Jesus Malverde
Jesus Malverde's JournalInside China: Marine’s comment on islands draws sharp Chinese response
A casual remark by a U.S. general during a breakfast has made China mad, really mad, and Beijing’s response is far less than civil and humble.
On April 11, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Wissler, commander of the 18,000 Marines in Okinawa, Japan, told reporters at a Washington breakfast meeting that the Marines in the Pacific would quickly retake the Senkaku island group and return it to Japan if China were to invade it.
The statement was nothing new, as U.S. officials from the president on down repeatedly have told the Chinese that the United States would fulfill its defense treaty obligations to help Japan militarily in any conflict with China over the islands.
What apparently incensed the Chinese was what Gen. Wissler said next: “You wouldn’t maybe even necessarily have to put somebody on that island until you had eliminated the threat, so to speak.”
The Chinese military is supremely confident of its invincibility in the Pacific and is taking Gen. Wissler’s remark as a great insult.
The first return salvos were fired by the Communist Party-owned and operated newspaper Global Times.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/17/inside-china-marines-comments-on-island-draw-sharp/
How the U.S. Is Vulnerable to Terrorism in Space
Space terrorism is a growing threat to U.S. national security, according to a new report.
And an attack on a U.S. satellite—or damage to one from another country's debris—could have astronomical effects on national security, says the report from the Council on Foreign Relations.
The U.S. is more reliant on space than any other nation to carry out critical national security functions, such as precision attacks on suspected terrorists and image analysis of nuclear-weapons programs, according to the report.
But countries like China, North Korea, and Iran are developing their military space capabilities, increasing the risk of a dangerous situation for the U.S, says the report.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/how-the-u-s-is-vulnerable-to-terrorism-in-space-20140417
Texas has been holding this man hostage for 12,600 days
Last week, in a decision that contorted both law and fact, a state judge ruled against an illiterate, intellectually disabled black man named Jerry Hartfield.
Hartfield has been imprisoned for more than 33 years — without a valid conviction or sentence authorizing his confinement. In the latest decision, the judge ruled that even though state and local officials clearly were negligent in letting Hartfield slip through the cracks all these decades, there is nothing in the Constitution that provides him with any protection from being retried. Not the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a speedy trial. Not the undisputed fact that key evidence in that long-ago trial — like the alleged murder weapon, for example — has disappeared. Not the fact that there is no proof that Hartfied, with an IQ testing far below standards for mental retardation, strategized to keep himself in prison for 30 years as a way of avoiding a retrial.
It's not just the third of a century of unlawful confinement that is egregious here. It's the fact that 10 months have passed since the state courts in Texas (after many years of prodding) first acknowledged the terrible mistake that was made in this case. Even this lesser period of delay is unconscionable. Jerry Hartfield, who first would have been eligible for parole in 2003 had Texas followed the law, should be free.
On June 30, 1977, Hartfield was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for killing a woman named Eunice Lowe. This verdict and death sentence were overturned on Sept. 17, 1980, because prosecutors had unconstitutionally precluded from the jury a woman who had reservations about the death penalty.
http://news.yahoo.com/texas-holding-man-hostage-12-600-days-060500679.html
Police: Man ate pot candy before shooting his wife
Authorities say a Denver man accused of killing his wife while she was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher ate marijuana-infused candy before the attack.
Search warrants released Thursday said 44-year-old Kristine Kirk told dispatchers her husband bought and ate the candy before he started hallucinating and frightening the couple's three children.
Police say 47-year-old Richard Kirk also may have taken prescription pain medication before he began acting erratically.
It was not clear whether the pot influenced his behavior.
http://news.yahoo.com/police-man-ate-pot-candy-shooting-wife-214528099.html
The State of American Beer
What's going on in Beer World? Beer lovers of America might be forgiven if their grasp of the current brew-scape feels iffy. Alice herself would be at home in this Wonderland. It's a world in which up is down, little is big, and there's no Blue Moon on the horizon.
It's a world in which old standbys are faltering (case sales of Miller High Life were down almost 10 percent in 2013 from the prior year). Mexican labels are dominant (Corona, Modelo, and Dos Equis, account for three of the top four imported beers). And a craft-beer company founded only 20 years ago is coming on strong ("Bartender, pour me a Lagunitas"
.
The March 2014 issue of Beverage Industry offers us a through-the-looking-glass portrait of Beer World in the United States today. The magazine unleashed its writers on data gathered by Information Resources Inc. (IRI) of Chicago from supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchandisers, gas and convenience stores, military commissaries, and select club and dollar retail chains for the 52 weeks ending December 29, 2014. I made graphs and charts from their tabular data.
Before we delve into the particulars, let's remember the big picture: over the past twenty years, per-capita consumption of beer in the U.S. has been declining. Derek Thompson wrote about that here last August, citing this report. But twenty years is a long lens. Let's take a look at the state of Beer World in the last year.
Read More: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-state-of-american-beer/360583/
All sent and received e-mails in Gmail will be analyzed, says Google
Google added a paragraph to its terms of service as of Monday to tell customers that, yes, it does scan e-mail content for advertising and customized search results, among other reasons. The change comes as Google undergoes a lawsuit over its e-mail scanning, with the plaintiffs complaining that Google violated their privacy.
E-mail users brought the lawsuit against Google in 2013, alleging that the company was violating wiretapping laws by scanning the content of e-mails. The plaintiffs' complaints vary, but some of the cases include people who sent their e-mails to Gmail users from non-Gmail accounts and nonetheless had their content scanned. They argue that since they didn't use Gmail, they didn't consent to the scanning.
US District Judge Lucy Koh refused Google's motion to dismiss the case in September. Koh also denied the plaintiffs class-action status in March on the grounds that the ways that Google might have notified the various parties of its e-mail scanning are too different, and she could not decide the case with a single judgment.
This is the full text of Google's terms of service addition related to e-mail scanning:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/google-adds-to-tos-yes-we-scan-all-your-e-mails/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Do babies cry at night to stop parents from making more babies?
A Harvard evolutionary biologist thinks babies’ nighttime crying spells are a form of birth control.
David Haig hypothesizes that babies demand food at all hours of the night to exhaust their mothers and prevent them from ovulating. This works to the baby’s advantage, Haig believes, because if the mother can’t become pregnant and have another child, the baby is likely to get more attention and more food and improve its chances for survival.
In our modern-day society this seems a little far-fetched, but hundreds of years ago, when birth control didn’t exist and people hunted and gathered for their food, Haig’s evolutionary theory is plausible.
Today’s society more commonly assumes that babies wake in the night because they need food, but Haig claims that babies get plenty of nourishment even if they sleep through the night. Around-the-clock feedings are entirely unnecessary for babies to maintain a healthy weight. Haig theorizes babies cry to keep their mothers infertile. In a paper for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, he writes “babies waking at night to suckle is an adaptation of infants to extend their mothers’ lactational amenorrhea.”
Lactational amenorrhea — the temporary infertility that occurs when a woman is not menstruating and fully breastfeeding — is a controversial topic. Many women assume they’re not ovulating in the first few months after giving birth so they don’t go on birth control or use protection—and then they end up getting pregnant. Nursing isn’t a fool-proof form of birth control. But according to the Mayo Clinic, within the first 6 months postpartum, lactational amenorrhea in women who are exclusively breastfeeding is 98 percent effective in preventing pregnancy, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Read More: http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2014/04/17/do-babies-cry-at-night-to-stop-parents-from-making-more-babies/
Once an Arab model, Baghdad now world's worst city
As recently as the 1970s, Baghdad was lauded as a model city in the Arab world. But now, after decades of seemingly endless conflict, it is the world's worst city.
That is, at least, according to the latest survey by the Mercer consulting group, which when assessing quality of life across 239 cities, measuring factors including political stability, crime and pollution, placed Baghdad last.
The Iraqi capital was lumped with Bangui in the conflict-hit Central African Republic and the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, the latest confirmation of the 1,250-year-old city's fall from grace as a global intellectual, economic and political centre.
Residents of Baghdad contend with near-daily attacks, a lack of electricity and clean water, poor sewerage and drainage systems, rampant corruption, regular gridlock, high unemployment and a myriad other problems.
Read More: http://news.yahoo.com/once-arab-model-baghdad-now-worlds-worst-city-171513551.html
S.F. officials try to snuff out '420' madness
"If everyone would just be cool, it's cool." - San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.
That was the message from city officials Wednesday as they discussed plans to deal with Sunday's annual "420" pot-smoking celebration, which last year left the city to clean up 10,000 pounds of trash, brought traffic in the Haight to a standstill and led to a fight.
At a press conference led by Supervisor London Breed, whose district includes the Haight and Golden Gate Park - where most of last year's revelry occurred around Hippie Hill at Sharon Meadow - city officials stressed that they weren't trying to kill the fun, just ensure everyone stays safe.
But weed smoking appears to be the least of their worries. Illegal parking, camping, drug sales, open alcohol containers and underage drinking were among the "code violations" that Suhr, Breed, and Recreation and Park head Phil Ginsberg said would be enforced with vigor.
Read More: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-officials-try-to-snuff-out-420-madness-5408404.php
I'd agree that people setting up booths and selling food, drink and dabs made the last couple years suck. Closing down these mostly out of town vendors would make the festivities a little more relaxed and keep the traffic flowing.
Nobody lives here: The nearly 5 million Census Blocks with zero population
A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.
Green shading indicates unoccupied Census Blocks. A single inhabitant is enough to omit a block from shading
The map tends to highlight two types of areas:
places where human habitation is physically restrictive or impossible, and
places where human habitation is prohibited by social or legal convention.
Water features such lakes, rivers, swamps and floodplains are revealed as places where it is hard for people to live. In addition, the mountains and deserts of the West, with their hostility to human survival, remain largely void of permanent population.
Of the places where settlement is prohibited, the most apparent are wilderness protection and recreational areas (such as national and state parks) and military bases. At the national and regional scales, these places appear as large green tracts surrounded by otherwise populated countryside.
http://mapsbynik.tumblr.com/post/82791188950/nobody-lives-here-the-nearly-5-million-census?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
Profile Information
Name: Jesus MalverdeGender: Male
Hometown: SF
Current location: Japan
Member since: Fri May 17, 2013, 11:44 PM
Number of posts: 10,274
