Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/208522729?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
All Local News Teams Should Use Puppets Instead of Court Sketches [Video]
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Neil Young's Warehouse Fire Blamed On The Hybrid Car He Made
SAN CARLOS, Calif. -- A company founded by Neil Young is facing a lawsuit over a fire in the San Francisco Bay Area that authorities say started in a vintage car the rocker had converted into a hybrid vehicle.
The suit seeks nearly $500,000 that Unigard says it paid to the owner of a building damaged in the 2010 blaze in San Carlos.
Fire officials say the blaze started in the car, dubbed the LincVolt. Young converted the car into a hybrid vehicle in a highly-publicized project to promote fuel-efficiency.
He did not respond to a request for comment.
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Saturday, January 21, 2012
Home prices likely to keep falling in 2012
By Martin Wolk
The housing market ended the year on a positive note with strong sales in December, but a glut of unsold homes will likely push prices lower through much of this year, forecasters said Friday.
Sales of existing homes hit an 11-month high last month and the number of properties on the market fell to the lowest level in nearly seven years, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Unseasonably warm weather may have helped boost sales, but analysts said a strengthening job market and record low mortgage rates should buoy housing in coming months. Still, they were troubled by the high level of "distressed homes" for sale, including short sales of underwater properties or sales of foreclosed properties. Nearly one-third of existing-home sales were distressed last month, according to the Realtors.
In addition, one-third of Realtors said home sales fell through last month because of declined mortgage applications or appraisals that fell short of the required values.
"These strong negative undercurrents in the housing market and absence of support from strong labor market conditions will continue to trim home sales in the near term," said Asha Bangalore, economist at Northern Trust Co.
The median sale price for an existing home in December was $162,500, down 2.5 percent from December 2010. For the full year, the median price for existing homes fell nearly 4 percent.
"Home sales will gradually improve in 2012. ... However, prices will continue to decline in the near term, despite the better sales," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC. He pointed out that many home foreclosures are stuck in the pipeline due to paperwork issues and will pressure home prices in the year to come.
"The market for single-family homes picked up in the second half of 2011, after being stuck near the bottom for nearly three years," said economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight. "This pickup is real, but the road to recovery will be a slow one."
While the home sales pace was a touch below economists' expectations, December marked the third straight month of gains, adding to hopes that a tentative recovery was taking shape.
But a glut of unsold properties that is weighing down on prices and stringent lending practices by banks is likely to make progress painfully slow.
There were 2.38 million unsold homes on the market last month, the fewest since March 2005. That represented a 6.2 months' supply at December's sales pace, the lowest since April 2006 and down from a 7.2 months' supply in November.
The Realtors group noted, however, that the inventory of unsold homes tends to decline in winter.
Data earlier this week showed single-family home starts rose for a third straight month in December and optimism among builders this month was the highest in four-and-a-half years.
"It is very encouraging that the current phase of the recovery is being driven by economic fundamentals as opposed to being fostered by temporary stimulus," said Millan Mulraine, a senior macro strategist at TD Securities in New York.
Reuters contributed to this report.
What are home prices doing in your area?
Existing home sales increased 5 percent last month, the highest pace in nearly a year. So, which investments may be the best bets as housing shows signs of life? CNBC's Diana Olick has the details.
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Project Bifrost: (Fission) Rockets of the Future?
Anytime anyone even thinks about mixing "nuclear" and outer-space (even radioisotope generators as used on many space probes) all the anti-nuclear groups kick up a huge fuss.
Sucks to be them, then. Any time you push beyond the inner solar system, you need some sort of nuclear power to get electricity, as you can't burn things or use hydroelectric or wind-power. You can use solar panels in the inner solar system, but the further out you go the less practical that becomes. IIRC, solar is a no-go much beyond about the orbit of Mars, even for relatively low-power applications. High thrust engines are not low-power!
What's more, as long as you're outside the Earth's magnetosphere, an
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Occupy movement's last big stand: Boston?
With Occupiers cleared out of New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and the status of the San Francisco camp in jeopardy, the last major encampment is Boston, which recently got a stay of eviction of up to two weeks. What do Occupiers do if they can't occupy public spaces anymore?
Occupy Boston, one of the few remaining protest encampments left in the United States, will stay up and running, at least for now.
Skip to next paragraphDespite that temporary victory in court last week, and the continued presence of Occupiers in smaller cities, the ?occupation? phase of the Occupy movement seems gradually to be coming to a close. Already, protesters evicted from their camps are gearing up with other forms of protest. On Tuesday, an offshoot of the Occupy movement protested foreclosures in some 25 cities around the US with talk in Los Angeles and elsewhere of helping families take back their foreclosed homes.
But can the Occupy movement survive if it's no longer occupying anything?
The breakup of the camps has advantages and disadvantages for the Occupiers, says David S. Meyer, a sociology professor at the University of California Irvine, who studies protest movements. ?The advantage of a geographical presence is visibility, and giving people stuff to do.... A disadvantage is that your community is defined by the people who show up, and that doesn?t necessarily make for smart decisions.?
Another drawback is that the encampments force the protesters to spend a lot of time on housekeeping matters, at the expense of fighting for their ideals.
"These general assembly meetings at the camps mostly deal with logistics,? Dr. Meyer?says. ?Taking the occupation out of it means they have the time to focus on core issues, like income equality. There?s more active civil disobedience, and some protesters are even starting to work in political campaigns. It should make for a more creative and diverse movement.??
But members of Occupy Boston see maintaining their Dewey Square encampment as a top priority, intrinsic to their message. ?As they argued in court Thursday, the camp is in the city?s financial district, highly visible from the buildings of banks and other financial institutions that the Occupiers see as responsible for the nation?s financial problems. ?There?s been a lot of discussion as to whether or not the encampment phase is over, but having it in the financial district is very important,? says Stephen Squibb, a protester and Occupy Boston spokesman .
?We have attempted to prioritize human needs ? food, clothing, shelter, the freedom of speech and assembly ? so as to highlight their betrayal by those working around us,? the group stated in a press conference on the steps of the Suffolk County courthouse Dec. 1.
Thursday, Suffolk County Superior Court judge Frances McIntyre granted the Boston protesters an extension to a Nov. 16 restraining order against the city, protecting the camp from eviction until Dec. 15. Around that time, the judge will render a ?final decision? on whether the Boston tent city will go the way of encampments shut down in several other major cities, including New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
?I?m feeling optimistic,? protester David Lehnerd said during a court recess just before the judge handed down her extension. ?Like more optimistic than cautiously optimistic, but not fully blown optimistic.?
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/H0y9gL_Xhbo/Occupy-movement-s-last-big-stand-Boston
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Scientists rediscover rarest U.S. bumblebee: Cockerell's Bumblebee was last seen in the United States in 1956
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2011) ? A team of scientists from the University of California, Riverside recently rediscovered the rarest species of bumblebee in the United States, last seen in 1956, living in the White Mountains of south-central New Mexico.
Known as "Cockerell's Bumblebee," the bee was originally described in 1913 from six specimens collected along the Rio Ruidoso, with another 16 specimens collected near the town of Cloudcroft, and one more from Ruidoso, the most recent being in 1956. No other specimens had been recorded until three more were collected on weeds along a highway north of Cloudcroft on Aug. 31, 2011.
"Most bumblebees in the U.S. are known from dozens to thousands of specimens, but not this species," said Douglas Yanega, senior museum scientist at UC Riverside. "The area it occurs in is infrequently visited by entomologists, and the species has long been ignored because it was thought that it was not actually a genuine species, but only a regional color variant of another well-known species."
Yanega pointed out that there are nearly 50 species of native U.S. bumblebees, including a few on the verge of extinction, such as the species known as "Franklin's Bumblebee," which has been seen only once since 2003. That species, as rare as it is, is known from a distribution covering some 13,000 square miles, whereas Cockerell's Bumblebee is known from an area of less than 300 square miles, giving it the most limited range of any bumblebee species in the world.
"There is much concern lately about declines in our native bumblebee species, and as we now have tools at our disposal to assess their genetic makeup, these new specimens give fairly conclusive evidence that Cockerell's Bumblebee is a genuine species," he said. "With appropriate comparative research, we hope to be able to determine which other species is its closest living relative. Given that this bee occurs in an area that's largely composed of National Forest and Apache tribal land, it's unlikely to be under serious threat of habitat loss at the moment. Since its biology is completely unknown, however, it nevertheless may require some more formal assessment in the future."
Yanega went on to point out that it is not especially surprising for an insect species to be rediscovered after decades, when people might otherwise imagine that it may have gone extinct.
"When an insect species is very rare, or highly localized, it can fairly easily escape detection for very long periods of time," he said. "There are many precedents -- some of them very recently in the news, in fact -- of insects that have been unseen for anywhere from 70 to more than 100 years, suddenly turning up again when someone either got lucky enough, or persistent enough, to cross paths with them again. It is much harder to give conclusive evidence that an insect species has gone extinct than for something like a bird or mammal or plant."
UCR entomologists rediscover many such "lost" insect species and discover entirely new species on a regular basis, at the rate of several dozen species every year, primarily in groups such as bees, wasps, beetles, and plant bugs. According to recent estimates, approximately 8 million species are in existence, the vast majority being insects of which only about 1 million have been described.
"It should come as no surprise that we discover so many new species of insects so easily," Yanega said. "But the pace of species discovery and description is incredibly slow because there are so few insect taxonomists relative to the number of undescribed insects. Moreover, the work is painstaking, time-consuming, and not very glamorous, at least in the public's perception, when compared to studying things like dinosaurs."
As for plans regarding additional work with Cockerell's Bumblebee, Yanega said that the recent expedition, carried out together with UCR scientists Keve Ribardo and Greg Ballmer, was funded in part by the Friends of the Entomology Research Museum, a non-profit organization supporting UCR's Entomology Research Museum, but that nothing further was yet planned. The DNA sequencing was also carried out at UCR, as part of a larger study on wasp and bee relationships.
"The first step is to come to a firm conclusion regarding the status of this bee as a species," he said. "The second step is spreading the word to the scientific community that this bee deserves some attention, as it has been completely overlooked. Here at UCR we may or may not be involved beyond that point, in gathering data on the distribution and biology of this species, but at the very least our discovery can get the proverbial ball rolling."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Riverside.
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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205140616.htm
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