Source: AP

The long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline cleared a major hurdle toward approval Friday, a serious blow to environmentalists' hopes that President Barack Obama will block the controversial project running more than 1,000 miles from Canada through the heart of the U.S.

The State Department reported no major environmental objections to the proposed $7 billion pipeline, which has become a symbol of the political debate over climate change. Republicans and some oil- and gas-producing states in the U.S. - as well as Canada's minister of natural resources - cheered the report, but it further rankled environmentalists already at odds with Obama and his energy policy.

The report stops short of recommending approval of the pipeline, but the review gives Obama new support if he chooses to endorse it in spite of opposition from many Democrats and environmental groups. Foes say the pipeline would carry "dirty oil" that contributes to global warming, and they also express concern about possible spills.

Republicans and business and labor groups have urged Obama to approve the pipeline to create thousands of jobs and move further toward North American energy independence. The pipeline is also strongly supported by Democrats in oil and gas-producing states, including Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. All face re-election this year and could be politically damaged by rejection of the pipeline. Republican Mitt Romney carried all three states in the 2012 presidential election.

Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KEYSTONE_PIPELINE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-31-14-58-05

U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous.

In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Lockheed Martin demonstrated the ability of the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS), which gives full autonomy to convoys to operate in urban environments. In tests, driverless tactical vehicles were able to navigate hazards and obstacles including pedestrians, oncoming traffic, road intersections, traffic circles and stalled and passing vehicles.

Under an initial $11 million contract in 2012, Lockheed Martin developed the multiplatform kit which integrates low-cost sensors and control systems with Army and Marine tactical vehicles to enable autonomous operation in convoys. According to Lockheed, AMAS also gives drivers an automated option to alert, stop and adjust, or take full control under user supervision.

“The AMAS CAD hardware and software performed exactly as designed, and dealt successfully with all of the real-world obstacles that a real-world convoy would encounter,” said David Simon, AMAS program manager for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, in a statement.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2014/01/driverless/

Earthlings may be extreme latecomers to a universe full of life, with alien microbes possibly teeming on exoplanets beginning just 15 million years after the Big Bang, new research suggests.

Traditionally, astrobiologists keen on solving the mystery of the origin of life in the universe look for planets in habitable zones around stars. Also known as Goldilocks zones, these regions are considered to be just the right distance away from stars for liquid water, a pre-requisite for life as we know it, to exist.

But even exoplanets that orbit far beyond the habitable zone may have been able to support life in the distant past, warmed by the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, says Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb.

For comparison, the earliest evidence of life on Earth dates from 3.8 billion years ago, about 700 million years after our planet formed.

http://www.space.com/24496-universe-alien-life-habitability-big-bang.html

Republicans eyeing the White House in 2016 are pushing their party to change its stance and accept a softening of federal marijuana laws — a dramatic shift from the GOP’s most recent contenders who railed against the drug and questioned its medicinal value.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has arguably been the most vocal on the subject, saying the federal government should leave the issue entirely to the states. Texas Gov. Rick Perry also argues that marijuana’s legal status should be a state issue, and he points to drug courts in his state that he said have helped move Texas toward decriminalization.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, meanwhile, has vowed to scrap the “failed war on drugs” altogether — more than four decades after President Nixon, a Republican, set it into motion by naming drug abuse as “public enemy No. 1 in the United States.”
“Certainly, the Republican Party has been a lot slower moving on this issue than on the Democratic side, but particularly in the past several months some prominent figures have sort of recalibrated themselves when it comes to the issue of marijuana,” said Erik Altieri, a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/29/republicans-eyeing-a-presidential-run-in-2016-star/

Meanwhile here is Dianne Feinstein (Starting at 6M35s- Gateway drug yada yada)


What can we do to get some common sense out of drug warriors like Sen. Feinstein?

White males dominate Sunday political talk shows. But the overrepresentation does not end there.
White dudes are all over your television. Their faces stare up at you from newspapers and homepages. They abound in U.S. politics. They are legion.

And they're definitely on all of your Sunday morning political talk shows. According to a new study from Media Matters, white men made up the majority of guests on every major Sunday show in 2013.

They made up 60 percent of guests on This Week, 67 percent on Face the Nation, 67 percent on Fox News Sunday, 62 percent on Meet the Press, and 54 percent on State of the Union. On MSNBC's two Sunday morning shows, Up and Melissa Harris-Perry, white men weren't a majority, but still a plurality of all guests (42 percent and 27 percent of guests, respectively).

That's a lot of white guys, and it's not at all representative of the overall U.S. population, of which white men make up just 31 percent, according to the most recent Census data. But this massive overrepresentation isn't just on TV. It's the bedrock of the U.S. political class.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/white-men-are-everywhere-20140131

DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.

The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.

The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/we-are-giving-ourselves-cancer.html

Officers are supposed to pull drivers over for traffic violations, but a Channel 2 Action News investigation found traffic stops leading to a violation of another kind.

Driver after driver told investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer officers searched inside their pants while they were stopped for minor traffic violations. In several cases, the invasive searches targeted passengers who were riding in the car.

"He was like, 'Just unbuckle all your clothes,' and put his hands down inside my pants," said Terry Phillips.

Forest Park police had pulled over Phillips' wife for a suspended registration.

Phillips consented to a search. However on the officer's dashboard camera recording Phillips can clearly be heard protesting when he realized the extent of the officer's intentions.

"That's illegal, man, you can't do that. You can't do that," said Phillips to the officer. The officer continued.

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/roadside-violation-drivers-passengers-say-police-s/nc7kd/

When Mike Seay arrived home earlier this month and found his wife in the kitchen crying, he braced himself. The couple was still devastated by their daughter's death in a car accident last February, and seeing his wife Shannon distraught, he prepared for the worst.

Mrs. Seay showed him a mailing sent by OfficeMax Inc. Below his name was printed "Daughter Killed In Car Crash."

How does such a horrific detail land on a junk mail envelope? Most likely from a customer-service representative who collects information during a sale for the store's use, according to an executive who knows the data-collection industry. Details are electronically passed from company to company and finally to a printer.

Such incidents are inevitable—part of the cost of doing business in collecting and collating information on millions of individuals, said Steven Sheck, owner of customer-data provider MailingLists.com. On rare occasions he has seen obscenities find their way into mailing addresses, likely entered by angry customer-service representatives during a contentious telephone call.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303743604579351050709924372?KEYWORDS=officemax

On Jan. 4, 2010, when my boss saw my letter to the editor in the New York Times, we had a little chat.

It was rare for the federal security director at Chicago O’Hare to sit down with her floor-level Transportation Security Administration officers—it usually presaged a termination—and so I was nervous as I settled in across the desk from her. She was a woman in her forties with sharp blue eyes that seemed to size you up for placement in a spreadsheet. She held up a copy of the newspaper, open to the letters page. My contribution, under the headline “To Stop a Terrorist: No Lack of Ideas,” was circled in blue pen.

One week earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate 80 grams of a highly explosive powder while on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. He had smuggled the bomb aboard the plane in a pouch sewn into his underwear. It was a masterpiece of post-9/11 tragicomedy: Passengers tackled and restrained Abdulmutallab for the remainder of the flight, and he succeeded in burning nothing besides his own genitals.

The TSA saw the near-miss as proof that aviation security could not be ensured without the installation of full-body scanners in every U.S. airport. But the agency’s many critics called its decision just another knee-jerk response to an attempted terrorist attack. I agreed, and wrote to the Times saying as much. My boss wasn’t happy about it.

“The problem we have here is that you identified yourself as a TSA employee,” she said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/tsa-screener-confession-102912.html#ixzz2rzbNRkQY

Demaryius Thomas‘ mother and grandmother will cheer for the Broncos receiver around the prison TV Sunday, both wearing No. 88 jerseys they crafted with strips of tape.

The two women have never seen Thomas play in person. He was 11 when police burst through the door of their home in Montrose, Ga., and arrested both in 1999. Police allowed Katina Smith to walk her son and his two younger sisters to the school bus one last time.

Now she’s at a minimum-security prison in Florida, sentenced to 20 years. Her mother, Minnie Pearl Thomas, who had two previous drug convictions, received two life sentences with the possibility for parole after 40 years.

Smith could have gotten a lighter sentence by testifying against her mother, but she refused.

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/01/30/demaryius-thomas-mom-grandma-have-to-root-from-prison/