May 14 2015

The Breakfast Club (Buzz)

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpgLots of bad environmental news this week.  I don’t really know much about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) so I’ll let the pieces speak for themselves.

Bees Are Dying and We’ll All Pay for It

Kiona Smith-Strickland, Gizmodo

5/13/15 3:55pm

Bee colonies are still dying, and food may get more expensive as a result.

Beekeepers in the U.S. lost 42.1 percent of their bee colonies between April 2014 and April 2015, according to a recent annual survey. Those losses continue a trend of die offs among bee colonies, which beekeepers say could drastically affect our food supply.

Without bees to pollinate crops, we stand to lose many staple foods that we eat every day, from apples and tomatoes, to onions and berries.

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Winter losses tell only part of the story. In fact, U.S. beekeepers lost enough colonies during the last two summers to make up for the improvements in winter losses. Last summer, about 27.4 percent of colonies died out. Large-scale commercial beekeepers, those with more than 50 colonies, seem to be especially prone to losing bee colonies during the summer.

Why are bee colonies dying? Several reasons: sometimes they succumb to winter cold, and sometimes a colony falls prey to mites, viruses, or fungi. Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is one of the biggest problems, and it’s actually pretty creepy. Colonies that have succumbed to CCD are eerily deserted. The adult bees are gone, but there aren’t any bodies. It’s likely that the workers died elsewhere, but they left with unhatched young in the brood chamber, ample supplies of food in the hive, and the queen all alone in the hive.

Researchers think CCD is the product of an unfortunate combination of pesticides, parasites, pathogens, and nutritional problems caused by less diversity and availability of sources of pollen and nectar. Any of those causes could also contribute to more ordinary kinds of colony loss.

A Sharp Spike in Honeybee Deaths Deepens a Worrisome Trend

By MICHAEL WINES, The New York Times

MAY 13, 2015

In an annual survey released on Wednesday by the Bee Informed Partnership, a consortium of universities and research laboratories, about 5,000 beekeepers reported losing 42.1 percent of their colonies in the 12-month period that ended in April. That is well above the 34.2 percent loss reported for the same period in 2013 and 2014, and it is the second-highest loss recorded since year-round surveys began in 2010.

Most striking, however, was that honeybee deaths spiked last summer, exceeding winter deaths for the first time. Commercial beekeepers, some of whom rent their hives to farmers during pollination seasons, were hit especially hard, the survey’s authors stated.

“We expect the colonies to die during the winter, because that’s a stressful season,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an assistant entomology professor at the University of Maryland who directs the survey for the bee partnership. “What’s totally shocking to me is that the losses in summer, which should be paradise for bees, exceeded the winter losses.”

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Dr. vanEngelsdorp said increasingly poor nutrition could be a factor in the rising summer death rate. Rising crop prices have led farmers to plow and plant millions of acres of land that was once home to wildflowers; since 2007, an Agriculture Department program that pays farmers to put sensitive and erosion-prone lands in a conservation reserve has lost an area roughly equal to half of Indiana, and budget cuts promise to shrink the program further. Dr. vanEngelsdrop and other scientists cite two other factors at work in the rising death rate: a deadly parasite, the varroa mite, and pesticides.

In recent years, some experts have focused on neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides used almost universally on some major crops in the United States. The European Commission has banned the use of three variants of the pesticide on flowering plants, citing risks to bees, and questioned whether they should be used at all.

Honeybees dying, situation ‘unheard of’

By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post

May 14 at 3:11 AM

Just last year, it seemed there was something to celebrate despite planet Earth’s ongoing honeybee apocalypse: Bee colony losses were down. Not by enough, but they were down.

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“One year does not make a trend,” Jeff Pettis, a co-author of the survey who heads the federal government’s bee research laboratory in Beltsville, Md., told the New York Times.

Turns out Pettis was right. VanEngelsdorp and other researchers at the Bee Informed Partnership, affiliated with the Department of Agriculture, just announced more than 40 percent of honeybee hives died this past year, as the Associated Press reported. The number is preliminary, but is the second-highest annual loss recorded to date.

“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems,” study co-author Keith Delaplane of the University of Georgia told the AP. “We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.”

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The state worst affected was Oklahoma, which lost more than 60 percent of its hives. Hawaii escaped relatively unscathed, losing less than 14 percent.

“Most of the major commercial beekeepers get a dark panicked look in their eyes when they discuss these losses and what it means to their businesses,” Pennsylvania State University entomology professor Diana Cox-Foster, who didn’t participate in the survey, said. Her state lost more than 60 percent of its colonies.

The USDA estimated that honeybees add more than $15 billion to the value of the country’s crops per year.

“If losses continue at the 33 percent level, it could threaten the economic viability of the bee pollination industry,” the department said. “Honey bees would not disappear entirely, but the cost of honey bee pollination services would rise, and those increased costs would ultimately be passed on to consumers through higher food costs. Now is the time for research into the cause and treatment of CCD before CCD becomes an agricultural crisis.”

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

This Day in History

News

Prince Charles’s ‘black spider memos’ show lobbying at highest political level

by Robert Booth and Matthew Taylor, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 May 2015 15.27 EDT

The 27 memos, sent in 2004 and 2005 and released only after the Guardian won its long freedom of information fight with the government, show the Prince of Wales making direct and persistent policy demands to the then prime minister Tony Blair and several key figures in his Labour government.

From Blair, Charles demanded everything from urgent action to improve equipment for troops fighting in Iraq to the availability of alternative herbal medicines in the UK, a pet cause of the prince.

In a single letter in February 2005, he urged a badger cull to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis – damning its opponents as “intellectually dishonest”; lobbied for his preferred person to be appointed to crack down on the mistreatment of farmers by supermarkets; proposed his own aide to brief Downing Street on the design of new hospitals; and urged Blair to tackle a European Union directive limiting the use of herbal alternative medicines use in the UK.

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The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, said: “We fought this case because we believed – and the most senior judges in the country agreed – that the royal family should operate to the same degrees of transparency as anyone else trying to make their influence felt in public life. The attorney general, in trying to block the letters, said their contents could ‘seriously damage’ perceptions of the prince’s political neutrality.

“Whatever the rights and wrongs of that assessment, it is shocking that the government wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money trying to prevent their publication. Now, after 10 years, we are pleased to be able to share the contents of his correspondence and let people draw their own conclusions.”

Graham Smith, chief executive of Republic, which campaigns for an elected head of state, said: “These letters are only a small indication of widespread lobbying that’s been going on for years. We now need full disclosure and an assessment of his impact on government policy.”

Maurice Frankel, director of the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information, said: “The release of the Charles memos represents a major victory for the freedom of information process, showing that ministers cannot block disclosure simply because they don’t like the result.”

House rejects NSA collection of phone records with vote to reform spy agency

by Dan Roberts, Sabrina Siddiqui, and Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 May 2015 17.42 EDT

Congressmen voted overwhelmingly to ban the mass collection of American phone records on Wednesday, as the House of Representatives piled up pressure to reform the most domestically contentious National Security Agency program revealed by Edward Snowden.

Two years after the former NSA contractor first revealed the controversial “bulk collection” program in the Guardian, the 338-88 vote in favour of the USA Freedom Act marks the second time the House has voted for an alternative system restricting government agencies to more targeted surveillance.

But this time, reformers are growing more confident of also convincing the Senate to back the legislation after strong support in recent days from the White House, intelligence agency leaders and a US federal appeals court – even as major civil libertarian groups have decried the bill as insufficient reform.

With just six working days left for Congress to re-authorise a controversial expiring portion of the 2001 Patriot Act that the NSA has used since 2006 to justify the program, Senate Republican leaders have insisted the bulk domestic surveillance should be renewed in its current form but conceded they may not have the votes to do so.

NSA reform is unavoidable. But it can be undermined if we aren’t careful

by Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 May 2015 07.45 EDT

Bolstered by a historic court of appeals opinion from last week that ruled much of NSA’s mass surveillance on Americans illegal, Congress is scrambling to pass a reform bill for the NSA before 1 June, when a key section of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, will expire unless both houses vote to extend it. Now the only question is how far they’ll go.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is the same law that a three judge panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled cannot be used by the NSA to collect every American’s phone records, which is exactly what they had been doing in secret for years before Edward Snowden revealed the program in his very first leak to the Guardian in June 2013.

The court ruling has left Congress reeling, where many thought they might be able to escape without doing much at all; now most members in both parties admit the question is not if the NSA will be constrained but by how much.

It’s hard to understate the 2nd Circuit ruling’s sweeping nature: not only did the three judge panel declare the notorious phone metadata program unlawful, but all other still secret mass surveillance programs are now illegal as well. (For example, Senator Richard Burr curiously claimed last week on the Senate floor that the NSA is mining American IP addresses in bulk using the Patriot Act. When he was called out for seemingly making classified information public, his statements quickly disappeared from the official congressional record.)

House Votes to End N.S.A.’s Bulk Phone Data Collection

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER, The New York Times

MAY 13, 2015

Under the bipartisan bill, which passed 338 to 88, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection by the National Security Agency of metadata charting telephone calls made by Americans. However, while the House version of the bill would take the government out of the collection business, it would not deny it access to the information. It would be in the hands of the private sector – almost certainly telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, which already keep the records for billing purposes and hold on to them from 18 months to five years.

So for the N.S.A., which has been internally questioning the cost effectiveness of bulk collection for years, the bill would make the agency’s searches somewhat less efficient, but it would not wipe them out. With the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the spy agencies or the F.B.I. could request data relevant to an investigation. Corporate executives have said that while they would have to reformat some data to satisfy government search requirements, they could most likely provide data quickly.

The legislation would also bar bulk collection of records using other tools like so-called national security letters, which are a kind of administrative subpoena.

The near unanimity in the House is not reflected in the Senate, where a bipartisan group that backs the House bill faces opposition from Mr. McConnell and a small but powerful group of defense hawks who want no change, and from another faction led by Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, that is pressing for even greater restrictions of data collection.

Democrats yield in Senate trade deal

By Burgess Everett

5/13/15 8:08 PM EDT

After Democrats engineered a stunning defeat of President Barack Obama’s push for new trade deals on Tuesday, negotiators hashed out a compromise that offered both parties a way to save face without scuttling the administration’s trade agenda. At the least, the agreement means the Senate is likely to pass new powers for the president to fast-track trade pacts through Congress.

But Democrats failed to guarantee enactment of their priorities by attaching them to the fast-track bill. Instead, Democratic measures that would crack down on currency manipulators and expand trade with Africa will get stand-alone votes on Thursday. The currency provisions, in particular, face an uncertain future in the House even if they pass the Senate and are unlikely to become law.

Under the deal announced Wednesday by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate will also vote Thursday to open debate on the trade promotion authority fast-track measure that’s linked with Trade Adjustment Assistance, which is intended to help workers who lose their jobs as a result of expanded trade.

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Other than locking in votes on a customs enforcement bill that includes the currency manipulation language and the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides duty-free access for sub-Saharan African countries to sell many goods in the United States, it’s unclear what else Democrats gained from Tuesday’s showdown.

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“What they demanded yesterday, they should continue to demand today,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Those who want to get trade right must demand that fast track doesn’t move unless currency and other enforcement tools are included in the package. Anything less leaves America’s workers, domestic producers and communities behind.”

Saudi Arabia Promises to Match Iran in Nuclear Capability

By DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times

MAY 13, 2015

“We can’t sit back and be nowhere as Iran is allowed to retain much of its capability and amass its research,” one of the Arab leaders preparing to meet Mr. Obama said on Monday, declining to be named until he made his case directly to the president. Prince Turki bin Faisal, the 70-year-old former Saudi intelligence chief, has been touring the world with the same message.

“Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too,” he said at a recent conference in Seoul, South Korea.

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It is doubtful that any of the American allies being hosted by Mr. Obama this week would turn to North Korea, although it supplied Syria with the components of a nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007.

Pakistan is another story. The Saudis have a natural if unacknowledged claim on the technology: They financed much of the work done by A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist who ended up peddling his nuclear wares abroad. It is widely presumed that Pakistan would provide Saudi Arabia with the technology, if not a weapon itself.

The Arab leader interviewed on Monday said that countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, all to be represented at the Camp David meeting, had discussed a collective program of their own – couched, as Iran’s is, as a peaceful effort to develop nuclear energy. The United Arab Emirates signed a deal with the United States several years ago to build nuclear power plants, but it is prohibited under that plan from enriching its own uranium.

5 Big Banks Expected to Plead Guilty to Felony Charges, but Punishments May Be Tempered

By BEN PROTESS and MICHAEL CORKERY, The New York Times

MAY 13, 2015

For most people, pleading guilty to a felony means they will very likely land in prison, lose their job and forfeit their right to vote.

But when five of the world’s biggest banks plead guilty to an array of antitrust and fraud charges as soon as next week, life will go on, probably without much of a hiccup.

The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said – a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.

The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement. UBS A.G., the banking unit that signed the 2012 nonprosecution agreement, is expected to plead guilty to the earlier charges and pay a fine that could be as high as $500 million rather than go to trial, the people said.

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Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators – including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department – that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.

In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions – or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing – the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.

Stalled Trade Bill Highlights Chasm Between Obama and Congressional Democrats

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, The New York Times

MAY 13, 2015

As it turned out, the defeat was fleeting. After Mr. Obama personally weighed in with Democrats at a hastily called meeting at the White House on Tuesday evening, senators announced a deal on Wednesday to revive the bill.

But the false start underscored the precarious position Mr. Obama is in as he presses for the trade bill, which has fractured his party and forced a president who has always suffered from a dearth of trust and good will on Capitol Hill into an uneasy alliance with the Republicans who will supply most of the votes.

Mr. Obama’s decision to criticize Democrats opposed to the trade measure as misinformed, isolationist and politically motivated deepened a chasm over the issue, giving critics a rallying point and Republicans like Mr. McConnell an easy scapegoat.

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Some damage may already have been done. Mr. Obama appears to have provoked a backlash among Democrats by turning the salvos he usually reserves for Republican opponents on members of his own party, especially Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is popular with the liberal base and is a leading critic of his trade agenda. Liberals and supporters of labor unions argue that the trade pact would harm American workers and the environment.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat and another opponent of the trade measure, said Mr. Obama had been “disrespectful” of Ms. Warren, even suggesting that by calling her by her first name in an interview, the president had been sexist.

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The vote on Tuesday gave opponents of Mr. Obama’s trade agenda a tantalizing opening to redouble their efforts to defeat the measure. The liberal advocacy group Democracy for America said it would “not rest until it’s dead, buried and covered with six inches of concrete.”

At the same time, the false start in the Senate threatened to sap support for the initiative in the House, where Democratic opposition is even sharper and some Republicans are wary of siding with Mr. Obama.

It also highlighted how the president’s priorities have diverged with those of his party’s rank and file. In the Senate, many Democrats have made it clear that they would rather be debating a bill that would extend the Highway Trust Fund.

Brexit – what would happen if Britain left the EU?

by Katie Allen, Philip Oltermann, Julian Borger and Arthur Neslen, The Guardian

Thursday 14 May 2015 04.33 EDT

David Cameron’s electoral triumph has brought the prospect of a British withdrawal from the EU one step closer. The prime minister has vowed to reshape Britain’s ties with Europe before putting EU membership to a vote by 2017.

But what would “Brexit” – a British exit from the 28-nation EU – look like? Eurosceptics argue that withdrawal would reverse immigration, save the taxpayer billions and free Britain from an economic burden. Europhiles counter that it would lead to deep economic uncertainty and cost thousands, possibly even millions, of jobs.

Our writers have drawn on the best available expertise to assess what Brexit would mean for growth, jobs, trade, immigration and Britain’s position in the world.

Philadelphia’s Osage Avenue police bombing, 30 years on: ‘This story is a parable’

by Alan Yuhas, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 May 2015 07.00 EDT

The raid killed six adults and five children, destroyed more than 60 homes and left more than 250 people homeless. It stands as the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US soil.

The 30-year anniversary of the bombing of Osage Avenue will be commemorated without Ward, who was one of only two survivors of the disastrous assault. Instead professor Cornel West, author Alice Walker and others will give speeches and protesters will march down the crumbling, mostly abandoned block where the bombing took place, drawing ties between police brutality and institutional racism then and now.

On 13 May 1985, police moved in to arrest four members of a group called Move, a mostly black, radical organization that believed in shedding technology and “manmade law” in favor of “natural law“. After years of antagonism with police, Move had fortified a rowhome on Osage Avenue as their headquarters. They boarded up walls, built a bunker on the roof, and broadcast their anti-police ethos through a bullhorn, night and day.

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“Were we wanted for rape, robbery, murder? No, nothing,” Ramona Africa, the only living Move survivor of that day, told the Guardian. Africa linked the bombing to the recent police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray: “These people that take an oath that swear to protect, save lives – the cops don’t defend poor people, poor white, black, Latino people. They don’t defend us, they kill us.

“All you have to do is look at the rash of police murders and the cops not being held accountable,” she added. “That should really alarm and outrage people, but the thing is that it’s happening today because it wasn’t stopped in ’85. The only justice that can be done is people seeing this system for what it is.”

Hundreds of officers, several fire trucks and a bomb squad arrived that day, with military-grade weapons in tow. They first tried to flush out the house with fire hoses. A team then blew holes in the walls to funnel in teargas, but no one budged.

“Then they just began insanely shooting, over 10,000 rounds of bullets, according to their own estimates,” Africa said. “That didn’t work, and that’s when they dropped the bomb on us, a rowhouse in an urban neighborhood.”

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