go to the developers, not state or city coffers).
At 432 Park Avenue, which will be the tallest condo in the Northern Hemisphere when it opens in 2015, full-floor penthouses are priced between $72.5 million and $95 million and will be saddled with common charges of more than $17,000 a month.
On top of those costly common charges come fees like the mandatory membership in the building’s gym, known as The Club at 432 Park Avenue, which bases its charges on the size of the apartment, with larger units owing more. Then there is the $2,000 that owners are required to pay annually toward the building’s dining room, and the additional $1,200 in private dining services that owners are required to buy annually, whether or not they use the restaurant.
Pity the owners of the $72.5 million apartments who owe mandatory gym membership fees.
Gothamist.com
July 14, 2013
The requirements for New York's tax abatement program to entice developers to build new housing tightened in 2008, but rules tend to mean very little when money is involved. This weekend Times reports that recently passed state legislation exempted several luxury buildings under construction from certain requirements for the tax break, including One57 and 30 Park Place. The law gives property owners a 10-year pass on real estate taxes—so the buyer of the $115 million penthouse at One57 would have an annual bill of under $18,000, when they would typically owe $300,000.
The abatement law, known as the 421A program, is complicated and controversial. Created in the '70s to spur economic growth, it has since added affordable housing requirements and tighter restrictions, restrictions that developers apparently had no trouble skirting.
“The idea of the program was that tax subsidies can be an important tool to create residential housing and affordable housing that otherwise wouldn’t be built,” said Vicki Been, the faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “I don’t see how giving a tax break to a building like One57 helps either of those goals.”
As if to offer some warped concept of "balance," the article notes that these tax breaks could be offset by obscenely high hidden fees tacked on to the sale agreements (the proceeds of which go to the developers, not state or city coffers).
At 432 Park Avenue, which will be the tallest condo in the Northern Hemisphere when it opens in 2015, full-floor penthouses are priced between $72.5 million and $95 million and will be saddled with common charges of more than $17,000 a month.
On top of those costly common charges come fees like the mandatory membership in the building’s gym, known as The Club at 432 Park Avenue, which bases its charges on the size of the apartment, with larger units owing more. Then there is the $2,000 that owners are required to pay annually toward the building’s dining room, and the additional $1,200 in private dining services that owners are required to buy annually, whether or not they use the restaurant.
Pity the owners of the $72.5 million apartments who owe mandatory gym membership fees.
Who are the hostile cranks? These days, it's not the conspiracy theorists
Is this building falling or exploding?
New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile
by Kevin Barrett
Veterans Today
July 14th, 2013
Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.
The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.
The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.
Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”
Additionally, it turned out that the anti-conspiracy people were not only hostile, but fanatically attached to their own conspiracy theories as well. According to them, their own theory of 9/11 – a conspiracy theory holding that 19 Arabs, none of whom could fly planes with any proficiency, pulled off the crime of the century under the direction of a guy on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan – was indisputably true. The so-called conspiracists, on the other hand, did not pretend to have a theory that completely explained the events of 9/11: “For people who think 9/11 was a government conspiracy, the focus is not on promoting a specific rival theory, but in trying to debunk the official account.”
In short, the new study by Wood and Douglas suggests that the negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist – a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory – accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it.
Additionally, the study found that so-called conspiracists discuss historical context (such as viewing the JFK assassination as a precedent for 9/11) more than anti-conspiracists. It also found that the so-called conspiracists to not like to be called “conspiracists” or “conspiracy theorists.”
Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”
In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.
DeHaven-Smith also explains why those who doubt official explanations of high crimes are eager to discuss historical context. He points out that a very large number of conspiracy claims have turned out to be true, and that there appear to be strong relationships between many as-yet-unsolved “state crimes against democracy.” An obvious example is the link between the JFK and RFK assassinations, which both paved the way for presidencies that continued the Vietnam War. According to DeHaven-Smith, we should always discuss the “Kennedy assassinations” in the plural, because the two killings appear to have been aspects of the same larger crime.
Psychologist Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph agrees that the CIA-designed “conspiracy theory” label impedes cognitive function. She points out, in an article published in American Behavioral Scientist (2010), that anti-conspiracy people are unable to think clearly about such apparent state crimes against democracy as 9/11 due to their inability to process information that conflicts with pre-existing belief.
In the same issue of ABS, University of Buffalo professor Steven Hoffman adds that anti-conspiracy people are typically prey to strong “confirmation bias” – that is, they seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while using irrational mechanisms (such as the “conspiracy theory” label) to avoid conflicting information.
The extreme irrationality of those who attack “conspiracy theories” has been ably exposed by Communications professors Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State University. In a 2007 peer-reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” they wrote:
“If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid… By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”
But now, thanks to the internet, people who doubt official stories are no longer excluded from public conversation; the CIA’s 44-year-old campaign to stifle debate using the “conspiracy theory” smear is nearly worn-out. In academic studies, as in comments on news articles, pro-conspiracy voices are now more numerous – and more rational – than anti-conspiracy ones.
No wonder the anti-conspiracy people are sounding more and more like a bunch of hostile, paranoid cranks.
Huawei Named Chinese Spy by Ex-CIA Head
Huawei Named Chinese Spy by Ex-CIA Head
By Peter Suciu
E-Commerce Times
Part of the ECT News Network
07/22/13
Chinese firms have been suspected before of spying for their home nation, but this time a prominent U.S. figure says he's aware of concrete evidence of Huawei's activities in that vein. "Almost every company in China is owned by the government one way or another," said analyst Alan Webber. "The line bleeds over between government and private company in China, and it is a huge gray area."
There is hard evidence that Chinese Huawei Technologies has spied for the Chinese government, former U.S. CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden asserted in a recent interview.
The company -- now the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker -- poses an unambiguous national security threat to both Australia and the United States, Hayden said in an interview with The Australian Financial Review.
The Chinese firm has shared extensive knowledge of foreign telecommunications systems, Hayden said. He did not, however, disclose in detail the nature of the evidence.
Hayden is currently principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy, as well as a professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. He did not respond to our request to comment for this story.
'Put Up or Shut Up'
Huawei was founded in 1988 by ex-military officer Ren Zhengfei as a private company. Today, as a multinational corporation, it has more than 140,000 employees with R&D facilities in China, the United States, Germany, Sweden and Russia.
The company has strongly denied the allegations that it has spied for Beijing.
"Huawei is a world-leading, proven and trusted ICT company,' said Huawei Global Cyber Security Officer John Suffolk in a statement provided to the E-Commerce Times by company spokesperson Jannie Luong. "These tired, unsubstantiated defamatory remarks are sad distractions from real-world concerns related to espionage -- industrial and otherwise -- that demand serious discussion globally.
"Once again, we challenge the individuals and organizations that make these accusations to present the evidence publicly," Suffolk added. "If they will not publish them, they should be taken for what they are: a distraction. Huawei meets the communication needs of more than a third of the planet, and our customers have the right to know what these unsubstantiated concerns are."
It's time to "put up or shut up," he said.
The Chinese Connection
Huawei is not the only Chinese firm that has been at the center of allegations of spying for the Chinese government, however. In October of last year the United States House of Representatives' intelligence committee urged American firms to stop doing business with not just Huawei but also ZTE.
At the time, the committee warned that the Chinese government could use equipment supplied by these firms to spy on certain communications and even threaten vital systems.
In Australia, it wasn't just warnings; there, the government barred Huawei from involvement in building a national broadband network.
"Almost every company in China is owned by the government one way or another," Alan Webber, industry analyst and managing partner at the Altimeter Group, told the E-Commerce Times. "It also depends on what your definition of spying is.
"The line bleeds over between government and private company in China, and it is a huge gray area," added Webber, "but we need to ask: Would a U.S. company turn over information to the CIA or NSA? It is possible. Corporations have been used for cover for government agencies."
'Reason to Be Suspicious'
Given that Chinese firms have been at the center of past allegations, it's perhaps not all that surprising that Huawei is at the center of it again.
"There is certainly reason to be suspicious of Huawei, although the report earlier this year from Congress provided no smoking gun," said Jon Lindsay of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. "Australia and the UK have also taken action to restrict investment in the company.
"There may be more that's classified we don't know, but there is at least some legitimate circumstantial grounds for suspicion," Lindsay told the E-Commerce Times. "Denials are normal from China, even when the evidence is more convincing than in the case of Huawei."
That said, however, Huawei is a global company and must remain globally competitive, Lindsay pointed out.
"Moreover, it likely has incentives to limit the level of blatant interference that the Chinese government makes for the purpose of espionage," he noted -- "all the more so as the controversy increases."
Conflicts of Interest?
Also worth noting, meanwhile, is that Hayden is on the board of directors at Motorola Solutions, which produces radios, smart tags, barcode scanners and safety products.
In the past, Motorola Solutions and Huawei have been engaged in intellectual property disputes.
"This news is really undercut by Hayden's affiliation with Motorola," Jeffrey Silva, senior policy director for telecommunications, media and technology at Medley Global Advisors, told the E-Commerce Times. "This could give Huawei something to counter with. In this case, the perception has somewhat become a reality."
'The Market Imperatives'
Of course, spying has been part of diplomacy and international relations for years. Yet while the trade craft continues to evolve, so, too, do the players. An especially complicating factor these days is what happens when the corporate interests of large, multinational corporations aren't compatible with those of their home nations.
"Even if there is Chinese government tampering in Western supply chains through Huawei equipment, there are real limits to what could potentially be done," said Lindsay. "Huawei has to ensure that its equipment works reliably well almost all the time if it is to put its equipment into position where it can make money, let alone support Chinese collection.
"If you are a company in the business of mass-producing standardized commodity equipment, how are you supposed to target it against particular targets for espionage?" Lindsay concluded. "Market imperatives tend to really limit the potential for Huawei's involvement in meaningful espionage."
By Peter Suciu
E-Commerce Times
Part of the ECT News Network
07/22/13
Chinese firms have been suspected before of spying for their home nation, but this time a prominent U.S. figure says he's aware of concrete evidence of Huawei's activities in that vein. "Almost every company in China is owned by the government one way or another," said analyst Alan Webber. "The line bleeds over between government and private company in China, and it is a huge gray area."
There is hard evidence that Chinese Huawei Technologies has spied for the Chinese government, former U.S. CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden asserted in a recent interview.
The company -- now the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker -- poses an unambiguous national security threat to both Australia and the United States, Hayden said in an interview with The Australian Financial Review.
The Chinese firm has shared extensive knowledge of foreign telecommunications systems, Hayden said. He did not, however, disclose in detail the nature of the evidence.
Hayden is currently principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy, as well as a professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. He did not respond to our request to comment for this story.
'Put Up or Shut Up'
Huawei was founded in 1988 by ex-military officer Ren Zhengfei as a private company. Today, as a multinational corporation, it has more than 140,000 employees with R&D facilities in China, the United States, Germany, Sweden and Russia.
The company has strongly denied the allegations that it has spied for Beijing.
"Huawei is a world-leading, proven and trusted ICT company,' said Huawei Global Cyber Security Officer John Suffolk in a statement provided to the E-Commerce Times by company spokesperson Jannie Luong. "These tired, unsubstantiated defamatory remarks are sad distractions from real-world concerns related to espionage -- industrial and otherwise -- that demand serious discussion globally.
"Once again, we challenge the individuals and organizations that make these accusations to present the evidence publicly," Suffolk added. "If they will not publish them, they should be taken for what they are: a distraction. Huawei meets the communication needs of more than a third of the planet, and our customers have the right to know what these unsubstantiated concerns are."
It's time to "put up or shut up," he said.
The Chinese Connection
Huawei is not the only Chinese firm that has been at the center of allegations of spying for the Chinese government, however. In October of last year the United States House of Representatives' intelligence committee urged American firms to stop doing business with not just Huawei but also ZTE.
At the time, the committee warned that the Chinese government could use equipment supplied by these firms to spy on certain communications and even threaten vital systems.
In Australia, it wasn't just warnings; there, the government barred Huawei from involvement in building a national broadband network.
"Almost every company in China is owned by the government one way or another," Alan Webber, industry analyst and managing partner at the Altimeter Group, told the E-Commerce Times. "It also depends on what your definition of spying is.
"The line bleeds over between government and private company in China, and it is a huge gray area," added Webber, "but we need to ask: Would a U.S. company turn over information to the CIA or NSA? It is possible. Corporations have been used for cover for government agencies."
'Reason to Be Suspicious'
Given that Chinese firms have been at the center of past allegations, it's perhaps not all that surprising that Huawei is at the center of it again.
"There is certainly reason to be suspicious of Huawei, although the report earlier this year from Congress provided no smoking gun," said Jon Lindsay of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. "Australia and the UK have also taken action to restrict investment in the company.
"There may be more that's classified we don't know, but there is at least some legitimate circumstantial grounds for suspicion," Lindsay told the E-Commerce Times. "Denials are normal from China, even when the evidence is more convincing than in the case of Huawei."
That said, however, Huawei is a global company and must remain globally competitive, Lindsay pointed out.
"Moreover, it likely has incentives to limit the level of blatant interference that the Chinese government makes for the purpose of espionage," he noted -- "all the more so as the controversy increases."
Conflicts of Interest?
Also worth noting, meanwhile, is that Hayden is on the board of directors at Motorola Solutions, which produces radios, smart tags, barcode scanners and safety products.
In the past, Motorola Solutions and Huawei have been engaged in intellectual property disputes.
"This news is really undercut by Hayden's affiliation with Motorola," Jeffrey Silva, senior policy director for telecommunications, media and technology at Medley Global Advisors, told the E-Commerce Times. "This could give Huawei something to counter with. In this case, the perception has somewhat become a reality."
'The Market Imperatives'
Of course, spying has been part of diplomacy and international relations for years. Yet while the trade craft continues to evolve, so, too, do the players. An especially complicating factor these days is what happens when the corporate interests of large, multinational corporations aren't compatible with those of their home nations.
"Even if there is Chinese government tampering in Western supply chains through Huawei equipment, there are real limits to what could potentially be done," said Lindsay. "Huawei has to ensure that its equipment works reliably well almost all the time if it is to put its equipment into position where it can make money, let alone support Chinese collection.
"If you are a company in the business of mass-producing standardized commodity equipment, how are you supposed to target it against particular targets for espionage?" Lindsay concluded. "Market imperatives tend to really limit the potential for Huawei's involvement in meaningful espionage."
Andy Borowitz Report: OPPONENTS OF STAND YOUR GROUND PROPOSE NEW LAW, DON’T SHOOT ME FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON
OPPONENTS OF STAND YOUR GROUND PROPOSE NEW LAW, DON’T SHOOT ME FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON
POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ
The New Yorker
JULY 22, 2013
TALLAHASSEE (The Borowitz Report)—Opponents of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law are attempting to mobilize support for a new law called Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason.
The proposed law, which faces major opposition in the Florida legislature, would make it illegal for people in the state to shoot each other for no reason whatsoever.
“Under the provisions of Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason, you will be required to have an actual reason for shooting someone,” said a spokesman for the measure, Harland Dorrinson. “This will be a first in Florida.”
The controversial bill has already drawn the ire of the National Rifle Association, which issued a statement today saying that requiring someone to have a reason to shoot another person would violate the Second Amendment.
“If you force someone to have a reason to shoot someone, soon you will be taking away his right to shoot that person altogether,” the N.R.A. said.
“We are not in principle against the idea of having a reason to shoot someone,” the N.R.A. continued. “But we believe you should be allowed to shoot the person first and have the reason second.”
Even if Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason somehow passes in the legislature, Florida Gov. Rick Scott said today that he would veto it, telling reporters, “Making people in Florida have a reason to shoot each other would fundamentally change our way of life.”v
POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ
The New Yorker
JULY 22, 2013
TALLAHASSEE (The Borowitz Report)—Opponents of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law are attempting to mobilize support for a new law called Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason.
The proposed law, which faces major opposition in the Florida legislature, would make it illegal for people in the state to shoot each other for no reason whatsoever.
“Under the provisions of Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason, you will be required to have an actual reason for shooting someone,” said a spokesman for the measure, Harland Dorrinson. “This will be a first in Florida.”
The controversial bill has already drawn the ire of the National Rifle Association, which issued a statement today saying that requiring someone to have a reason to shoot another person would violate the Second Amendment.
“If you force someone to have a reason to shoot someone, soon you will be taking away his right to shoot that person altogether,” the N.R.A. said.
“We are not in principle against the idea of having a reason to shoot someone,” the N.R.A. continued. “But we believe you should be allowed to shoot the person first and have the reason second.”
Even if Don’t Shoot Me for Absolutely No Reason somehow passes in the legislature, Florida Gov. Rick Scott said today that he would veto it, telling reporters, “Making people in Florida have a reason to shoot each other would fundamentally change our way of life.”v
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Bill Moyers: "Inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive and it was created."
Bill Moyers:
"Inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive and it was created. Today, 1% of Americans are taking home nearly 20% of the country's total income and own nearly 35% of the country's wealth. This didn't happen by accident. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains, we allowed it to happen."
How Inequality Was Created
July 10, 2013
by Theresa Riley
Great new animated video from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and the folks behind inequality.is explaining how inequality was politically engineered.
"Inequality is real, it's personal, it's expensive and it was created. Today, 1% of Americans are taking home nearly 20% of the country's total income and own nearly 35% of the country's wealth. This didn't happen by accident. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains, we allowed it to happen."
How Inequality Was Created
July 10, 2013
by Theresa Riley
Great new animated video from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and the folks behind inequality.is explaining how inequality was politically engineered.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Dozens Injured in Northern Ireland as Protestants Riot Over Blocked Parade Route
Dozens Injured in Northern Ireland as Protestants Riot Over Blocked Parade Route
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 13, 2013
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Hundreds of police reinforcements from Britain were deployed Saturday on Belfast’s rubble-strewn streets after Protestant riots over a blocked march left 32 officers, a senior lawmaker and at least 8 rioters injured.
Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, blamed leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood for inciting running street battles in two parts of Belfast that lasted six hours and subsided early Saturday. He called the group’s leaders reckless and said they had had no plan for controlling the crowds they had summoned.
The fraternity’s annual July 12 marches always raise tensions with the Roman Catholic minority here. In each of the previous four years, violence has broken out after an Orange parade passed by the mainly Catholic district Ardoyne in north Belfast, the most bitterly divided part of the capital.
This year the British authorities ordered the marchers to avoid the stretch of road nearest Ardoyne, an order that the police enforced by blocking the parade route with seven armored vehicles. Orange leaders took that as a challenge and rallied thousands of supporters to the spot, where some attacked police vehicles and the lines of heavily armored officers behind them.
Chief Baggott said the Orange leaders behaved recklessly and should not duck responsibility for the mayhem.
“Having called thousands of people to protest, they had no plan and no control,” said Chief Baggott, an Englishman who has commanded the Police Service of Northern Ireland since 2009.
Orange leaders said the blockade decision was the problem, not the fury of their own members. But they backed off their original threat to mount indefinite street protests across Northern Ireland and ordered a suspension of protests early Saturday. The order’s leaders declined requests for interviews.
Nigel Dodds, north Belfast’s Protestant member of Parliament and an Orangeman himself, had gone to the riot’s front line to appeal for calm and was knocked unconscious by a brick that fell short of police lines. He was released from the hospital on Saturday.
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service said it transported eight wounded civilians from the riots. But other rioters are likely to have stayed away from hospitals, because those admitted for riot-related injuries can be identified and arrested by the police.
Britain’s cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, said it was “vitally important for the Orange Order to make clear now that their protests have come to an end.”
“It would be disastrous if we were to see a recurrence of last night’s violence over the next few days,” she said.
The July 12 parades officially commemorate a 17th-century battlefield victory by the Protestants over Catholics. But in practical terms, the mass military-themed mobilizations — including 550 on Friday alone — provide a graphic annual test of whether Protestants still wield control in a land where the government and the police for decades were almost exclusively Protestant...
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 13, 2013
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Hundreds of police reinforcements from Britain were deployed Saturday on Belfast’s rubble-strewn streets after Protestant riots over a blocked march left 32 officers, a senior lawmaker and at least 8 rioters injured.
Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, blamed leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood for inciting running street battles in two parts of Belfast that lasted six hours and subsided early Saturday. He called the group’s leaders reckless and said they had had no plan for controlling the crowds they had summoned.
The fraternity’s annual July 12 marches always raise tensions with the Roman Catholic minority here. In each of the previous four years, violence has broken out after an Orange parade passed by the mainly Catholic district Ardoyne in north Belfast, the most bitterly divided part of the capital.
This year the British authorities ordered the marchers to avoid the stretch of road nearest Ardoyne, an order that the police enforced by blocking the parade route with seven armored vehicles. Orange leaders took that as a challenge and rallied thousands of supporters to the spot, where some attacked police vehicles and the lines of heavily armored officers behind them.
Chief Baggott said the Orange leaders behaved recklessly and should not duck responsibility for the mayhem.
“Having called thousands of people to protest, they had no plan and no control,” said Chief Baggott, an Englishman who has commanded the Police Service of Northern Ireland since 2009.
Orange leaders said the blockade decision was the problem, not the fury of their own members. But they backed off their original threat to mount indefinite street protests across Northern Ireland and ordered a suspension of protests early Saturday. The order’s leaders declined requests for interviews.
Nigel Dodds, north Belfast’s Protestant member of Parliament and an Orangeman himself, had gone to the riot’s front line to appeal for calm and was knocked unconscious by a brick that fell short of police lines. He was released from the hospital on Saturday.
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service said it transported eight wounded civilians from the riots. But other rioters are likely to have stayed away from hospitals, because those admitted for riot-related injuries can be identified and arrested by the police.
Britain’s cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, said it was “vitally important for the Orange Order to make clear now that their protests have come to an end.”
“It would be disastrous if we were to see a recurrence of last night’s violence over the next few days,” she said.
The July 12 parades officially commemorate a 17th-century battlefield victory by the Protestants over Catholics. But in practical terms, the mass military-themed mobilizations — including 550 on Friday alone — provide a graphic annual test of whether Protestants still wield control in a land where the government and the police for decades were almost exclusively Protestant...
Friday, July 12, 2013
Texas Confiscating Tampons
TX Confiscating Tampons
Rep. Diane Russell
moveon.org
July 12, 2013
Ummm... yeah. You read that correctly.
Right now, women are flooding the Texas Statehouse to stand with Sen. Wendy Davis as she and her Democratic colleagues fight to protect a woman's right to choose for this afternoon's vote.
Before they get to the gallery, though, security is confiscating tampons and maxipads. You can bring in your gun - just not your tampons. (Filed under: You can't make this up!)
Rep. Diane Russell
moveon.org
July 12, 2013
Ummm... yeah. You read that correctly.
Right now, women are flooding the Texas Statehouse to stand with Sen. Wendy Davis as she and her Democratic colleagues fight to protect a woman's right to choose for this afternoon's vote.
Before they get to the gallery, though, security is confiscating tampons and maxipads. You can bring in your gun - just not your tampons. (Filed under: You can't make this up!)
Thursday, July 11, 2013
We can't arrest our way out of the drug war
Smoking while black
by Anthony D. Romero
ACLU Action
July 11, 2013
Never stand on the corner by yourself-that's Alfredo Carrasquillo's first rule about life in the city. But it wasn't enough to avoid getting stopped by the police just for going about his daily life. And when the police found a five-dollar bag of marijuana on him, that meant three days in jail and a guilty plea.
As Alfredo put it, "I'm Black regardless. I can't escape it. And let's be honest. It's not just about smoking. It's also about race." Our new report on the War on Drugs backs him up: even though whites and blacks use marijuana at comparable rates, black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
Part of the problem is that when police are seeking out or receiving federal drug war money, they report on arrest numbers, including marijuana arrests. This creates a powerful incentive for police to aggressively go after people like Alfredo with small amounts of marijuana-it's an easy way to get a lot of arrests. Our new report has already been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, ABC News, and The Guardian-bringing attention to how billions of our tax dollars are funding this wasteful, racially biased numbers game. Now we need to capitalize on this moment so that we can put an end to this injustice.
Urge Attorney General Eric Holder not to reward police for making racially biased, wasteful arrests. Sign the petition to stop including marijuana possession arrests in the performance metrics for state and local police receiving federal money.
v Our report reveals some staggering numbers that confirm the failure of the War on Drugs: in just one year, over $3.6 billion in tax dollars were spent to enforce marijuana laws; in a decade, over 8 million people were arrested, without making us any safer.
In a recent speech, President Obama's drug czar aptly said, "we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem."
by Anthony D. Romero
ACLU Action
July 11, 2013
Never stand on the corner by yourself-that's Alfredo Carrasquillo's first rule about life in the city. But it wasn't enough to avoid getting stopped by the police just for going about his daily life. And when the police found a five-dollar bag of marijuana on him, that meant three days in jail and a guilty plea.
As Alfredo put it, "I'm Black regardless. I can't escape it. And let's be honest. It's not just about smoking. It's also about race." Our new report on the War on Drugs backs him up: even though whites and blacks use marijuana at comparable rates, black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
Part of the problem is that when police are seeking out or receiving federal drug war money, they report on arrest numbers, including marijuana arrests. This creates a powerful incentive for police to aggressively go after people like Alfredo with small amounts of marijuana-it's an easy way to get a lot of arrests. Our new report has already been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, ABC News, and The Guardian-bringing attention to how billions of our tax dollars are funding this wasteful, racially biased numbers game. Now we need to capitalize on this moment so that we can put an end to this injustice.
Urge Attorney General Eric Holder not to reward police for making racially biased, wasteful arrests. Sign the petition to stop including marijuana possession arrests in the performance metrics for state and local police receiving federal money.
v Our report reveals some staggering numbers that confirm the failure of the War on Drugs: in just one year, over $3.6 billion in tax dollars were spent to enforce marijuana laws; in a decade, over 8 million people were arrested, without making us any safer.
In a recent speech, President Obama's drug czar aptly said, "we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem."
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Tale of the snail tells us about Ireland's ancient origins
New research suggests that snails in Ireland and the Pyrenees share almost identical genetic material not found in British snails, suggesting the snails arrived in Ireland with southern European migrants.
By Elizabeth Barber, Contributor
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition
June 20, 2013
Listen close to the tale of the snail – it may tell us about the mysterious history of ancient Ireland.
New research published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE found that the snails in Ireland and the Pyrenees share genes not found in British snails. Since it’s improbable that the Irish snails made a slow, slimy crawl thousands of miles long from France and Spain, scientists suggest that the simplest explanation is that snails arrived with snail-eating migrants from southern Europe some 8,000 years ago.
That Ireland is genetically different from Britain and has genetic similarities to Iberia – with numerous species that are unique to it and Iberia, including the strawberry tree, the Kerry slug, and the Pyrenean glass snail – has long puzzled scientists. In tracing the snail’s genetic origins, this latest research joins a growing body of evidence that the first people of Ireland arrived from Iberia.
“The results tie in with what we know from human genetics about the human colonisation of Ireland — the people may have come from somewhere in southern Europe,” said Angus Davison, of the University of Nottingham and the co-author of the study, in a statement. “What we’re actually seeing might be the long lasting legacy of snails that hitched a ride, accidentally or perhaps as food, as humans travelled from the South of France to Ireland 8,000 years ago.”
Davison and Adele Grindon, also of the University of Nottingham, analyzed mitochondrial DNA found in muscle samples sliced from the feet of some 880 snails, from the species Cepaea nemoralis. Researchers and volunteers had spent two years collecting the little animals across Europe.
The researchers found that snails in Ireland share a mitochondrial lineage with the Central and Eastern Pyrenean snail populations, but not with snails collected elsewhere in Europe.
Researchers are unsure whether or not the snails travelled as stowaways or as snacks for the long-journeying migrants. Mesolithic or Stone Age humans in the Pyrenees are recorded to have eaten snails, or perhaps farmed them.
Sunday, June 02, 2013
Are good atheists going to hell? No, says Pope Francis. Not necessarily, clarifies Rev. Rosica.
Atheism, the Catholic Church, and Eternal Salvation
By Christopher
Christopher's Apologies
May 28, 2013
[Rev. Thomas Rosica’s clarification of the eternal dwelling-place of atheists, in response to Pope Francis' recent statement that good atheists go to heaven:]
"...A non-Christian may reject a Christian’s presentation of the gospel of Christ. That however, does not necessarily mean that the person has truly rejected Christ and God. Rejection of Christianity may not mean the rejection of Christ. For if a given individual rejects the Christianity brought to him through the Church’s preaching, even then we are still never in any position to decide whether this rejection as it exists in the concrete signifies a grave fault or an act of faithfulness to one’s own conscience. We can never say with ultimate certainty whether a non-Christian who has rejected Christianity and who, in spite of a certain encounter with Christianity, does not become a Christian, is still following the temporary path mapped out for his own salvation which is leading him to an encounter with God, or whether he has now entered upon the way of perdition...."
Unfortunately, nuance has been missing from most of the coverage of this story.
Not so fast: Vatican says Pope Francis got it wrong, atheists do go to hell
The Washington Times
May 30, 2013
The Vatican has issued a new statement running counter to Pope Francis‘ recent suggestion [see story below] that good deeds can earn atheists entrance to heaven.
The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said in what was described as an “explanatory note” that those who know about the Catholic Church “cannot be saved [if they] refuse to enter her or remain in her,” United Press International reported.
Father Rosica also added, UPI reported: Those “who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ and His church, but sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, try to do his will as it is known through the dictates of conscience, can attain eternal salvation.”
Some see Father Rosica’s statements as running contrary to what Pope Francis said on May 22.
Then, the pope said that redemption was available to all — “not just Catholics,” but “even the atheists. Everyone,” UPI reported. He then went on to speak of doing good to others, talking specifically to atheists when he added: “But do good — we will meet one another there [in heaven].” UPI reported.
After the Vatican issued its “explanatory note,” noted British scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins wrote on Twitter: “Atheists go to heaven? Nope. Sorry world, infallible pope got it wrong. Vatican steps in with alacrity.”
And author Neal Donald Walsch, who wrote “Conversations With God,” said to UPI that “it was regrettable that the hidden hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church chose to officially retract the recent statement on eternal damnation bravely made by its new leader, Pope Francis.”
Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics
Huff Post
05/22/2013
Pope Francis rocked some religious and atheist minds today when he declared that everyone was redeemed through Jesus, including atheists.
During his homily at Wednesday Mass in Rome, Francis emphasized the importance of "doing good" as a principle that unites all humanity, and a "culture of encounter" to support peace.
Using scripture from the Gospel of Mark, Francis explained how upset Jesus' disciples were that someone outside their group was doing good, according to a report from Vatican Radio.
“They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation.”
Pope Francis went further in his sermon to say:
"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!".. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
Responding to the leader of the Roman Catholic church's homily, Father James Martin, S.J. wrote in an email to The Huffington Post:
"Pope Francis is saying, more clearly than ever before, that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone. That's always been a Christian belief. You can find St. Paul saying in the First Letter to Timothy that Jesus gave himself as a "ransom for all." But rarely do you hear it said by Catholics so forcefully, and with such evident joy. And in this era of religious controversies, it's a timely reminder that God cannot be confined to our narrow categories."
Of course, not all Christians believe that those who don't believe will be redeemed, and the Pope's words may spark memories of the deep divisions from the Protestant reformation over the belief in redemption through grace versus redemption through works.
The pope's comment has also struck a chord on Reddit, where it is the second most-shared piece.
Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis said on Wednesday in his latest urging that people of all religions - or no religion - work together.
The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics made his comments in the homily of his morning Mass in his residence, a daily event where he speaks without prepared comments.
He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.
"Even them, everyone," the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. "We all have the duty to do good," he said.
"Just do good and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical conversation in which someone told a priest: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."
Francis's reaching out to atheists and people who belong to no religion is a marked contrast to the attitude of former Pope Benedict, who sometimes left non-Catholics feeling that he saw them as second-class believers.
By Christopher
Christopher's Apologies
May 28, 2013
[Rev. Thomas Rosica’s clarification of the eternal dwelling-place of atheists, in response to Pope Francis' recent statement that good atheists go to heaven:]
"...A non-Christian may reject a Christian’s presentation of the gospel of Christ. That however, does not necessarily mean that the person has truly rejected Christ and God. Rejection of Christianity may not mean the rejection of Christ. For if a given individual rejects the Christianity brought to him through the Church’s preaching, even then we are still never in any position to decide whether this rejection as it exists in the concrete signifies a grave fault or an act of faithfulness to one’s own conscience. We can never say with ultimate certainty whether a non-Christian who has rejected Christianity and who, in spite of a certain encounter with Christianity, does not become a Christian, is still following the temporary path mapped out for his own salvation which is leading him to an encounter with God, or whether he has now entered upon the way of perdition...."
Unfortunately, nuance has been missing from most of the coverage of this story.
Not so fast: Vatican says Pope Francis got it wrong, atheists do go to hell
The Washington Times
May 30, 2013
The Vatican has issued a new statement running counter to Pope Francis‘ recent suggestion [see story below] that good deeds can earn atheists entrance to heaven.
The Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said in what was described as an “explanatory note” that those who know about the Catholic Church “cannot be saved [if they] refuse to enter her or remain in her,” United Press International reported.
Father Rosica also added, UPI reported: Those “who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ and His church, but sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, try to do his will as it is known through the dictates of conscience, can attain eternal salvation.”
Some see Father Rosica’s statements as running contrary to what Pope Francis said on May 22.
Then, the pope said that redemption was available to all — “not just Catholics,” but “even the atheists. Everyone,” UPI reported. He then went on to speak of doing good to others, talking specifically to atheists when he added: “But do good — we will meet one another there [in heaven].” UPI reported.
After the Vatican issued its “explanatory note,” noted British scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins wrote on Twitter: “Atheists go to heaven? Nope. Sorry world, infallible pope got it wrong. Vatican steps in with alacrity.”
And author Neal Donald Walsch, who wrote “Conversations With God,” said to UPI that “it was regrettable that the hidden hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church chose to officially retract the recent statement on eternal damnation bravely made by its new leader, Pope Francis.”
Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics
Huff Post
05/22/2013
Pope Francis rocked some religious and atheist minds today when he declared that everyone was redeemed through Jesus, including atheists.
During his homily at Wednesday Mass in Rome, Francis emphasized the importance of "doing good" as a principle that unites all humanity, and a "culture of encounter" to support peace.
Using scripture from the Gospel of Mark, Francis explained how upset Jesus' disciples were that someone outside their group was doing good, according to a report from Vatican Radio.
“They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation.”
Pope Francis went further in his sermon to say:
"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!".. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
Responding to the leader of the Roman Catholic church's homily, Father James Martin, S.J. wrote in an email to The Huffington Post:
"Pope Francis is saying, more clearly than ever before, that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone. That's always been a Christian belief. You can find St. Paul saying in the First Letter to Timothy that Jesus gave himself as a "ransom for all." But rarely do you hear it said by Catholics so forcefully, and with such evident joy. And in this era of religious controversies, it's a timely reminder that God cannot be confined to our narrow categories."
Of course, not all Christians believe that those who don't believe will be redeemed, and the Pope's words may spark memories of the deep divisions from the Protestant reformation over the belief in redemption through grace versus redemption through works.
The pope's comment has also struck a chord on Reddit, where it is the second most-shared piece.
Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis said on Wednesday in his latest urging that people of all religions - or no religion - work together.
The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics made his comments in the homily of his morning Mass in his residence, a daily event where he speaks without prepared comments.
He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.
"Even them, everyone," the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. "We all have the duty to do good," he said.
"Just do good and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical conversation in which someone told a priest: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."
Francis's reaching out to atheists and people who belong to no religion is a marked contrast to the attitude of former Pope Benedict, who sometimes left non-Catholics feeling that he saw them as second-class believers.
"We are all here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I have no idea."
John Foster Hall is the author of a quote mistakenly attributed to W. H. Auden or Oscar Wilde.
We are all on earth to help others . . .
By Edward Mendelson
The Auden Society
December 2007; updated August 2012
Auden is commonly cited as the author of the sentence that he called "the conceit . . . of the social worker—'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know'" (Prose, vol. 2, p. 347; cf. variants on pp. 160, 180, and 424). He never claimed credit for it, however, and the real authorship remained unknown to students of his work until a letter by R. Meikle in the Spectator, 22 November 2002, traced the sentence to the English music-hall and radio comedian John Foster Hall (1867-1945), who called himself The Revd. Vivian Foster, the Vicar of Mirth.
"Vivian Foster" made about ten recordings on the Columbia label between around 1915 and 1933 with such titles as "The Parson and the Collection," "The Parson Talks About Marriage," "The Parson's Christmas Address," and "The Parson Pleads for Happiness." (He recorded some of these twice, first using the old acoustical recording method, then the later electrical method.) The sentence that Auden quoted may be heard on his 1923 recording, "The Parson Addresses His Flock," starting about two minutes and ten seconds into side 2. This 26-second audio extract (630KB, from the Dinosaur Discs CD described below) includes the familiar phrase.
A detailed biographical account of John Foster Hall, who was the son of an Anglican vicar and began his career as a schoolmaster, appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph, 19 May 2003. One detail not noted in this account is that Foster performed in at least one film, This Week of Grace (directed by Maurice Elvey, 1933), in which he played the Vicar.
Foster's records were widely popular in Britain, and would have been heard by everyone who had even a slight familiarity with popular culture. But it is possible that Auden's attention was called to the phrase in the early 1940s by his friends the theologians Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr.
Ursula Niebuhr, an Anglican who had grown up in England and studied at Oxford, would have recognized Foster's sentence as an exact representation of the way in which many real clergymen thought about their moral obligations.
Reinhold Niebuhr could also have heard it during his visits to Britain, or from Ursula Niebuhr. v Auden seems first to have quoted the phrase in a review of a biography of George Bernard Shaw in the Roman Catholic weekly The Commonweal, 23 October 1942, at a time when his friendship with the Niebuhrs was especially close.
A CD copy of all of Vivian Foster's recordings may be purchased from Windyridge CDs for £10 or $18 (plus postage outside the UK). Until the Windyridge CD became available, the best source for Vivian Foster recordings as Dinosaur Discs, who will prepare a CD of Foster's records on request; a Dinosaur Discs CD was the source of the sound clip on this page. (The Windyridge CD became available only after this page was first posted.)
We are all on earth to help others . . .
By Edward Mendelson
The Auden Society
December 2007; updated August 2012
Auden is commonly cited as the author of the sentence that he called "the conceit . . . of the social worker—'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know'" (Prose, vol. 2, p. 347; cf. variants on pp. 160, 180, and 424). He never claimed credit for it, however, and the real authorship remained unknown to students of his work until a letter by R. Meikle in the Spectator, 22 November 2002, traced the sentence to the English music-hall and radio comedian John Foster Hall (1867-1945), who called himself The Revd. Vivian Foster, the Vicar of Mirth.
"Vivian Foster" made about ten recordings on the Columbia label between around 1915 and 1933 with such titles as "The Parson and the Collection," "The Parson Talks About Marriage," "The Parson's Christmas Address," and "The Parson Pleads for Happiness." (He recorded some of these twice, first using the old acoustical recording method, then the later electrical method.) The sentence that Auden quoted may be heard on his 1923 recording, "The Parson Addresses His Flock," starting about two minutes and ten seconds into side 2. This 26-second audio extract (630KB, from the Dinosaur Discs CD described below) includes the familiar phrase.
A detailed biographical account of John Foster Hall, who was the son of an Anglican vicar and began his career as a schoolmaster, appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph, 19 May 2003. One detail not noted in this account is that Foster performed in at least one film, This Week of Grace (directed by Maurice Elvey, 1933), in which he played the Vicar.
Foster's records were widely popular in Britain, and would have been heard by everyone who had even a slight familiarity with popular culture. But it is possible that Auden's attention was called to the phrase in the early 1940s by his friends the theologians Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr.
Ursula Niebuhr, an Anglican who had grown up in England and studied at Oxford, would have recognized Foster's sentence as an exact representation of the way in which many real clergymen thought about their moral obligations.
Reinhold Niebuhr could also have heard it during his visits to Britain, or from Ursula Niebuhr. v Auden seems first to have quoted the phrase in a review of a biography of George Bernard Shaw in the Roman Catholic weekly The Commonweal, 23 October 1942, at a time when his friendship with the Niebuhrs was especially close.
A CD copy of all of Vivian Foster's recordings may be purchased from Windyridge CDs for £10 or $18 (plus postage outside the UK). Until the Windyridge CD became available, the best source for Vivian Foster recordings as Dinosaur Discs, who will prepare a CD of Foster's records on request; a Dinosaur Discs CD was the source of the sound clip on this page. (The Windyridge CD became available only after this page was first posted.)
Friday, May 31, 2013
Biggest GOP food stamp foe gets huge farm subsidies
Biggest GOP food stamp foe gets huge farm subsidies
by Joan McCarter
Daily Kos staff
May 23, 2013
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
Welfare recipient Stephen Fincher.
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) has been making a big splash with his supposedly Jesus-inspired opposition to the government helping to keep poor people alive by giving them food stamps. As could be totally expected, Fincher's Bible-quoting is highly selective and hugely misinterpreted, because that's what wingnuts quoting the Bible do.
Fincher should include in his Bible study the plethora of verses that address hypocrisy. Because, when it comes to where the funding in the Farm Bill is allocated, he's among the biggest.
Using Agriculture Department data, researchers at the Environmental Working Group found that Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, Tenn., collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012. The data is part of the research group’s online farm subsidy database from which the group issues a report each year.
In 2012 alone, the data shows, Mr. Fincher received about $70,000 in direct payments, money that is given to farmers and farmland owners, even if they do not grow crops. It is unclear how much Mr. Fincher received in crop insurance subsidies because the names of people receiving the subsidies are not public. The group said most of the agriculture subsidies go to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country. These farmers have received $265 billion in direct payments and farm insurance subsidies since 1995, federal records show.
Fincher voted for $20 billion in cuts to the supplemental nutrition program over the next 10 years. He also voted to increase the farm subsidies he's on the receiving end of. It's likely that the bulk of Rep. Fincher's income is provided entirely by taxpayers, from these farm subsidies to his congressional salary. Flincher also, of course, is an enthusiastic supporter of Paul Ryan's budget that decimates social spending, presumably because he cares so much about the deficit. As long as the deficit cutting is happening to someone else.
He's also not much a true-believer when it comes to the sacred free market.
Fincher has said his farm would have shut down without the subsidies, which he argued protect American farmers from more heavily subsidized foreign competition. "We would be all for not having government in our business," Fincher told the Washington Post in 2010, "but we need a fair system."
He needs a fair system, but everybody else is on their own. Spoken like a true Republican.
by Joan McCarter
Daily Kos staff
May 23, 2013
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
Welfare recipient Stephen Fincher.
Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) has been making a big splash with his supposedly Jesus-inspired opposition to the government helping to keep poor people alive by giving them food stamps. As could be totally expected, Fincher's Bible-quoting is highly selective and hugely misinterpreted, because that's what wingnuts quoting the Bible do.
Fincher should include in his Bible study the plethora of verses that address hypocrisy. Because, when it comes to where the funding in the Farm Bill is allocated, he's among the biggest.
Using Agriculture Department data, researchers at the Environmental Working Group found that Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, Tenn., collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012. The data is part of the research group’s online farm subsidy database from which the group issues a report each year.
In 2012 alone, the data shows, Mr. Fincher received about $70,000 in direct payments, money that is given to farmers and farmland owners, even if they do not grow crops. It is unclear how much Mr. Fincher received in crop insurance subsidies because the names of people receiving the subsidies are not public. The group said most of the agriculture subsidies go to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country. These farmers have received $265 billion in direct payments and farm insurance subsidies since 1995, federal records show.
Fincher voted for $20 billion in cuts to the supplemental nutrition program over the next 10 years. He also voted to increase the farm subsidies he's on the receiving end of. It's likely that the bulk of Rep. Fincher's income is provided entirely by taxpayers, from these farm subsidies to his congressional salary. Flincher also, of course, is an enthusiastic supporter of Paul Ryan's budget that decimates social spending, presumably because he cares so much about the deficit. As long as the deficit cutting is happening to someone else.
He's also not much a true-believer when it comes to the sacred free market.
Fincher has said his farm would have shut down without the subsidies, which he argued protect American farmers from more heavily subsidized foreign competition. "We would be all for not having government in our business," Fincher told the Washington Post in 2010, "but we need a fair system."
He needs a fair system, but everybody else is on their own. Spoken like a true Republican.
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