Amplify’d from gawker.com

Hillary Clinton Isn't Down With TSA Junk Touching

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on the Sunday talk shows today addressing some of the most pressing foreign policy issues of our time. Then Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer asked if she would submit to a TSA pat-down.

"Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean who would?" Watch:

(via Mediaite)

Send an email to Jeff Neumann, the author of this post, at jeff@gawker.com. Read more at gawker.com

 

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Papal Fallibility | The pope's shift on condoms is the thin end of the wedge

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The pope's shift on condoms is the thin end of the wedge

If he now accepts that condoms can prevent the spread of Aids, how else may his teaching change?

As Pope Benedict sat down with the German journalist Peter Seewald at the papacy's summer residence a few months ago, he probably never imagined that his cautious remarks on condoms would spark international excitement. He appears to be constantly surprised that his ruminations should be noticed.

Benedict reiterated the Catholic church's longstanding and dogmatic opposition to artificial birth control, which remains a grave sin – though honoured rather more in the breach than the observance by many of the faithful, certainly in the western world. And, as some Catholic theologians and even several cardinals – including the former archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor – have argued in recent years, using a condom to prevent a greater evil, the passing on of a lethal virus, may be licit.

But it is the implication of his statement – and the fact that the pope has made it himself – that changes things. "In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, [condom use] can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane, sexuality," he said, adding: "There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom."

For more than 40 years the church hierarchy has tied itself up in rhetorical knots to justify the encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968, in which Pope Paul VI overturned the advice of his own papal commission to restate the church's opposition to any artificial birth control.

Now, suddenly and maybe grudgingly, Benedict has acknowledged the weight of pragmatic advice and implicitly accepted the medical case that condoms do indeed help to prevent the spread of infection. He even seems to recognise, by the term male prostitute, that people who in his terms should not be having sex at all do so, and therefore need protection, especially if ultimately it helps them see the light.

Welcome – marginally – to the real world. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who claimed in 2003 that the Aids virus could percolate through little holes in condoms that only he could see, must be turning in his grave. Benedict sidelined Trujillo when he became pope, so perhaps he always had doubts about the Colombian's credibility.

The church's position on sex has long contained doses of hypocrisy. Even in times of mass religious observance, it has been well aware that its rules have been flouted or ignored. You can dress it up as the dictates of conscience, or pragmatism, or even human sinfulness, but women have always attempted to practise birth control or, if that failed, risked abortions.

A recent US survey found 40% of women seeking abortions were Catholic (and a further 40% belonged to other religious groups) – proportions that have probably scarcely altered, despite all the condemnation, since the mid-19th century, when one in six pregnancies in the US are thought to have been aborted. Even the rhythm method, or natural family planning as the church calls it, is a form of birth control, in that it attempts to avoid procreation.

Perhaps lapsed Catholics like me should welcome the pope's shuffle. At least it starts to undermine one of the Vatican's least intellectually coherent positions: the thin end of a very long wedge. If this can change, what else might follow, if not under this ageing pontiff then his successor? We already have some married priests, converted from Anglicanism. What if the next pope, in response to a divine revelation to answer the shortage of vocations, decided that women could be ordained too? Where would Church of England refugees be then? Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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Clinton on Terrorists: I Want to See These Guys Executed or in Prison - FoxNews.com

URL:  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/21/clinton-terr...

Are the the terrorists they are talking about U.S. Citizens? Look at the TSA molesting U.S. Citizens at our airports!

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Airport Scanners: Are They Putting You in Danger?

Amplify’d from www.foxnews.com

Airport Scanners: Are They Putting You in Danger?

By Dr. Manny Alvarez & Karlie Pouliot

A security officer examines a computer screen showing a scan from a RapiScan full-body scanner, being trialled by Manchester Airport, during a photocall at the airport, in Manchester, northern England January 7, 2010.

The new full-body scanners in place at 60 airports across the country have been causing outrage in recent weeks – and that’s putting it pretty mildly.

From lawsuits being lodged against the Transportation Security Administration due to their “intrusive” pat-down procedures, to passengers getting into scuffles with TSA agents, these new scanners are creating a lot of turmoil. And as the busiest travel days of the year fast approach – with more than 1.6 million Americans expected to flock to airports over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend – there’s no telling how some passengers are going to react.

But let’s move past all of that for now and concentrate on the safety of the backscatter X-ray scanners. What I want to know is – are we putting our health at risk every time we walk through one these machines at an airport? And because I’m an OB-GYN, I am also concerned about women who are pregnant. Could these scans affect a fetus?

To get a little insight into that, we contacted Dr. David Schauer, executive director of the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements (NCRP) in Bethesda, Md.

Q. How much radiation does one of these backscatter X-ray scanners actually emit?

A. Radiation exposure is reported in units called millirem (mrem). The effective dose per scan of 0.01 mrem is 100 times less than the annual negligible individual dose (NID) of 1 mrem recommended by the NCRP. It would therefore require at least 100 scans of the same individual in a year to reach an amount that is considered negligible.

To put that into perspective, a typical chest X-ray is over a thousand times greater than what a person is exposed to per scan when they walk through an airport full-body scanner.

NOTE: Remember, radiation is all around us. We are exposed to it every day while we walk, breathe, eat and sleep. On average in the United States, a person is exposed to approximately 620 mrem (whole-body exposure) per year from all sources. According to the TSA, one scan is about the same as a person would get from flying for about three minutes in an airplane at 30,000 feet, where atmospheric radiation levels are higher than on the ground.

Click here for more information from the FDA.

Q. How do these scanners differ from your typical medical X-ray machines?

A. It’s important to note that backscatter X-ray systems are not like standard medical X-ray machines that operate in a transmission mode. That is to say, medical X-rays are transmitted though a patient’s body. Backscatter X-rays are not transmitted through a person’s body, they are, as the name would suggest, backscattered (or reflected) to a detector that is used to create an image. As a result of this fundamental difference, doses from backscatter X-rays are orders of magnitude less than doses from medical imaging with X-rays.

Q. In your opinion, do these scanners pose a risk to a fetus? Are we potentially putting women in danger?

A. Given the low levels of effective dose involved per scan (and the resultant low levels of equivalent dose per scan to the embryo or fetus of a pregnant woman), no special precautions are required for the embryo or fetus of a pregnant woman, for infants, or for children.

Q. And finally – in general – should the general public be concerned about these scanners?

A. It is important that all scanned individuals be well informed about the security screening process, its benefits and its potential risks. Information, in lay language, about the security screening process, its benefits and its potential risks should be provided to individuals prior to their being scanned.

In an email, Dr. David Brenner, director of the center for radiological research at Columbia University in New York City, told us the bigger concern is the overall population risk.

“Even though the individual risk is very small, the impact on the population may not be small if the exposed population is large. This is potentially the case with airport X-ray scanners. We know the individual risk is very small, but multiply that by the number of people going through airport security each year in the U.S. – currently about 700 million, maybe one billion a decade from now – then we start to have a concern about the population risk.”

So – what’s the bottom-line here? Should we be really concerned?

“From an individual personal-risk perspective, the risks of going through the scanner just a few times are very small, even for a child,” Brenner told us in an email. “So while the pat down is an option, the radiation exposure is not something to be too concerned about from the perspective of individual risk, assuming you are going through the scanners just occasionally.”

Whatever you decide to do the next time you have to travel – remember this – you can always opt for a good old fashioned road trip with your family or hop on a train. You might just see the country in a whole new way, especially since there are still a lot of unknowns about these airport scanners. Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Authorities Search for Clues in Violent Deaths of Florida Family

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Authorities Search for Clues in Violent Deaths of Florida Family

A Tallahassee investigator lifts police tape to pass under at a home where a woman and three children were killed in Tallahassee, Fla.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. –  TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The deaths of a young mother and her three small children whose bodies were found in their home are homicides, police said Sunday.

Autopsies were completed Sunday and authorities are looking for information on anyone who may have wanted to harm the family, said Tallahassee police spokesman David McCranie. Police refused to release the autopsy results or how the victims died because making those details public might hurt the investigation, Tallahassee Police Chief Dennis Jones said.

Police said the victims are 27-year-old Brandi Peters, her 6-year-old twin daughters, Tamiyah and Taniyah Peters, and 3-year-old son, Jovante Segura.

Cedrica Smith, who lives across the street, said her kids often played with the slain children. The twins and the boy had different fathers, Smith said, and neither had been married to Peters.

Jones' statement said the crime scene inside the home just a few miles from the state Capitol was violent. There were no signs of forced entry and a broken front window was the result of police entering, he said.

The crime was reminiscent of a March 2005 slaying in Marianna, about 60 miles west of Tallahassee. In that crime, a 19-year-old mother and her three boys ages 3 weeks to 3 years were killed in the woman's apartment.

The father of two of the boys, Wesley Williams, was sentenced to four life terms in prison for the killings. The woman had been shot, while the boys were bound with duct tape and suffocated.

Burglaries had been a problem in the neighborhood of the slayings, though the crimes had waned with increased police patrols. Authorities hadn't been called to the home before Saturday, when the bodies were found, McCranie said.

The single-story home is in a subdivision built about five years ago, surrounded by dense woods and not far from the campuses of Florida State University and Florida A&M University. The neighborhood is made up of a lot of families, McCranie said.

"This is a very shocking and unusual case for us," he said.

The bodies were found after police received a suspicious call Saturday morning.

The street reopened in front of the modest, single-story home, which was otherwise quiet on Sunday except for a single police officer standing guard. Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Texas Gov. Perry: Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme

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Texas Gov. Perry: Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme

Nov. 12: Texas Gov. Rick Perry signs copies of his book "Fed Up!" during a stop in Tyler, Texas.

Social Security by definition is a Ponzi scheme that even master swindler Charles Ponzi would feel badly about, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Sunday, arguing that the federal government should turn over block grants to states to run entitlement programs.

"My children who are in their 20s know that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme," Perry, the new chief of the Republican Governors Association, told "Fox News Sunday."

"It probably is a program that even makes Mr. Ponzi feel pretty bad if he were still alive. The fact is our children know that the money that they're putting into Medicaid they'll never see. And they need to fix it.

"And it is a Ponzi scheme. I don't know how you would explain it any other way than what you just did. There are fewer people paying into it and our kids are never going to see any benefit from it," Perry said.

Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who defrauded thousands of New England residents by convincing them to invest in a postage stamp speculation scheme in which he promised investors a 50 percent return in 90 days. Though he died in 1949, his name lives on as an expression that refers to any investment scheme in which new investors are required to pay off earlier investors without any of the investments ever seeing the return promised.

As a scheme, Perry, who recently published a book about decentralizing government, said Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare collectively are $106 trillion of debt because of unfunded liabilities.

If states were allowed to implement Medicaid, for instance, then the federal government could start having the discussion on how to put Social Security on "better and more solid footing," he said.

Perry, who called states "the laboratories of innovation," said a better system would allow him to take federal block grants to create a cheaper health care delivery system without the federal strings.

"This federalized Washington health care now may not work. Matter of fact, we know it won't work well in Texas," he said.

Though Texas has one of the lowest tax rates and regulatory structure, and led the states in private sector growth in the past decade, it is potentially facing a $25 billion deficit this year. The state already spends 25 percent of its budget on health care. Furthermore, 25 percent of the population in Texas doesn't have health insurance -- one of the highest rates in the nation.

But Perry said he thinks he could cut Medicaid spending in half and return $9 billion to the government and cut $6 billion of the state's spending. He said that would also mean leaving the federal government out of the state's governing.

"It's $30 billion a year between the state and the federal government for one year of Medicaid in the state of Texas. We think we can cut that substantially, help our colleagues in Washington, D.C. balance the budget up there," he said.

"Do the things that you're supposed to do like securing our border, like delivering the mail, preferably on time and on Saturdays, before you get involved in things that the Constitution doesn't say one word about, like health care," Perry added. Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Carjacking Ends on University of Pennsylvania Campus, 1 Suspect Killed

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Carjacking Ends on University of Pennsylvania Campus, 1 Suspect Killed

PHILADELPHIA –  Authorities say an armed carjacking in West Philadelphia ended in an exchange of gunfire at the University of Pennsylvania and the death of a suspect.

No one else was injured in the exchange behind the university library about 3 a.m. Sunday.

University Vice President Maureen Rush said the early morning hour and the cold weather had kept people off the streets.

University security officials said the vehicle was carjacked about a mile from the school. Philadelphia police gave chase; the driver lost control, crashed into a concrete barrier near campus, and two male suspects fled.

Officials said police ran after them, and one suspect was shot. He was pronounced dead at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Police arrested the other man. Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Ahmadinejad urges girls to marry at 16

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Ahmadinejad urges girls to marry at 16

Nov. 10: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gestures prior to delivering his speech at a public gathering during his provincial tour in the city of Qazvin about 90 miles west of the capital Tehran.

TEHRAN, Iran –  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged young girls to marry at age of 16 in his latest rejection of the country's once effective family planning program, local newspapers reported on Sunday.

Following record birth rates in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran implemented an internationally praised family planning program in the 1990s that dramatically reduced the growth rate. Ahmadinejad has criticized the program as an ungodly and a Western import.

"We should take the age of marriage for boys to 20 and for girls to about 16 and 17," he said, according to the state-owned Jam-e Jam daily. "The marriage age for boys has reached 26 and for girls to 24, and there is no reason for this."

Since coming to power in 2005, the Iranian president has sought to increase of the country's population, which is already at 75 million, with a third between the ages of 15 and 30.

In July, he inaugurated a new policy to encourage population growth with financial incentives for every new child born, having previously said the country could feed a population of 150 million.

Critics said the policy will only exacerbate unemployment, currently set 9 percent officially. There are an estimated 3 million unemployed people of working age in the country. Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Researcher: Biofuels More Harmful Than Coal

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Researchers Debate Whether Biofuels Are Truly Greener Than Fossil Fuels

By Loren Grush

A chemical engineer holds up a test-tube of biofuel at the Oleoplan factory in Brazil.

If Willie Nelson supports it, it must be green, right? Not so fast.

Amid rising concern over U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, many hope that running our cars on so-called "biofuels," which are grown rather than processed, could solve our sustainability woes. But a new report argues that these renewable resources may not be as green as they seem.

The ETC Group, an international organization supporting sustainability and conservation, has just published its newest report, an 84-page document that presents a lengthy criticism of "the new bioeconomy." In it, principal author Jim Thomas argues that using biofuels for energy and resources isn't green -- in fact, he says, it's even more harmful to the environment than coal.

"What's being presented by the government as 'the green way forward,' is this idea that we can use plant matter from crops, trees, or algae and convert it into fuel, plastics or chemicals," Thomas told FoxNews.com. "And it's just assumed that it's carbon neutral. But when you burn something like a tree, you release as much, if not more, carbon dioxide than when you burn something like coal."

Biofuels are fuels derived from living organisms, such as trees, algae plankton and more; they're collectively called biomass.Thomas' report -- "The New Biomassters: Synthetic Biology and the Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods" -- acts as a comprehensive critique of the entirety of the biofuel industry, summarizing all the different criticisms and compiling them into a single essay.

He says he hopes that his research will be able to educate others on what he feels is a scary and careless venture.

"The essential tool the industry is using is called synthetic biology, designing new organisms that have never existed in nature," Thomas told FoxNews.com. "This is a very risky venture, and there's no regulation surrounding it. And that's one of the findings in this study, that this is growing very fast without regulation or oversight."

Early biofuels came about from fermenting sugars from foods such as corn and wheat. But the movement came under scrutiny after it led to crop shortages in developing countries and sharp increases in food prices. At issue was whether thos crops should be used to feed humans or power cars.

But other scientists say the biofuel economy is complex, and they note that it's hard to lump absolutely everything labeled biomass together.

"One needs to recognize that all biofuels are not the same. The current generation is based on corn in the U.S., based on wheat and rapeseed in Europe," Dr. Madhu Khanna, a professor of agriculture at the University of Illinois, told FoxNews.com.

"But even among the first generation, there is also sugarcane, which is a much cleaner fuel, and Brazil has a lot of available land for sugarcane production. You're able to expand without coming into conflict with food production. So you don't hear the same criticism necessarily about sugarcane."

There are up to four "generations" within the biofuel movement, starting with its origin in corn. Second-generation biofuels arose to combat the problems of the first, by using parts of crops that were not consumed, such as corn stalks rather than the corn itself, or non-food crops such as rapeseed. Third and fourth generations move into other areas, such as algae. Thomas claims that this just raises more issues.

"If you start using the stalk of a corn, you have to put more fertilizer in the soil," Thomas said. "Fertilizer production is very energy intensive. It produces large amounts of nitrous oxide, which is 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide. So if you're moving over to these fuels that use the corn stalk supposedly to cut back your greenhouse emission, then it's very counterproductive."

The report also claims that this transition doesn't solve the food shortages in third-world nations.

"The U.S. government says there's a billion tons of fair biomass that they can turn into fuels and chemicals and burn for electricity," Thomas said. "When I began to look at the billion-ton study, it doesn't exist. In fact, it doesn't make any sense to source biomass in the U.S. because there's much more biomass coming from Sub Sahara Africa and Brazil."

Thomas is adamant that land use will become a massive issue for the biomass industry. "This isn't a switch, it's a massive grab on land," he said. "This movement to a plant-based, or so-called green economy, will throw a lot of people off their land in the developing world."

But Khanna cites recent studies that have shown a decrease in deforestation in Brazil due to recent regulations. She attributes the difference in opinions like this to the intricacy of such an ambitious movement. Both Khanna and Thomas  agree that a proper combination of well-developed technology and public policy are the keys to solving the fossil-fuel issue.

"The government, instead of putting money into these quick technological fixes, need to invest into more long term fixes," Thomas said. "It's economical and social fixes rather than technological fixes that will help us through. It's about the government giving support for both kinds of choices." Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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Clinton on Terrorists: I Want to See These Guys Executed or in Prison

Are the the terrorists they are talking about U.S. Citizens? Look at the TSA molesting U.S. Citizens at our airports!

Amplify’d from www.foxnews.com

Clinton on Terrorists: I Want to See These Guys Executed or in Prison

Saturday: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama at the Afghanistan Opening Session at the NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

The one-count guilty verdict against terror detainee Ahmed Ghailani disappointed many Americans who thought the government had a rock-solid case, but civilian courts are still more successful at getting convictions than military commissions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday.

And that means more sentences to satisfy Americans looking for justice against plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and other assaults on U.S. interests, Clinton said.

"I’m well aware, as a former senator from New York on 9/11, how important it is to get this right. I want to see these guys behind prison or executed, whatever is appropriate in the individual cases," Clinton told "Fox News Sunday."

"But when you look at the success record in civilian courts of convicting, sentencing, detaining in maximum security prisons by the civilian courts, it surpasses what yet has been accomplished in the military commissions," she said.

Ghailani, who had been held in a CIA secret prison and then transferred to Guantanamo, was brought up on 284 counts, including the murder of 224 people at the U.S. embassy complexes in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. He was convicted of one count of conspiracy.

The verdict shocked many security experts since most court-watchers thought his would be the easiest terror case to prosecute. The ruling led to howls against the use of civilian courts for terror detainees.

But Clinton said the one count earned Ghailani 20 years to life, and the case would have been tried the same way in both the military or civilian courts.

Clinton acknowledged, however, that for some terror detainees, civilian trials are "not appropriate."

"You will get no argument from this administration on that point," she said, adding that the Obama administration is trying to move toward trials in a way that "maximizes the outcome that is in the best interest of the security of the American people."

"So I don't think you can, as a rule, say, 'Oh, no more civilian trials or no more military commissions.' President Obama's theory of this is that most should be in Article III (civilian) courts, some should be confined to military commissions. But as things stand right now, we have actually gotten more convictions, and more people, more terrorists, are serving time in prison right now, because of Article III courts than military commissions." Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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