White House talks don't include NRA: gun group president

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An effort led by Vice President Joe Biden to find ways to reduce gun violence after the Connecticut school massacre so far has not included talking to the National Rifle Association, the president of the gun rights group said on Friday.

NRA President David Keene said neither Biden nor his staff has contacted the organization since President Barack Obama unveiled the effort on December 19.

Keene said he was not surprised, given Biden's past support for new gun control laws. "He's not even a friendly antagonist," Keene told Reuters in an interview.

The lack of communication between the White House and the largest U.S. lobbying group for gun owners is a sign that the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has so far failed to change long-held stances on gun politics. In that tragedy, a young man shot his mother with her own gun before killing 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Biden and up to four Cabinet officers are holding a series of meetings with outside groups to discuss possible gun legislation. The first was with law enforcement officials, another with mayors.

The White House has said other meetings will take place with gun safety groups and gun owners, among others, but it has not said whether the NRA will be invited. The White House had no comment on Friday.

Asked about the organization's influence, Obama struck an optimistic note on Dec 19. "The NRA is an organization that has members who are mothers and fathers," he said. "I would expect that they've been impacted by this as well, and hopefully, they'll do some self-reflection."

Two days later, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre said at a press conference that new gun laws were not the answer, calling instead for some form of armed guards in every school.

Keene told Reuters: "I'm willing to talk to anybody. I'm willing to sit down with anybody up there." He added, though, that he would not agree to "gut" gun rights.

"I'm going to want to have a conversation about how we protect our children," he said. "That's a serious conversation. Offering sort of feel-good bills doesn't strike me as serious."

Biden's group is due to offer its recommendations in January.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Thursday found that support remains high for preserving specific gun ownership privileges, such as concealed-weapon permits, as well as for some restrictions, such as background checks for every purchase.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Gunna Dickson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-talks-dont-nra-gun-group-president-224543942.html

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Video: Najarian: I'll Get Back In Market When ...

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/cnbc/50314267/

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Data Shows Online Buzz About Snapchat Is Skyrocketing After The Launch Of Facebook Poke

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, which is nice and all -- but for businesses, flattery doesn't exactly pay the bills. However, when said flattery comes along with massive amounts of new attention from millions of potential new users, a high-profile copycat could actually help more than it hurts. Such may well be the case with ephemeral photo sharing app Snapchat and its newly-launched doppelg?nger Facebook Poke.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/nPsVdw_cdh4/

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Edison Mission Energy files for bankruptcy. Is natural gas to blame?

Edison International's Edison Mission Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday. Edison Mission's financial woes reflect the obstacles coal faces in a market increasingly dominated by cheap natural gas and a shift towards renewables.

By David J. Unger,?Correspondent / December 17, 2012

This February 2012 file photo, shows Midwest Generation's Crawford Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, in Chicago. In September, Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of Edison Mission Energy, closed two plants on Chicago's southwest side under pressure from environmental groups.

M. Spencer Green/AP/File

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Edison Mission Energy, the power generation arm of?Edison International, voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday. The?Santa Ana, Calif.-based holding company reported?$5.13 billion in assets and $5.1 billion in debt in its filing with the?US Bankruptcy Court.?Midwest Generation, a Chicago-based subsidiary, was also included in the filing.

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The company's financial woes reflect the obstacles coal faces in a energy market increasingly dominated by cheap natural gas and a shift towards renewables.

"Like other independent power generators, EME has been challenged by depressed energy and capacity?prices and high fuel costs affecting its coal-fired facilities, combined with pending debt maturities and the need to retrofit its coal-fired facilities to comply with environmental regulations," read the company's press release.

In September,?Midwest Generation, which operates a fleet of coal-fired plants in Illinois, closed two plants on Chicago's southwest side under pressure from environmental groups.?

Environmental consulting firm sues federal drilling regulators over ...

An environmental consulting firm has filed suit against federal energy regulators to halt the Obama administration's new five-year plan for auctioning offshore oil and natural gas drilling leases on the outer continental shelf, the first leasing plan approved since the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by the Center for Sustainable Economy, maintains that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management used a flawed analysis to rush ahead with the leasing program in violation of several federal environmental laws.

John Talberth, the president and senior economist at the non-profit public interest consulting firm, said in a statement that the the untapped reserves "should only be developed when and if it makes compelling economic sense to do so," and accused the Obama administration of "rushing headlong into a program that will put our shores and oceans at risk and do nothing at all for America's energy security."

The five-year leasing program includes 15 scheduled sales in offshore areas in the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico, as well as portions of the Eastern Gulf, as well as the Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet, offshore of Alaska. Regulators estimate the program has the potential to produce 5.75 to 14.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

A spokesman for the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said Monday that the department does not comment on pending litigation.

The suit contends that regulators did not consider "economic, cultural, social, subsistence, and environmental values of the renewable and nonrenewable resources" located in areas that would be affected by the proposed drilling, as well as the "potential impacts of oil and gas leasing and development activities."

Last month, more than 20 million acres off the coast of Texas were offered in the first lease sale scheduled as part of the program. It garnered about $133.8 million from 13 companies that submitted high bids for 116 offshore drilling tracts

In March, federal regulators plan to auction another 38 million acres in the Central Gulf, which will include about 7,250 federally-owned drilling tracts in water depths of nine to more than 11,115 feet.

Source: http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/12/consulting_firm_sues_federal_d.html

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Fight to Know: California Voters Turn Down Label Requirements for Genetically Modified Products

Proposition 37, requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods, was defeated in a close election, but other anti-GM efforts continue

FOOD FIGHT: Proposition 37, defeated by a narrow margin this past Election Day, called on food-makers to label products containing genetically modified ingredients--and to not label such foods as "natural." Image: Hemera Collection/Thinkstock

Dear EarthTalk: What was Proposition 37 in California that concerns the labeling of genetically modified foods and that was just voted down in that state?? Peter Tremaine, Euclid, Ohio

Many healthy food advocates were disheartened on Election Day when Californians rejected Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods across the state. GM foods have had genes from other plants or animals inserted into their genetic code to optimize for one or another trait, such as resistance to pests, better taste or longer shelf life, and are controversial because scientists don?t know the ramifications of mixing genetic codes on such a widespread scale.

While it was close, those against the so-called ?California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act? prevailed, with 53.1 percent of the vote. The proposition called on food manufacturers to label foods containing GM ingredients on the front or back of the packaging with the phrase ?partially produced with genetic engineering??and not to label or advertise such foods as ?natural.? Proponents developed the proposition in lieu of federal action requiring labeling of GM foods?as exists in 50 other countries.

Proponents of the bill raised some $9 million and garnered some 46.9 percent of the vote, indicating that upwards of four million Californians fear the potential effects of GM foods and are in favor of greater transparency on the part of the food industry. But such efforts weren?t enough to overcome aggressive marketing by so-called Big Food companies including Monsanto, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Nestle and Kraft, who poured some $45 million into the ?No on 37? campaign.

Backers of the proposition are crying foul. Public health lawyer Michele Simon reports that some of the companies involved in defeating the bill engaged in lying, scare tactics, misrepresentation and various dirty tricks ?to protect their profits and keep California voters uninformed about their food choices.?

?The No campaign listed four organizations in the official state document mailed to voters as concluding that ?biotech foods are safe?,? she says. ?One of them, the American Council on Science and Health, is a notorious industry front group that only sounds legit. Another, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, actually has no position and complained about being listed?? The other two groups, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization, have more nuanced positions...than just ?safe.?

Simon also criticizes Big Food for its claims about high food costs, ?shakedown lawsuits? and ?special interest exemptions? if the law passed: ?While each of these claims is easily debunked, being outspent on ad dollars makes it hard to compete, especially when all you can really say is, ?that?s not true?.?

The battle over GM labeling in California may be over for now, but the war rages on nationally. Just Label It, a nonprofit started by Stonyfield Farm magnate Gary Hirshberg, is trying to persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require GM food labeling nationally. Readers can help by signing the campaign?s online petition. Beyond that, Just Label It recommends eating more fresh vegetables and unprocessed foods (the vast majority of processed foods in the U.S. contain either GM corn or soy) and looking for the USDA Organic label, which precludes any foods containing GM ingredients.

CONTACTS: Yes on 37, www.carighttoknow.org; Just Label It, www.justlabelit.org.

EarthTalk? is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=a0a309ab5b5b9278288ac59bbf6b1f25

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Phones to be pocket seismometers

5 December 2012 Last updated at 04:20 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

The smartphones in our pockets are about to get even smarter.

Scientists want these ubiquitous gadgets to be put to work helping them detect and investigate earthquakes.

The devices contain accelerometers and a team at the Berkeley Seismic Laboratory says the mechanisms are capable of monitoring tremors.

An app is being developed that will record the shaking during major events and then report the data back to a central server over the cell network.

The high numbers of smartphones now in circulation mean researchers could get very detailed information on who felt what, and where.

It is the sort of insight that is useful for future hazard assessment and risk planning, but real-time data could also eventually play an important role in California's earthquake early warning system.

This aims to give people precious seconds' advance notice that a big trembler is on its way.

"Nowadays, smartphones carry all sorts of sensors, and we can put these to use in unexpected ways," explained Qingkai Kong. "Right now, we can only detect earthquakes above about Magnitude 5.0, but with better accelerometers in future smartphones we would hope to detect smaller ones as well," he told BBC News.

The University of California, Berkeley, researcher was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

He and colleagues were not sure at first that mobile phones would be up to the task of being pocket seismometers. So a selection of the gadgets was put on the lab's "shake table".

This instrument can simulate various grades of tremors. It is usually employed to test the robustness of various construction techniques, to provide confidence that buildings will not collapse during an earthquake.

The results clearly demonstrated that the accelerometers - used primarily in phones as part of the mechanism to tilt the screen - could pick up the shaking.

The confounding issue, of course, is that phones are rarely left alone on a flat surface - they are moving around with their owners.

But the team believes it can solve this problem as well, and has developed an algorithm that will subtract the human "noise" in the data.

"The pattern recognition algorithm sees typical human activities such as walking, running and driving, and we use that information to disengage those activities from the earthquake signal," said Mr Kong.

This algorithm is rarely fooled, he added.

Berkeley's project is very much in its early stages and the team hopes soon to start recruiting more people into its research project. It is likely to issue a test app to thousands of volunteers across the San Francisco Bay Area next year.

This is a region that lives with the knowledge that a major quake could happen at any time. A Magnitude 7.9 event in 1906 flattened San Francisco; and Berkeley itself sits right on top of the Hayward Fault, which many scientists suspect will deliver the next big blow to the Bay Area.

Having good reports on the amount of shaking in an earthquake from different locations is invaluable data.

The level of disturbance a person feels will depend on many things: the number and quality of buildings close by, and the nature of the soils on which they are built, etc. It is even possible for individuals on opposite sides of a street to have quite different experiences.

Shaking reports help planners identify weaknesses in construction standards and are used to raise the level of preparedness for the next big event.

Moreover, a smartphone seismic network has potential to feed directly into the early warning system.

This relies on being able to detect the faster-moving but not-so-damaging P-waves of a seismic event ahead of its S-waves, which cause most destruction.

How much warning an individual gets will depend on how far they are from the epicentre of a quake.

It can though amount to several seconds - time enough for individuals to take cover in a doorway, for trains to slow, for planes to be passed a message to abort their landing, and for surgeons to finish a delicate procedure.

The current generation of smartphones does not have the sensitivities yet to participate in such a programme, but the performance being promised by tech companies for future accelerometers suggests the dream may soon be fulfilled.

Being everywhere and always on, smartphones would then not only provide a dense source of data for the warning system but be the means also to issue its alerts through dedicated tones and messages.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20531304#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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