In October 2009, [NYPD officer Adrian] Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
A six-figure Fisker Karma electrified sedan broke during Consumer Reports check-in period, before the magazine even could begin testing it, delivering another black eye to the struggling automaker.
"Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it's broken," the magazine lamented in its blog today in an item headlined "Bad Karma."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that he’s fine with allowing a vote on a Republican amendment to transportation legislation that would approve the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline. ...
Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and David Vitter (R-La.) want to amend the sweeping transportation funding bill with a measure that authorizes TransCanada Corp. to build Keystone, which would bring oil from Alberta’s massive tar sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries. ...
Yesterday, local news reported that a 13 year old NE Baltimore girl was missing. She had gone off to a skating barn, but hadn't come back. Her family turned out to search the neighborhood, and her older brother found her body under some trash in an alley. That sounded fishy, and I wondered to myself if he knew where to look, but today the case took another turn.
A 13-year-old girl reported missing in northeast Baltimore over the weekend was playing with a gun with a friend when it fired, killing her, police said Monday afternoon.
Family members identified the victim as Monae Turnage. Police said the teenager was accidentally shot by a .22-caliber rifle that she and her friends were playing with.
Two boys, ages 12 and 13, were charged with involuntary manslaughter. ...
The family said the juveniles pretended to be upset over Monae's disappearance, joining in the search for her and eventually guiding her 16-year-old brother to her body, which was found under some plastic trash bags on Sunday in the 1600 block of Cliftview Avenue.
During his keynote speech at the Energy Innovation Summit, Dr Steven Chu cited an ARPA-E grant recipient, Envia Systems, which has announced, "a more energy-dense lithium ion battery that it says will be cheaper than today's batteries and allow for an electric car with a 300-mile range."
By Donal on Wed, 02/29/2012 - 6:50pm | Technology, Health
TransCanada is moving ahead with the Southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that would take oil, and synthetic oil from tar sands, from Cushing, Oklahoma to the refineries and ports near the Gulf of Mexico. A White House press release stated:
The President welcomes today's news that TransCanada plans to build a pipeline to bring crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf of Mexico. As the President made clear in January, we support the company's interest in proceeding with this project, which will help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight year high. Moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-the-art refineries on the Gulf Coast will modernize our infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American energy production.
Since the Fukushima catastrophe almost one year ago, Jun Shigemura has been providing psychological care to workers from the stricken nuclear facility. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he tells of the immense challenges facing TEPCO employees -- and why most of them have elected not to quit their jobs.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Since May, you have been providing psychological assistance to workers in the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. How did you end up with such a job?
Fine atmospheric particles — smaller than one-thirtieth of the diameter of a human hair — were identified more than 20 years ago as the most lethal of the widely dispersed air pollutants in the United States. Linked to both heart and lung disease, they kill an estimated 50,000 Americans each year. But more recently, scientists have been puzzled to learn that a subset of these particles, called secondary organic aerosols, has a greater total mass, and is thus more dangerous, than previously understood. ...
As Occupy Wall Street spread across the nation last fall, sparking protests in more than 70 cities, the Department of Homeland Security began keeping tabs on the movement.
[Jonathan Chait] Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away.
I watched a brief video on Motley Fool last weekend to the effect that Tesla Motors is a good investment while Zipcar has probably grown to its upper limit within walkable urban cities. But I'd be concerned about the bricked Roadster battery reports, which are getting fierce on both sides. A dogpile search shows dozens of stories like "Tesla Downplays Danger of Bricked Battery" and some that ridicule anyone that wouldn't already know that batteries will discharge. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed experts on Slashdot swear that LIon batteries couldn't possibly be fully discharged because they found an old cell phone once and recharged it.
Once again, speculators behind sharply rising oil and gasoline prices Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/21/139521/once-again-speculators-behind.html#storylink=cpy
U.S. demand for oil and refined products — including gasoline — is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.
As we've seen in the comments to my last two posts, cold fusion, or LENR, has many skeptics and some firm believers. Scientific American describes a film, The Believers:
Occupy Our Food Supply is bringing together the Occupy, sustainable farming, food justice, buy local, slow food, and environmental movements for a global day of action on February 27, 2012.
Prince Neymor was frustrated. He was expending a lot of energy—using almost all his powers—against his former teammates. But 'teammates' was hardly the proper word for the odd group he faced.
[Max] Drucker took delivery of Roadster No. 340 in May 2009, more than a year after placing a $50,000 deposit for the vehicle. He said he has driven the car 13,000 miles and followed Tesla’s service guidelines. He moved into a rental house while his home was being renovated and parked his Roadster in the garage, leaving it with a 25 percent state of charge. He didn’t touch it for six weeks and found it dead when he attempted to start it earlier this month.
