[Link: www.thedailybeast.com...]
As temperatures are rising in Southern California, so are tensions over the future of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, also known as SONGS. It's been nearly four months since the nuclear power plant, located 45 miles north of San Diego, was shuttered after a small amount of radiation leaked into the atmosphere from a recently installed steam-generator tube in the plant's reactor Unit 3.
It was subsequently discovered that a large number of these tubes, which function like a car radiator and carry hot, pressurized radioactive water, were damaged in Unit 2, the other operating unit at the seaside plant, which is operated by Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and jointly owned with the city of Riverside, Calif.
Jennifer Manfre, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison, told The Daily Beast that the company has since plugged 510 damaged tubes in Unit 2 and 807 tubes in Unit 3. But investigators with Edison and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still haven't pinpointed the reason for the tubes' erosion -- other than to say it was the result of a vibration.
[Link: azstarnet.com...]
WASHINGTON - More Arizonans were killed by guns in 2009 than in motor-vehicle incidents, evidence of the need for stricter gun laws, according to a report released last week.
The report, by the Violence Policy Center, said Arizona was one of 10 states where firearm deaths outstripped traffic deaths in 2009, the most recent year for which numbers were available.
"Arizona needs to start looking seriously at the fact that it has a major gun-violence problem," said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the center.
But an Arizona lawmaker who supports gun rights criticized the report's "apple-and-oranges" comparison, which he said was simply designed to influence firearms legislation.
State Sen. Frank Antenori, R-Tucson, said it is unfair to compare gun-related deaths to motor-vehicle deaths because most gun deaths are not accidental.
"Do you use a car in self-defense?" Antenori asked hypothetically.
[Link: www.businessinsider.com...]
Greek election polls are trickling in and one disturbing result is this: The Neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' party, whose logo is practically a swastika, is likely going to get enough votes to win a few seats in parliament. Nothing is quite confirmed yet, but that's what exit polls show now.
They'll be tiny, but it's still a shock.
And furthermore, the relationship between depression, unemployment, and Nazis repeats again, as this famous chart from SocGen's Dylan Grice confirms.
[Link: blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com...]
At the Gilbert home where five people died yesterday in an apparent murder/suicide -- allegedly perpetrated by neo-Nazi J.T. Ready -- there was a reason the bomb squad showed up: six grenades.
Gilbert police said this morning that "hazardous chemicals and military grade munitions" were found by investigators once a search warrant was obtained, and Nick Martin from Talking Points Memo found out those munitions were anti-tank grenades.
U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent Tom Mangan confirmed this to New Times, telling us that it's definitely illegal for regular citizens to have those devices, which are designed for use in military combat.
TPM says the grenades are typically fired from a launcher, which was not found at the home.
[Link: www.theatlantic.com...]
SREBRENICA, BOSNIA -- Six months from now, a municipal election will be held in this isolated mining town, the scene of the largest massacre in Europe since World War Two.
The town's current mayor, a 33 year-old Bosnian Muslim, says the election will hand Bosnian Serbs control of the town and complete the "ethnic cleansing," or removal, of all Muslims from eastern Bosnia. Serbs say it is democracy, plain and simple.
Seventeen years ago, Serb forces executed 8,100 Muslim men and boys here in the largest single mass killing of the war in Bosnia. The U.S. and its European allies - who had declared the town a U.N. protected "safe area" - stood by as the Serbs rampaged for days in the summer of 1995.
In local elections since then, a special exemption has been granted that allows Muslims who lived here before the war to vote in Srebrenica - even if they no longer reside here. This year, the country's High Representative - a foreign overseer with sweeping powers - plans to issue no such exemption. In a visit to the town this week, he called for Serb and Muslim politicians to compromise.
"The challenge in Srebrenica goes far beyond the elections," said Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat who has pressed local officials to take more responsibility since becoming high representative in 2009. "People want a better life, and the key to that is constructive politics and economic development."
Under the exemption, Muslims have controlled the municipal government, interned the bodies of 5,137 of the victims in a sprawling memorial here and tried to reverse some of the impact of the killings by slowly moving back. Today Srebrenica's population, which was 75 percent Muslim before the war, is evenly split between Serbs and Muslims.
And that is where the good news ends. Already a glaring symbol of international fecklessness, the town's sorry state today sets a new standard for Western half-measures gone astonishingly wrong.
[Link: thinkprogress.org...]
A new survey finds that by 2-to-1 Americans accurately understand global warming makes a number of extreme weather events worse.
This Yale survey matches a recent Brookings poll that found Americans' understanding of climate change was increasing with more extreme weather and warmer temperatures. It also matches Yale's earlier November survey finding.
This finding matches the results of September polling by ecoAmerica:
69% of Americans Know "Weather Conditions (Such as Heat Waves and Droughts) Are Made Worse by Climate Change"
57% of Americans understand "If we don't do something about climate change now, we can end up having our farmland turned to desert."
[Link: pandodaily.com...]
It's been three days since Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad, but you're still stuck with your trusty old iPad 2. You're keen to get rid of it so you can buy the new one, but you forgot to log in to one of those buy-back sites before Wednesday's launch. Predictably, the announcement sent trade-in values plummeting--before the launch, some of these sites were offering close to $300 for your entry-level iPad 2 (the 16GB Wi-Fi model), provided it was in "good" condition. Now they're willing to part with far less: As of Saturday morning, if you've got a well-cared-for iPad 2, NextWorth will give you $241 for it. BuyBackMac is offering $224. eBay's Instant Sale will net you $200. And Gazelle, the most popular of the buy-back sites, will only part with $185.
Sure, if you're hurting for cash to subsidize your early adopter lifestyle, $200 is nothing to scoff at. But if I were you, I'd skip by all of these sites and instead log in to Amazon. As of right now, its trade-in service is offering $351 for a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 that has "normal wear," and up to $390 for one in "like new" condition. Indeed, Amazon Trade-In's lowest offer for an iPad 2 is $300--if your tablet isn't water-damaged and is at least in working condition, you'll get that baseline amount.
What's going on here? Considering that Apple is selling new iPad 2s for $399, how can Amazon afford to shell out up to $390 for your old one? What's it doing with all the iPads it's buying? Is Jeff Bezos running a charity?
Nope. There's one catch to Amazon's trade-in program, and it's brilliant.
