By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, Nov. 17, 2012

Then-defense secretary Robert M. Gates stopped bagging his leaves when he moved into a small Washington military enclave in 2007. His next-door neighbor was Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, who had a chef, a personal valet and — not lost on Gates — troops to tend his property.

Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.

“I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time,” Gates said in response to a question after a speech Thursday. He wryly complained to his wife that “Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss.” [....]

Reuters, Nov. 19, 2012

More than 100,000 protesters organised by Catholic groups staged separate demonstrations in French cities over the weekend to protest against government plans to legalise same-sex marriage next year.

Most of them took to the streets on Saturday, backed by the French Catholic Church and joined by several senior clerics, and several thousand more paraded with ultra-traditionalist Catholics in Paris on Sunday.

Though marching separately, they chanted the same slogan - "one father one mother for all children" - and denounced the Socialist government's plan. Polls show about 60% support for the reform, but not the right for gay people to adopt children [....]

[Thomas] Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, given a purely physical beginning, everything else – chemistry, biology, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, values, understandings, even science – follows on by natural processes. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. We do not understand every step in this process, naturally, but we can be reasonably confident of its overall shape and confident, too, that any remaining gaps that can be closed will be closed only by more understanding of the same broad kind that we already have....Nagel wholly rejects this picture. He denies that our consciousness can be explained in terms of our animal make-up; he thinks it very implausible to suppose that life can be explained as emerging from physical and chemical processes; he doubts that a process of random genetic mutation coupled with natural selection can explain the abundance and complexity of life. He proposes, instead, that there should be an alternative that makes “mind, meaning and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in an account of what there is”.

Meeting with hard-to-impress McKayla, Obama did his best to keep up appearances - some might say upstaging her.

Ads on Google have placed pro-fracking propaganda at the top of Google search results and into the middle of an important discussion on the environmental impacts of fracking. The practice raises important questions about the role of search engines in the new media world.

For more than 17 months, Robert Howarth, an ecology professor at Cornell, has had a Google problem. Howarth is the chief author of an important paper on the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial method of obtaining natural gas. The paper concludes that the practice is not a clean way to extract domestic energy, as many allege, and has an even greater carbon footprint than coal. The paper's conclusions poke holes in some of the most common talking points used by supporters of fracking and made major headlines, including a large and prominently placed article in The New York Times in April 2011. Howarth, along with one of his co-authors, Anthony Ingraffea, and activist actor Mark Ruffalo, were ranked by Time as among the 100 "people who matter" in 2011.

Al Jazeera, Nov. 15, 2012

Jordanian authorities have threatened to crack down on those who incite violence during protests with an "iron fist", while opposition groups pledge to continue demonstrations in the kingdom.

The protests, which erupted on Tuesday across the country in response to the government's raising fuel and gas prices, are the largest and most sustained to hit the country since the start of uprisings in the region nearly two years ago.

"We will hit with an iron fist those who violated the law by stirring unrest," Hussein Majali, Jordan's police chief, said on Thursday.

Armed men taking advantage of street chaos caused by the protests, fired on two police stations late on Wednesday [....]

NY1 News, Nov. 15, 2012, 4:59 PM ET, WITH VIDEO

President Barack Obama on Thursday toured some of the city's hardest hit areas from the storm and also announced a native New Yorker will be the point-person in the effort to rebuild.

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will be in charge of coming up with a long-term recovery plan.

Donovan, the former head of the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, will be working with city, state and local officials to come up with what the president called an "effective plan." The president also promised to work with Congress to come up with the resources necessary to support it. [....]

The Independent reports: Israeli troops massed on the Gaza border last night, poised for a possible ground invasion as Israel launched a major military operation it said was designed “to severely impair the command and control chain of the Hamas leadership, as well as its terrorist infrastructure.”

Suffering on L.I. as Power Agency Shows Its Flaws
By Danny Hakim, Patrick McGeehan and Michael Moss, New York Times, November 13/14, 2012

[...] The trustees’ approach toward the looming disaster reflects deep-rooted problems at the authority that have hobbled its response, causing hardship for hundreds of thousands of its customers, according to an examination of its performance by The New York Times. The bungling of the storm has called into question the authority’s very future. [...]

In many ways, the Long Island Power Authority, known as LIPA, reflects the shortcomings of the state’s quasi-independent public authorities, which are often criticized as a shadow government that resists scrutiny. Long Island is the only region of New York where the main electrical utility is run by the government.

While oversight has drifted, politicians have installed relatives and friends in executive positions at the authority, turning it into a rich source of patronage jobs, according to interviews and a review of state records. These positions have an average salary of $110,000, the records show.

“There are many, many people who have been placed at LIPA during my tenure here who have no utility experience or training in the job that they have been placed in,” said Tracy Burgess-Levy, the authority’s director of community relations [...]

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo set up the authority in the 1980s when the Long Island Lighting Company enraged customers by failing to restore service quickly after Hurricane Gloria. The company had also stirred controversy over high rates and plans to open the Shoreham nuclear power plant.

The elder Mr. Cuomo vowed that the authority would keep costs down and communicate better, but even before Tropical Storm Irene and Hurricane Sandy, it had alienated customers, who pay some of the highest rates in the nation.

The authority ranked last in two recent national satisfaction surveys of utility customers, one by J. D. Power & Associates and another by American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

Politicians often seem to focus on the authority when they are looking to place relatives and friends at jobs there, according to interviews, local news reports and payroll records.

Lynda Nicolino, the former counsel to the Suffolk County Republican Party, earns $260,000 a year as the authority’s general counsel. Barbara Ann Dillon, a $125,000 compliance officer, is the daughter of Denis Dillon, the former Nassau County district attorney. Andrew McCabe, an assistant general counsel paid $117,000 a year, is the son of a former top judge in Nassau County.

Other top executives include former aides to the state comptroller [...]

Reuters, Nov. 13, 2012

In more bad news about U.S. generals, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is in Australia for talks, announced on Wednesday he was demoting a retiring four-star Army general for wasting taxpayer money on extravagant trips and would seek to recoup tens of thousands of dollars from him [...] The investigation into Ward by the Pentagon's Inspector General found numerous examples of wasted taypayer money, including taking his official plane to Bermuda for an overnight refueling stop with his wife [...]

For more details, & file photo see:

US official: Panetta demotes former head of Africa Command for lavish travel, spending
Associated Press, Nov 13, 2012

Last month, a woman was admitted to a hospital in Galway, Ireland. She was 17 weeks pregnant with a wanted child. She was experiencing severe back pain. She was found to be miscarrying the pregnancy.

A week later, she was dead.

Why? Because she ended up in a Catholic hospital, governed by an ethic that even a non-viable fetus doomed to die is more important than a living, breathing 31-year-old woman.