Jesus Malverde
Jesus Malverde's JournalClimate Change, Drought Likely Means Marijuana Grown In California Will Be More Potent
A warming climate could boost the medicinal and psychoactive properties of plants including cannabis, that according to experts.
The Daily Climate reports, climate change could also play a huge role in the number of people growing marijuana on public lands, which would put increased strain on the ecosystem.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, said his research shows that marijuana grown outdoors will likely become stronger and require less water to thrive. He said a small portion of plant species have adapted to lower carbon dioxide levels, but most including marijuana, still feel deprived.
Retired USDA ethno-botanist James Duke said that when plants are stressed, like is often the case during a drought, they tend to exhibit more of their medicinal properties.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/05/13/climate-change-drought-likely-means-marijuana-grown-in-california-will-be-more-potent/
O’Malley, eyeing the presidency, plans May 30 announcement
Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, who has been ramping up for a potential White House bid, plans to make an announcement about his political future on May 30 in Baltimore, aides said Wednesday.
O'Malley, who is widely expected to run for the Democratic nomination, will tell donors and other supporters about the announcement in a conference call scheduled for Thursday night, according to aides who requested anonymity in order to speak more freely.
The aides expect O'Malley to say he is inclined to run but to remain somewhat circumspect about his intentions. Were he to tell them outright that he plans to enter the race, he could trigger a 15-day window that would require him to file candidacy papers before May 30.
An email alerting O'Malley supporters to Thursday night's call promised "an important update on his imminent 2016 plans." People familiar with the planning said several locations within Baltimore have been under consideration for the May 30 event.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/14/omalley-eyeing-the-presidency-plans-may-30-announcement/
Illinois' Pension Crisis Continues With Court's Ruling
The Illinois Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to Illinois taxpayers Friday when it struck down a reform law aimed at taming the state’s $111 billion pension debt.
The 2013 law made modest changes to pension benefits for government workers. Under the plan, cost-of-living adjustments for retirees would grow at a slightly slower pace, younger employees would have to work longer and some workers would have faced a six-figure cap on the salary used to calculate their annual pension payments.
At best, this package of reforms would only reduce the state’s unfunded liability by about one-fifth—leaving plenty of challenges left to be tackled.
But last week, the state’s high court said even these limited changes ran afoul of the Illinois constitution because of a pension clause that says: “[m]embership in a pension or retirement system of the State … shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/05/12/illinois-pension-crisis-continues-with-courts-ruling/
The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True
From the moment it was announced to the public, the tale of how Osama bin Laden met his death in a Pakistani hill town in May 2011 has been a changeable feast. In the immediate aftermath of the Navy SEAL team’s assault on his Abbottabad compound, American and Pakistani government accounts contradicted themselves and each other. In his speech announcing the operation’s success, President Obama said that “our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”
But others, including top Pakistani generals, insisted that this was not the case. American officials at first said Bin Laden resisted the SEALs; the Pakistanis promptly leaked that he wasn’t armed. Then came differing stories from the SEALs who carried out the raid, followed by a widening stream of new details from government reports — including the 336-page Abbottabad Commission report requested by the Pakistani Parliament — and from books and interviews. All of the accounts were incomplete in some way.
The latest contribution is the journalist Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word article in The London Review of Books, which attempts to punch yet more holes — very big ones — in both the Obama administration’s narrative and the Pakistani government’s narrative. Among other things, Hersh contends that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military-intelligence agency, held Bin Laden prisoner in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that “the C.I.A. did not learn of Bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.”
On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&referrer=
Suck it up, haters.
The smokestacks of abandoned factories will mark the skyline like tombstones of a dying middle class
Perhaps it was just an open date on his calendar that led President Barack Obama to pump for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal, on the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. The president didn't mention the coincidence in his speech Friday at Nike's corporate headquarters in Oregon. But it inspired me to pay a sentimental visit to Western Electric Co.'s old clock tower in Cicero.
It offers visual witness to America as it was when Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, and to where our country is presently headed. The clock tower stands in the middle of the Hawthorne Works shopping center, flanked by a big-box store and fast-food restaurants — the kind that offer minimum-wage jobs. But during World War II, it was part of a sprawling industrial plant devoted to the war effort. It built the radar sets that enabled GIs to spot the enemy. Afterward it reverted to producing telephone equipment, paying decent wages that enabled workers to buy the tidy bungalows for which Cicero is famed.
It is long gone, as are other Chicago-area factories that provided the arms that defeated Germany and Japan — and built the American middle class. Bemoaning their loss, Obama argues, won't solve our economic problems. In his speech at Nike, the president took note of critics who claim that trade deals have given an edge to foreign manufacturers, costing American jobs.
According to Obama, opposition to or support for pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes down to "a question of the past versus the future." Granting the president's point that the dubious are living in the past, consider what that past was like.
http://t.co/WnJmnDeKV3?fb_ref=Default - Chicago Trib
Full Link for subscribers.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-grossman-trade-column-20150511-story.html
Blogger, 16, exposes limits to free speech in Singapore
A government crackdown on a teen video blogger and independent news and opinion website has focused attention on free speech limits, and perhaps the next election, in this cosmopolitan but famously strict city-state.
Five days after the death in March of Singapore's founding father, 16-year-old Amos Yee posted his latest American-accented blog to YouTube, titled "Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!" He shared it with the popular and provocative site The Real Singapore, one of several online alternatives to government-controlled TV broadcasts and newspapers.
After it went viral locally, with over a million views so far, Yee was arrested and charged with transmitting an obscene image and deliberately "wounding the religious or racial feelings of any person." He refused bail conditions that amounted to a gag order and has been jailed for over two weeks, awaiting a court's judgment on Tuesday. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to three years in prison.
The government's Media Development Authority shut down TRS, as it is known, earlier this month -- though officials say it was for unrelated reasons.
"These are the things that will split the whole society," said Alvin Tan, who as artistic director of the respected theatre company The Necessary Stage has tangled with censors for over three decades. "I think we're waiting for a tipping point." He has refused to self-censor but negotiates with government representatives, who have had a lighter touch recently with his plays.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11446891
Strong Language Warning
Oakland puts off acting on controversial surveillance system
Activists are keeping an eye on Oakland as city officials grapple with new proposed restrictions for the Domain Awareness Center, a controversial surveillance system at the city’s port.
But people will have to wait awhile for the city to act on the new policy, drafted over the course of a year by an ad hoc committee of lawyers, techies, and privacy buffs. City Council public safety committee Chair Desley Brooks postponed a planned Tuesday vote on the policy, saying it needs to be reformatted.
Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was frustrated after arriving 20 minutes late to the meeting, only to find out the item had been postponed.
“This is the second time this has happened, in a city with a real lack of trust between the elected representatives and the people,” Kayyali said, noting that the policy first appeared on a public safety committee agenda in February, but was delayed then, too.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-puts-off-acting-on-controversial-6259736.php
Prince Charles's black spider memos to be published on Wednesday
Source: Guardian UK
Prince Charles’ secret letters to British government ministers expressing frank views that the government has warned could undermine his political neutrality will finally be published on Wednesday.
The move follows a 10-year battle by the Guardian to expose the heir to the throne’s so-called ‘black spider memos’ to public scrutiny.
The 27 letters were sent between Charles and ministers in seven government departments in 2004 and 2005 and were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by the Guardian journalist Rob Evans.
The government has been battling to protect the Prince of Wales from scrutiny over what the former attorney general Dominic Grieve has described as Charles’s “particularly frank” interventions on public policy in the letters.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/12/prince-charles-black-spider-memos-letters-published
Why the corporate sector is desperate for the TPP
It's not cheap to build things in China anymore.
Chinese private-sector wages rose 14% in 2012, data showed Friday, good news overall for Beijing's push to make consumer spending a more important part of growth. But higher labor costs also hurt business profitability and export competitiveness—which could pose its own risks to the economic recovery.
Crystal Group, an apparel producer for Marks & Spencer, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Gap, says it has more than tripled its staff in Vietnam over the past three years, but made only small increases in its China workforce. "It's a simple matter of economics for us," says Andrew Lo, CEO of the Hong Kong-based company, as it becomes less cost-effective to make basic t-shirts and jeans in China
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324767004578488233119290670
U.S. officials: Assad losses in Syria could become ISIS gains
Washington (CNN)Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's momentum in fighting off rebel groups has decreased, but should his regime crumble, Syria could face greater instability and control by extremist groups, U.S. security officials are warning.
They attribute the gains of rebel fighters in part to their acquiring more battleground experience as well as the ability to use advanced tactics. There are also signs that moderate forces have become more coherent in their organization, making Assad more vulnerable.
But the officials pointed out that the U.S. will still have trouble identifying moderate partners while extremist groups such as al Qaeda affiliate al Nusra and ISIS, also known as ISIL, try to take advantage of any cracks in the government's control.
The Syrian regime's "momentum has been slowed," according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey. "I do believe the situation is trending less favorably for the regime."
The shift has occurred in the last several weeks, Dempsey recently told reporters. Rebels have scored gains in both the north and south of Syria.
"What it might mean for the nation of Syria is further instability," he said, "for power to suddenly transfer precipitously. And it could mean an even increased humanitarian crisis."
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/11/politics/syria-bashar-assad-isis-nusra-moderates/
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
