June 2009 archive

1. The LA Times reports Environmentalists are baffled by Obama’s strategy. President Obama is defending in courty harmful measures that he promised to eliminate.

   As a candidate for president, Barack Obama wooed environmentalists with a promise to “support and defend” pristine national forest land from road building and other development that had been pushed by the George W. Bush administration.

   But five months into Obama’s presidency, the new administration is actively opposing those protections on about 60 million acres of federal woodlands in a case being considered by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals…

   The strategy has puzzled some environmentalists because the administration has used the courts to backpedal from Bush policies in some areas, including spotted owl protection, energy efficiency standards and hazardous-waste burning.

   

   It’s not the only area where Obama is looking a lot like his predecessor. McClatchy reports In stark legal turnaround, Obama now resembles Bush. “President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred. In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama’s legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush’s: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.”

2. The NY Times reports on the health of Cuyahoga River, 40 years after the river caught fire. “Monday is the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, when oil-soaked debris floating on the river’s surface was ignited, most likely by sparks from a passing train.”

   The burning river in Cleveland helped lead to “the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and to the passage of the Clean Water Act.” Now, decades later, the Cuyahoga is slowly recovering. Fish have returned to the river along with beavers, blue herons, and bald eagles. “Long sections of the Cuyahoga are clean enough that they no longer require aggressive monitoring… Problems remain, however.”

   While today, Reuters reports the Supreme Court allows a world’s largest silver mining company to dump mine waste into our lake. “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday for Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp by upholding a government permit that will allow the company’s Alaska gold mine to deposit rock waste into a lake on federal land.” The ruling overturned the appeals court decision.

   “The appeals court sided with environmentalists and ruled the permit violated the federal clean water law. It said the toxicity of the discharge might have lasting effects on the lake, killing all the fish and nearly all aquatic life.”

   So much for the Clean Water Act.

Four at Four continues with coal, Afghanistan, and guerrilla gardeners.

Original article, by Maziar Razi and titled A few words with the Iranian workers on recent events, via Iranian Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency:

Honourable and brave workers of Iran

And I will add, greetings and solidarity from the United States.

See if you can follow this one!

Ocean Optics

http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/ins…

Why limit the bandwidth to 650 thus missing the 656 H alpha line?

Why not broadband 200-1100 when it’s available?

http://www.oceanoptics.com/pro…

H alpha is far more intense in comparison to the elusive OH 308.

Shirin Ebadi – Nobel Peace Laureate and HR lawyer –

‘I will pursue those who kill the prtestors’ –

#Iranelection

Iran Admits Discrepancies in 3 Million Votes



By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: June 22, 2009

TEHRAN – Locked in a bitter contest with Iranians who say the presidential elections were rigged, the authorities have acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, state television reported Monday following assertions by the country’s supreme leader that the ballot was fair.

But the authorities insisted that discrepancies, which could affect three million votes, did not violate Iranian law and the country’s influential Guardian Council said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the election result.

The news emerged on the English-language Press TV as a bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened over the disputed election. The outcome of the vote, awarding a lopsided victory to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.

World Bank calls on west to help relieve trillion dollar drain on world’s poor

• Flow of money into developing world halving to $363bn in 2009

• Lack of capital means longer recessions in many poor countries

Ashley Seager

The Guardian, Monday 22 June 2009

The world’s poorest countries will see $1tn (£600bn) drain from their economies this year according to the first detailed analysis of how the global recession is hitting developing nations.

Figures published today by the World Bank show the financial crisis taking a heavy toll, with the flow of money into the developing world halving this year after heavy losses in 2008.

Despite recent talk of economic green shoots in Britain and the US, the lack of international capital means many poor countries will stay in recession for longer as companies and governments are starved of investment.

The World Bank is calling for greater international policy co-ordination and tighter regulation of the global financial system in response. Releasing its authoritative annual Global Development Finance report, the Washington-based institution singles out Africa, central and eastern Europe and Latin America as regions suffering most from the global recession even while rich nations are starting to talk about recovery.

USA

Recovery’s Missing Ingredient: New Jobs

Experts Warn of A Long Dry Spell

By Michael A. Fletcher

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, June 22, 2009

Despite signs that the recession gripping the nation’s economy may be easing, the unemployment rate is projected to continue rising for another year before topping out in double digits, a prospect that threatens to slow growth, increase poverty and further complicate the Obama administration’s message of optimism about the economic outlook.The likelihood of severe unemployment extending into the 2010 midterm elections and beyond poses a significant political hurdle to President Obama and congressional Democrats, who are already under fire for what critics label profligate spending. Continuing high unemployment rates would undercut the fundamental argument behind much of that spending: the promise that it will create new jobs and improve the prospects of working Americans, which Obama has called the ultimate measure of a healthy economy.

“Our hope would be to actually create some jobs this year,” Obama said in an interview with The Washington Post in the days before taking office.