After shuffling off the "Dancing with the Stars" stage, Bill Nye has decided to take on creationism with a debate tentatively scheduled between the Science Guy and Ken Hamm, founder of Kentucky's Creation Museum, for Feb. 4, at 7 p.m., according to news reports.

Not everybody thinks a debate between Nye and Hamm is a good idea. Greg Laden, on his culture and science blog, gives four reasons Nye should avoid the debate...

I find myself agreeing with Laden, even more so after reading this quote from a comment:

"In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal."

- Thomas Jefferson -

By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, Jan. 2/3, 2013

Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.

The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.

The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day and types of visits, including those for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.

The findings cast doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in emergency room costs [....]

BBC News, 2 Jan., 2013

Police in China have confiscated three tonnes of the drug methamphetamine and arrested 182 people during raids at a village, officials say.

The drug, also known as crystal meth or "ice", was seized in Boshe village, Lufeng city, Guangdong province.

Police told state media that more than a third of China's methamphetamine came from Lufeng in the last three years.

The raids involved at least 3,000 police operatives, two helicopters and speedboats, an official statement said [....]

Home page lede: Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda freed prisoners, torched police stations and seized mosques on Thursday in Falluja and Ramadi, two of Iraq’s most important cities.

By Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2014

BAGHDAD — Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened Thursday to seize control of Falluja and Ramadi, two of the most important cities in Iraq, setting fire to police stations, freeing prisoners from jail and occupying mosques, as the government rushed troop reinforcements to the areas.

Dressed in black and waving the flag of Al Qaeda, the militants commandeered mosque loudspeakers to call for supporters to join their struggle in both cities in the western province of Anbar, which have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011 [....]

By Rick Hampson, USA Today, Jan. 2, 2014

Homicide in America last year was a tale of two cities: those where it plummeted and those where it soared.

Murder declined in some places with which it was once (sometimes recently) synonymous, such as Chicago (down 17% from 2012), Philadelphia (down 25%), Los Angeles (16%) and New York (20%).

Chicago's total was the lowest since 1965, Philadelphia's the lowest since 1967, L.A.'s the lowest since 1966. New York logged the lowest total at least since 1963, when its current system of keeping records was established.

Homicides declined in some of the nation's most troubled cities, including bankrupt Detroit (from 386 to 333) and Camden, N.J. (from 67 to 57), where the local police department was dissolved and replaced by a regional force.

Homicides increased in other cities, including Washington (even if the 12 victims of the Sept. 16 Navy Yard massacre are not included); Baltimore, whose Western District, infamous in the TV series The Wire, saw the most murders in a decade; and Newark, where the bloodiest year since 1990 culminated with police charging a 15-year-old boy in a Christmas Day shooting that left two teenagers dead and a third seriously injured.

Overall, homicide declined dramatically around the turn of the century, but experts say it's unclear exactly where it's headed now.

"It wasn't a bad year, especially compared to 15 years ago,'' said Thomas Reppetto, former president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and an author of several books on policing, "but it's not clear what the long-term trend will be, even five years from now.'' [....]

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

By Eli M. Rosenberg and Michael Schwirtz, New York Times, Dec. 31, 2013/Jan. 1, 2014

The arrests began almost as soon as the concertgoers amassed outside Madison Square Garden on Monday evening. Uniformed and plainclothes police officers moved through the crowd, picking off targets and leading them to a police van parked around the corner where they were patted down and loaded in [....]

It was the start of another night of revelry and arrests that has become something of a ritual within the traveling circus that accompanies the jam band Phish. At least 228 people were arrested or received summonses at shows on the first three nights of a four-night stand that was to end Tuesday with a New Year’s Eve performance and undoubtedly more arrests.

Illegal drugs have been woven into the fabric of the rock concert experience since before Woodstock. But fans of Phish, a Vermont band with an obsessed following reminiscent of the Grateful Dead, seem to have developed an outsize reputation among law enforcement agencies for heavy drug use [....]

By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Dec. 30, 2013, updated 8:43 pm

Julian Assange’s father met with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria during a visit to Damascus last week as a member of “a solidarity delegation,” The Australian reported on Monday [....]

A spokesman for the Wikileaks Party, set up earlier this year to support Mr. Assange’s failed bid for a seat in the Australian Senate, confirmed on Monday that its chief executive, Mr. Shipton, had traveled to Syria with two members of the party’s national council.

A Syrian state television report on the delegation’s meetings with senior officials featured comments from Mr. Shipton, who said the visit was intended “to show the solidarity of the Australian people and Wikileaks Party with the difficulties that Syria is … having at the moment.”

Mr. Assange’s father, who bears a striking physical resemblance to his son, also called the courage of the Syrian people “an example to the rest of the world in how to resist this plague of terrorism which is sweeping the Middle East and Central Asia.” He added that the Wikileaks Party planned to lend Mr. Assad’s government a hand in getting its message out. “We’ll continue to expose the truth to the Australian people and to our international audience, and next year we will set up an office in Damascus,” Mr. Shipton said [....]

One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program. These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers. ...

 

Although the method appears to have little importance in practical terms, the NSA's agents still seem to enjoy it because it allows them to have a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Seattle-based software giant. ... ("Sigint" stands for "signals intelligence.")

Also Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox

By Leonid Ragozin in Moscow, The Guardian, 29 Dec., 2013

Sixteen people were killed and another 50 injured after a suicide bombing at a railway station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd that highlighted the region's security vulnerability just six weeks before the Winter Olympics.

The blast ripped through an area between the station entrance and metal frames that had been installed as a precaution against terror attacks. There were conflicting reports on the identity of the perpetrator; the authorities first indicated that a young woman from the Caucasus may have been responsible, as in previous attacks in Russia over the past decade. But latterly, news agencies reported that it was a man wearing a rucksack who was behind the attack, though he may not have been acting alone.

CCTV video shows a bright flash of light inside the station building [....]

More details and analysis @

At Least 15 Are Killed in Explosion at Russian Rail Station
By Steven Lee Myers in Moscow, New York Times, Dec. 29, 2013

The race is on to exploit off-shore energy around Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus -- and Moscow is crashing the party.

By Keith Johnson, ForeignPolicy.com, Dec. 27, 2013

On Christmas Day, Russian state-owned gas company Soyuzneftegaz inked a $90 million, 25-year deal with Damascus to start exploring for the first time some of Syria's offshore energy resources. On the surface, it represents another show of support from Russia for the beleaguered regime of Bashar al Assad. But the deal also fits into a larger pattern of Russian energy adventurism in one of the world's newest frontiers for oil and gas development. If the investments there work out as planned, they could help cement Russia's eroding hold over Europe's energy supply -- and help boost Moscow's standing as a global power on the rise.

At a time when the whole post-war architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean is crumbling, from the breakdown of Egypt's relations with Israel to tensions in the U.S.-Turkish relationship, Moscow seems to spy an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where it once loomed large, get a grip on a potentially big alternative to Russian energy, and make it easier to flex its military muscles [....]

... interviews with dozens of academics and traders, and a review of hundreds of emails and other documents involving two highly visible professors in the commodities field — Mr. Pirrong and Professor Scott H. Irwin at the University of Illinois — show how major players on Wall Street and elsewhere have been aggressive in underwriting and promoting academic work.

 

The efforts by the financial players, the interviews show, are part of a sweeping campaign to beat back regulation and shape policies that affect the prices that people around the world pay for essentials like food, fuel and cotton.

 

Professors Pirrong and Irwin say that industry backing did not color their opinions. ...

 

No one disputes that a substantial portion of price increases in oil and food over the last decade were caused by fundamental market factors: increased demand from China and other industrializing countries, extreme weather, currency fluctuations and the diversion of grain to biofuel.

 

But so much speculative money poured into markets — from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion at a peak in 2008 — that many economists, and even some commodities traders and investment banks, say the flood became a factor of its own in distorting prices.