16 Mar - Burma,Budgets,'Security'

Burma fuelling China’s heroin crisis

China has seen a rapid rise in drug addiction this year, particularly in its southern Yunnan province where opium from Burma’s volatile Shan state is pouring across the border.
More than 60,000 people registered as heroin addicts in Yunnan province last year, a leap from 50,000 the year before, according to Bangyuan Wang from Health Unlimited, which provides treatment for drug users along the China-Burma border.
“[Heroin addiction] has been one of the big problems in Yunnan over the past 20 years, and the government is trying really hard to crack down on drug traffickers and drug users,” he said.
He added that most of the drug traffickers were being arrested as they transported drugs from Burma into China, while a recent Al Jazeera report found that around 80 percent of heroin addicts in the Chinese border town of Nabang were from Burma.
In Yunnan, the Chinese government has opened more than 50 methadone treatment clinics which are being accessed by “thousands of users”, Wang said.
Burma is the world’s second largest source of opium, after Afghanistan, and the findings will do little to support the Burmese government’s repeated guarantees that it is stamping out the country’s drug trade.

Despite the burgeoning of the cross-border heroin trade, however, a serious problem remains within Burma.
A report in January by the Thailand-based Palaung Women’s Organisation (PWO) said that opium abuse was “devastating” Shan communities. The Palaung are an ethnic group from Burma’s northeastern Shan state, which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s opium output.
The report pointed the finger at the Burmese government’s acquiescence in the production of opium by drug lords “in exchange for policing against resistance activity and sharing drug profits”.

Burma an ‘enemy of the internet’

Internet repression in Burma is amongst the strictest in the world, according to a report released today by a Paris-based media watchdog.
The findings were released to coincide with the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, an initiative started by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), which also releases an annual Press Freedom Index.
Alongside Burma on RSF’s Enemies of the Internet report are Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam.
It accuses Burma, as well as North Korea, Cuba and Turkmenistan, of being “determined to use any means necessary to prevent their citizens from having access to the Internet”.
The group highlighted last year’s trial of Burma opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, when the junta “did not hesitate to cut the telephone and Internet lines of the city in which she was detained”.

( For a contrasting thought on the virtues of a 'Free Press' - cough,cough - remember that the Internet is a U.S. military application grown to worldwide use. Also the C.I.A. is profoundly interested in media manipulation - as is the Pentagon. 
The B.B.C. set up shop to provide NATO means to promote the Green  Revolution in Iran via broadcasts into the country to provide news slanted against the ruling party at a time when assassins are funded to kill government and military figures. This from people known to overturn governments so as to rape countries of resources through mass murder. I always take the Voice of America with a large dose of cynicism. )

County Stuck In Information Superhighway Slow Lane

Forslund says AT&T got a right of way to put its fiber into the ground there to connect major cities to the north and south. But he says the company isn't interested in connecting his county.

"AT&T has declined our offers to utilize that in the past, and it's here and it's using our rights of way, which we get no benefit for," Forslund says.

A local company, New Day Broadband, says it approached AT&T about paying to tap into its line to connect Trinity County, but New Day says AT&T turned down the proposal.

In an e-mail response, AT&T told NPR that the fiber that runs through Trinity is "not engineered for local feeds."

That claim baffles Andrew Afflerbach, the director of engineering at Columbia Telecommunications Corp. Columbia consults with rural communities around the U.S. to help bring them broadband access. He says a local provider should be able to tap into the fiber and build out into the community.

"The two potential technical arguments — one is that the cable's all used up and another that you can't touch it — those are essentially technically not valid," he says. "Whatever reason that exists, it's not a technical reason."

( That's a familiar tune. Locally, the province put fibre right to schools. The formerly provincial telephone utility has a POP3 to its office. Nobody gets to tap into those sources to forward connections to the country - though alternatives are scarce to nonexistent still, except satellite -or cellphone plans which charge access fees driving rates through the roof. My supernet access ?  Through unrelated internet monitoring schemes used by the oil industry. Still, I should admit you can get access to fibre...at multiples of the rate any sane person would pay for wireless for installations made by digging up municipalities to install physical connections. )

HitWise: Facebook’s US Traffic Continues to Grow, Takes Over Visits Lead from Google

It makes sense to us that the average user would find a News Feed that defaults to Top Stories more engaging than a real time stream.

More courts swear by digital technology

By Liisa Rajala, USA TODAY

Courts in Iowa, Minnesota and New York are considering replacing at least some court reporters with digital recording systems to cut costs.

If they do, they would follow Utah,Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska and Kentucky in using electronic recording systems. Utah and Vermont switched exclusively for budget reasons in 2009, according to SueLynn Morgan, president of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), and officials in those states.

The Outsiders Who Foresaw The Subprime Crisis

Nearly the whole financial system bought into subprime mortgages and the securities that were backed by them — and amounted to bundles of bad debt.

In his new book, The Big Short, Michael Lewis writes about people who didn't buy in. In fact, they bet against the colossal tower of debt that Wall Street built. They shorted it — and they profited from its eventual collapse.

For Lewis, The Big Short is his return to the scene of the crime. Twenty years ago, he wrote about his experience working as a young bond trader at Salomon Brothers.Liar's Poker was an astonishing tale of kids fresh out of Ivy League schools making huge decisions about other people's money with no qualifications for doing so.

By the time of the financial crisis, the generation he wrote about in Liar's Pokerwas established Wall Streeters, typically up to their eyeballs in mortgage-backed securities.

The people he writes about in The Big Short are outsiders by virtue of youth or personality.

Montgomery, Prince George's slash budgets

Maryland's two largest counties outlined spending cuts Monday that would reach from children's health clinics to nursing homes, slice tens of millions of dollars in education spending and furlough thousands of public employees.

Drop-offs in revenue and in expected state aid are forcing officials in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, home to nearly a third of the state's population, to confront some of the same unforgiving math that has caused governments across the Washington region to propose cuts to popular programs and safety-net services.

Social care revamp needed 'to make system fairer'

The number of people being excluded from social care in England will continue rising unless there is a major revamp of the system

U.S. regulations forcing more meat inspections in Canada

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/regulations+forcing+more+meat+inspections+Canada/2684056/story.html#ixzz0iJuODaXs

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is scrambling to maintain an increased presence at dozens of large meat-processing plants after auditors from the United States Department of Agriculture found inspections were too infrequent to meet U.S. food-safety standards, newly released internal records show.

The Tea Party Movement and American Democracy

The Tea Party movement presents itself as bipartisan. Inasmuch as part of it began as opposition to the Bush administration’s bailout of major corporations about to become minor corporations, there is some bipartisanship. But today “anti-bigness” is more consonant with GOP pitches than with those of the Democrats. Further, its opposition to national healthcare is pronounced, and though it remains rather amorphous, the movement is presently hostile to the Obama administration.

In describing the movement as a party, it’s unclear which meaning of the word it refers to – political organization or boisterous revelry. Tea Party rallies look like folk festivals, complete with music, costumes, and charivari. Anger and frustration are obvious. Thoughtfulness and strategy are not. Last month’s convention did not lead to coalescence of ideology or leadership. Many in the movement feel this will preserve its authentic populist nature, but it might portend its doom.

Lyndon Larouche, the brahmin in search of lower-caste support, has tried to make the movement his own but succeeded only in giving the movement a boorish image. Libertarians might have a better shot. They are articulate and thoughtful, but perhaps too dispassionate to play well with the emotional members of the movement. Democrats, as holders of the White House and both houses of congress, at present are the focus of popular anger.

Phantom of Mexican Narco-Guerrillas Haunts U.S. Security Chiefs

Recent assassination attempts against high-ranking state officials - Sinaloa's Secretary of Tourism (successful), Coahuila's Attorney General (the restaurant at which he was dining with a Texas mayor was sprayed with automatic weapon fire), and a Baja California finance undersecretary (hung by the neck from a Tijuana freeway overpass) - suggest revolutionary retribution in a year that marks the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution in which jitters of new uprisings are legion - January 1st was welcomed in with anarchist bombs, sabotage, and "expropriations" in Mexico City and Tijuana on the northern border.

Although the incidents cited suggest revolutionary subversion, they were all the handiwork of Mexico's five narco cartels locked in an intractable war with both President Felipe Calderon's military and federal police - and reportedly hundreds of U.S. drug warriors - that has now taken more than 19,000 lives since December 2006.

The U.S, role in the capture of El Teo and Arturo Beltran Leyva, "the Boss of Bosses" who was gunned down by Mexican marines December 16th, appears to have been purposefully downplayed. According to an unidentified member of Calderon's Security Cabinet as reported by Gustavo Castillo, a La Jornada correspondent with exceptional sources, Simentel was located by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Immigration & Customs Enforcement, a first indication that ICE is now being deployed in Mexico's drug war.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI are also thought to have armed agents on the ground here under provisions of the Merida Initiative and the North American Security & Prosperity Agreement.

Widespread human rights abuses by federal troops who combat the narcos along the northern border has provoked a wave of anti-army, anti-government anger in many northern states and conditions for a Gamiz-like assault on military installations cannot be discounted should drug gangs and armed radicals find common cause.

Florida's Double Standard on Violent Offenders

Habeas Porpoise

Strikingly absent in the outpouring of public compassion for Tilikum, who was taken from the wild in 1983 and has been captive to adoring Orlando audiences since age eleven (following his role in a previous trainer’s death), is acknowledgement of the comparable effects of lifelong incarceration for Florida’s unfree human denizens. According to a 2009 report by the Sentencing Project, more than 140,000 people in the U.S. are serving life sentences without parole. Over 6,000 of them are in Florida. And, perhaps most striking of all for the state that serves as home to some of the nation’s most widely revered family-friendly attractions-- the land of Disney World, Epcot Center and, yes, SeaWorld -- the Sunshine State leads the country in the number of juveniles serving life without parole(LWOP) for crimes in which no one was killed. Like Tilikum, these young offenders -- 77 in all, out of the 100 LWOP juveniles serving time nationwide -- live in cramped, stressful conditions, are regularly subject to pressure for unconsensual sex, and face the likelihood of permanently severed ties from their families.

USDA fails to stop anal shocking and other abuses of slaughterhouse animals

Canada's warmest winter ever 'beyond shocking'

( What happened ? I saw 40 below for the first time in the last few years and snow is on the ground as is usual. )

From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books.
Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948. 

"The winter than wasn't" may have set the stage for potentially "horrific" water shortages, insect infestations and wildfires this summer.

Discovery News

DINOSAURS CHOKED ON OZONE

A new study in the journal Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology puts forth the idea that the Chicxulub impact, long blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era 65 million years ago, could have done them in by flinging huge amounts of ozone precursor chemicals -- nitrogen oxides, methane, and other hydrocarbons -- into the air.

According to the researchers' simulation, the impact could have produced enough ozone to raise concentrations in the atmosphere to over 1,000 parts per billion (or 1 part per million), about 10 times the dangerous level for people).

 

Now, I'm not sure we know enough about dino physiology to say for certain that these high O3 levels were enough to cause them all to keel over in a fit of wheezing and respiratory distress. But it's an interesting idea. The researchers suggest it may explain why the extinction was selective -- it killed off 50 percent of all land animals, but spared large crocodiles, frogs, and mammals. That kind of picking and choosing doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense in the "global firestorm" and/or "nuclear winter" hypothesis.

Still, there is at least one major hole in the authors' theory: not all dinosaurs died out, of course. Avian dinosaurs -- birds -- made it. As the researchers note, birds store outside air in their hollow bones. They exchange old air for new by exhaling, effectively passing poisonous air through their lungs twice. You'd think they'd be just as susceptible to high O3 levels as non-avian dinosaurs, most of which also had hollow bones.

If this finding turns out to hold up under scrutiny, it doesn't bode well for humans -- studies suggest that ground-level ozone is already responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world each year. And ozone does well in warm weather. So -- you guessed it -- models suggest that as global warming eases onto the scene over the next century, people may start succumbing to the poisonous gas with more and more frequency.