Eideard

Murkowski viewing a traditional Senate image of payoffs in gold
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

In a speech to Congress, a Republican senator from Alaska announced she would use an obscure and rarely used measure to try to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a dangerous pollutant…

Murkowski’s motion of disapproval, though unlikely to become law, is widely seen as a barometer for the chances of getting a climate change bill through the Senate this year…

According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, Murkowski, from the oil-rich state of Alaska, has received $244,000 in campaign funds from oil and gas companies since 2005, and consulted two energy industry lobbyists before launching today’s proposal…

Murkowski was joined today by Mary Landrieu, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana who has repeatedly expressed concern for her state’s oil refining business; Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas; and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Murkowski also claimed support from governors of her home state of Alaska, Mississippi and West Virginia as well as business organisations. Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, has also expressed support for Murkowski.

But there has also been a strong push back against Murkowski from environmental organisations and other business groups. A coalition of 80 companies from Virgin America to eBay wrote to Obama today urging action on climate change…

Murkowski’s strategy hinges on using the Congressional Review Act, a law used for the first time in the early days of the George Bush era to throw out new ergonomic standards for workplaces passed under Bill Clinton. The measure would require only 51 votes for passage and the Senator is confident of signing up all 40 Republicans as well as some Democrats.

Isn’t it amazing how closely reactionaries and cowards stick together?

Next couple elections, it’s time to kick a few more bought-and-paid-for butts out of office.

A U.S. data security firm said a study of passwords from the Rockyou.com breach found “123456″ was the most commonly used password among users.

The Imperva security firm said in a release Thursday a study of the 32 million passwords exposed during a December breach of a RockYou database indicates numerical passwords were popular among users.

While “123456″ topped the list, the study found “12345″ was the second most commonly used password among Rockyou.com users. The password “123456789″ was third overall…

Imperva Chief Technical Officer Amichai Shulman said the list, which was rounded off with “abc123″ in 10th, shows the vulnerability of certain passwords.

“Vulnerability of certain passwords”? How about the vulnerability of people who are too stupid to come up with a useful password?

Cripes!

The Supreme Court today overturned a century-old restriction on corporations using their money to sway federal elections and ruled that companies have a free-speech right to spend as much as they wish to persuade voters to elect or defeat candidates for Congress and the White House.

In a 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative bloc said corporations have the same 1st Amendment rights as individuals and, for that reason, the government may not stop corporations from spending freely to influence the outcome of federal elections. The decision is probably the most sweeping and consequential handed down under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr…

Until now, corporations and unions have been barred from spending their own treasury funds on broadcast ads or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal candidate. This restriction dates back to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt called on Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national banks from using their money in federal election campaigns. After World War II, Congress extended this ban to labor unions.

In today’s decision, the high court struck down that restriction and said the 1st Amendment gives corporations, just like individuals, a right to spend their own money on political ads…

Most election-law expert have predicted a court decision freeing corporations will send millions of extra dollars flooding into this fall’s contests for Congress. And they predict Republicans will be the main beneficiaries.

Today’s decision was supported by five justices who were Republican nominees. They include Kennedy and Roberts along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr…

But Stevens and the dissenters said the majority was ignoring the long-understood rule that the government could limit election money from corporations, unions and others, such as foreign governments. “Under today’s decision, multinational corporations controlled by foreign governments” would have the same rights as Americans to spend money to tilt U.S. elections. “Corporations are not human beings. They can’t vote and can’t run for office,” Stevens said, and should be subject to restrictions under the election laws.

None of which bothers the Republican Party. Regardless of populist pretense to sucker teabaggers into the grunt work, the only flag Republicans really care about is Green and doesn’t stand for the environment.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Amazon, displaying a sense of urgency, perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet-style computer is turning its Kindle device into a platform. The Seattle-based company…announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active content” and distribute it through the “Kindle Store later this year.” Amazon will be giving out a Kindle Development Kit that will give “developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle.” The company will launch a limited beta effort next month.

I would also like to see what developers come up with. An Electronics Arts’ executive in Amazon’s press release says that the company is looking to develop games for the Kindle platform. I wonder how much can you do with the limited hardware that is a Kindle. Screen refresh rates are low, the inbuilt processor is puny and of course no color. Unless Amazon is planning to launch a beefier and color version of the device, game developers are unlikely to be able to create great experiences on Kindle…

As I wrote back in March 2009…people are looking for a cheap, connected Internet device that is “not a laptop.” I was recently watching an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on “Charlie Rose” in which he talked about the Kindle being flexible enough to encourage new kinds of media consumption, including multimedia books and newspapers with immersive content and interactivity. I think he is spot on — and just from that perspective, Apple has to be thinking really hard about this looming opportunity.

There’s only one reason to make the announcement early. Trying to cop attention for the project before Apple’s launch party on the 27th.

I wish we could get KB into the official launch for a hands-on review.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Health care reform — which is crucial for millions of Americans — hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn’t what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man who was offering hope and change, is this:

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there’s some things in there that people don’t like and legitimately don’t like.”

In short, “Run away, run away”!

Maybe House Democrats can pull this out, even with a gaping hole in White House leadership. Barney Frank seems to have thought better of his initial defeatism. But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

I voted for Obama. What I got was Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

I didn’t expect the Democratic Party or Congress to change willingly. I did expect Barack Obama to fight for change.

UPDATE: All right. I’m not so pissed off, tonight. In the interim, Obama started making noises, again, like a leader instead of part of a barely liberal troika.

Water down the strength of my criticism by half. Of course, I appreciate the changes he brought. They have been almost exclusively by executive order. Let’s see some Congressional butt kicked, too.

A U.S. Airways jet was diverted to Philadelphia International Airport Thursday after a praying Jewish man’s religious item was mistaken for a bomb, police said.

There were initial reports that a man may have been wired with “a device” and FBI and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials and a police bomb squad all attended.

However, when authorities boarded Flight 3079 from LaGuardia Airport to Louisville, they established there was no bomb on board.

Government sources also said the passenger had been “praying loudly” and that the flight was diverted out of an “abundance of caution.”

Officials said a passenger had become alarmed by seeing a man with phylacteries — boxes containing verses from the Bible — which observant Jews strap around their arms and heads as part of morning prayers…

The passengers were due to fly to Louisville on a different plane. It was unclear whether the man wearing the phylacteries would be among them.

So, if you’re afraid of flying and must take a trip by air – don’t pray once you’re on board. At least not in Hebrew or Yiddish.

Amid the flat, wide fields of central France, a team of re-trained secretaries and IT experts is packaging Europe’s literary heritage for the digital era…

The company they work for, Safig, is one of the few European firms to digitize books, using automatic and human page-turners. That places them right at the center of France’s plan for a massive online library, and its attempts to negotiate a digital books deal with U.S. internet giant Google…

Fans of France’s 750 million euro scheme to digitize its libraries and museums see it as a union of cultural pride and industrial strategy — Bruno Racine, head of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, is also a strategic advisor to NATO, the military alliance.

Skeptics point out that Google’s 10 million digitized books dwarf any French effort so far, such as Safig’s three-year contract to scan 300,000 books for the Bibliotheque Nationale.

One possible outcome is a compromise with Google that would accelerate mass digitization…

France has said it is ready to talk to Google over a joint project, but wants to extract far more generous terms than other partners — for example, through a free book swap.

That stance marks a shift in attitude following the departure of Jean-Noel Jeanneney as director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2007. Jeanneney was a fierce Google critic and even wrote a book attacking the company’s book project as a threat to non-Anglophone culture.

Under the deal, the Bibliotheque Nationale could let Google use the digitized books and in return would have free access to Google’s far bigger collection.

“We welcome the spirit of the proposal,” Google spokesman Simon Morrison said. “We are happy to talk.”

It’s always good for a chuckle to watch nations fight cultural battles against global communications. There are people in French letters who still oppose translations into other languages. Or they will only allow specific languages in translation.

I had a friend in Warsaw who quite legally translated French classics into Polish – and also enjoined by the owners of IP rights not to translate the same works into English on occasion.

The earthquake which rocked Padang, western Sumatra in September last year killing more than 1000 people was not the ‘great earthquake’ which earth scientists are waiting for. In fact, it may have made the next massive earthquake more likely, according to Ulster expert Professor John McCloskey…

Professor McCloskey and his group rapidly analysed the M9.2 earthquake that triggered the Indian Ocean 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and alerted the world to the threat of another large quake in the Sumatra region of the Indian Ocean 10 days before it struck. He is head of the Geophysics Research Group at Ulster’s Environmental Sciences Research Institute…

“For some years now scientists have been warning of the build up of stress on one of the earth’s great plate boundaries to the west of Sumatra in Indonesia. For more than 200 years the collision between the Indian ocean plate and the Asian plate has stored an enormous amount of energy.

“It’s just like slowly drawing a bow. For hundreds of years the energy is stored as the two tectonic plates bend and deform. Then, in just a few seconds all this energy is released generating a massive earthquake and sometimes flexing the seafloor to create a tsunami.

“Off western Sumatra the bow is drawn tight. The last shock happened more than 200 years ago and the stresses are probably larger now than they were then; the earthquake must happen soon…

“Science and scientists do not have all the answers. We don’t know where or when the next big earthquake will happen. We disagree on a lot of the details about how earthquakes work, how they start and how they stop but there are many things about which there is no disagreement.

“All the indicators are pointing in the same direction for western Sumatra. Another massive earthquake is due there and could happen literally any day.

The question returns – what might nations do to prepare for global-scale natural disasters? If we still believe that “peace has broken out” with the end of the Cold War – one obvious proposal would be to constitute large sections of armies and navies to be trained for disaster response as an essential portion of their mandate.

Necessary wars and other delights of partisan politics always seem to get in the way, though.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Munich international airport was re-opened on Wednesday after a three-hour shut down caused when a passenger left the security check even though his laptop computer set off an explosives detector, police said.

About 1,200 police did not find the man in their search of the terminal, which was shut down and completely evacuated. All passengers had to go through security checks a second time after the terminal was re-opened, an airport spokesman said.

“We checked the terminal intensively and we’re certain that there are no explosives or dangerous materials in the terminal,” said Peter Pruemm, a spokesman Munich’s Franz Josef Airport, Germany’s second largest airport.

Pruemm said an earlier statement by federal police that the laptop had been confiscated turned out to be inaccurate. He said the man took his laptop and left the security area before it could be put through the security device a second time…

More than 100 flights were delayed, police said.

The coppers said they get a number of false positives every day. Something as simple as his after-shave could have set off the explosive detection device.

A number of reports noted it looked more like he was a businessman who hurried along to catch his flight – and did – rather than someone attempting to escape detention.

Cadbury, which [looks as if it] has been sold to US firm Kraft, is one of several great British firms founded by Quakers. But how did they gain such a stranglehold on the chocolate industry and why were they so successful in business?

For a religious sect more interested in championing social reform than industry, the Quakers have established an impressive roll call of household business names.

Barclays and Lloyds banks, Clarks shoes, Bryant & May matches and the biscuit firms Huntley & Palmers and Carrs are just a few of the companies founded by members of the pacifist group.

But when it comes to confectionery, there has been a virtual monopoly for more than a century, led by Cadbury of Birmingham, Fry’s of Bristol and Rowntree’s and Terrys of York…

This achievement is all the more remarkable given the tiny numbers of Quakers. In 1851 they only accounted for about one in 1,400 of the population of 21 million in England, Scotland and Wales – less than 0.1%.

The move into chocolate began with cocoa drinks in the 19th Century as a reaction against the perceived misery and deprivation caused by alcohol, says Quaker historian Helen Rowlands.

“Quakers and other non-conformists at the time were concerned about levels of alcohol misuse in the population at large, they were part of the temperance movement.

“Cocoa was a way of providing cheap and available drink. It was healthy because you had to boil the water to make it when they didn’t have good water supplies…”

Another advantage was their reputation for honesty and reliability running parallel with their quest for justice, equality and social reform.

“They were amongst the first to set a firm price for goods. There was a lot of bartering before, but the Quakers said ‘no, we’ll state the price for goods and a fair price’,” says Ms Rowlands.

“People appreciated that, they knew where they stood with Quaker businessmen – they were in it to make a livelihood but not at the expense of customers or employees…”

RTFA. Lots of interesting history. There are parallels in many nations, many lands.