Amplify’d from news.nationalgeographic.com

Scientists Make Dozens of Storms in the Abu Dhabi Desert?

Claims of Manmade Rain Clouds Spark Skepticism

Camels and trucks travel on a main desert road in Abu Dhabi while rain descends in the background.

Photograph by James Davis Photography, Alamy

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

This story is part of a special National Geographic News series on global water issues.

In arid lands, the ability to create freshwater out of thin air would be priceless.

Now a Swiss company, Meteo Systems, is poised to earn a pretty penny in Abu Dhabi with a controversial weather modification system said to be responsible for dozens of rain showers in the desert last summer.

The claim is difficult to verify but certainly has raised a storm of skepticism among many leading weather modification experts.

“As far as I’m concerned I don’t believe these claims,” said Roelof Bruintjes, who heads the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s international weather modification programs. “There’s no scientific basis for this; the physics doesn’t support it.”

(Related: “Planes Create Weird Clouds—And Snow, Rain Fall Out.”)

While typical weather modification efforts—which began in the mid-20th century and continue in nations from the United States to China—make use of natural clouds and attempt to “seed” them to produce precipitation, Meteo Systems purports to create the clouds themselves.

Their system uses arrays of 33-foot (10-meter) electric towers that produce negatively charged ions, according to the company. These ions bind with tiny solid and liquid particles, supercharging the particles’ ability to form clouds and precipitation.

Joseph Golden, a weather modification expert who once chaired the now-defunct Atmospheric Modification Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also has serious doubts that the technique could work.

“This method is inherently incapable of producing clouds out of thin air,” Golden said.

(Related: “China’s Rain-Free Olympics Plan Met With Skepticism.”)

A Long History of Ionization

The Technical University of Munich’s Peter Wilderer, winner of the 2003 Stockholm Water Prize, said people have been attempting ionization techniques for decades.

"The ionization technology was first mentioned in 1890 by [Nikola] Tesla. In 1946 General Electric executed some field trials under the leadership of [Bernard] Vonnegut [brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut]. Later the technology was used for military purposes in the former Soviet Union."

Wilder added that reviews of radar images suggested to him that ionization could possibly have some effect, under proper meteorological conditions. Despite press reports to the contrary, he has never personally witnessed any rainfall events produced by Meteo Systems.

Show Me the Data

NOAA’s Golden is interested in hearing much more from the scientists trying to make it rain in the desert.

“I put out a challenge to any of those that are involved in this project and making these claims. Show me the data,” he said.

There may be little chance of such transparency in the near-term, however, as Meteo Systems is closely guarding the secrets of the potentially valuable technology the company has dubbed “WEATHERTEC.”

Meteo Systems did not respond to calls and emails from National Geographic News.

The directors of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, who have been erroneously linked to the project via media reports, released a statement expressing “distress” that the scientific organization had been associated in any way with the work of Meteo Systems. They added that rainstorms were part of unusual weather patterns in the Middle East last summer.

“Our institute has no connection whatsoever to this work, nor have we been privy to the underlying evidence that the company is using to support its claims,” the statement said.

“We also note that many people have a financial stake in seeing these claims being credibly reported by the media, and that to the extent rain showers in the region were unusual this summer, they accompanied rather unusual weather patterns over the broader region, which certainly had nothing to do with the very localized experiments in Abu Dhabi. One only needs to be reminded of the terrible flooding over neighboring Pakistan.”

Playing God

NCAR’s Bruintjes noted that the UN-based World Meteorological Organization’s expert team on weather modification research met in Abu Dhabi in March 2010, and issued a report on the state of the science that cautioned against just this type of technology.

“The energy involved in weather systems is so large that it is impossible to create cloud systems that rain,” the WMO report read. “Weather modification technologies that claim to achieve such large-scale or dramatic effects do not have sound scientific basis (e.g. hail cannons, ionization methods) and should be treated with suspicion.”

Golden said people who are simply desperate to fool Mother Nature often pay for modification techniques that are unproven at best, including the hail cannons mentioned in the WMO report. “Farmers invest thousands of dollars in those cannons to suppress hail even though the scientific evidence is that they don’t work,” he said.

Bruintjes put his point bluntly: “The rotation of the Earth, the energy of the sun, and moisture from the oceans cause these things. None of us can change that, and it’s actually good that none of us can change that because we’d likely make a mess of it.” Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com

 

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Prosecutors Describe Philadelphia Abortion Clinic As ‘House of Horrors’

Amplify’d from cnsnews.com

Prosecutors Describe Philadelphia Abortion Clinic As ‘House of Horrors’

By Mary Claire Dale and Patrick Walters, Associated Press

Philadelphia (AP) - A doctor accused of running a filthy "abortion mill" for decades in an impoverished Philadelphia neighborhood delivered babies alive, killed them with scissors and allowed a woman who had survived 20 years in a refugee camp to be overmedicated and die at his clinic, prosecutors said.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, was charged Wednesday with eight counts of murder for the deaths of seven babies and one patient. Nine employees also were charged, including four with murder.

Prosecutors described the clinic as a "house of horrors" where Gosnell kept baby body parts on the shelves, allowed a 15-year-old high school student to perform intravenous anesthesia on patients and had his licensed cosmetologist wife do late-term abortions. A family practice physician, Gosnell has no certification in gynecology or obstetrics.

Four months after Karnamaya Mongar reached the United States after spending nearly two decades in camps in Nepal she was dead at Gosnell's clinic. The 41-year-old mother of three died of cardiac arrest when she was given too much Demerol and other drugs, prosecutors said.

"Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did, even after Karnamaya Mongar's death," city prosecutors charged in a nearly 300-page grand jury report.

The "Women's Medical Society" opened in 1979 and was inspected by the state Department of Health only sporadically. The last inspection was in 1993. Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams accused state health officials of "utter disregard" for Gosnell's patients, who were mostly poor minority women like Mongar.

Gosnell made millions performing thousands of dangerous abortions. A second woman, a 22-year-old mother of two from Philadelphia, died in 2000 from a perforated uterus.

Mongar, a refugee with her husband Ash from native Bhutan, had gone to the clinic in November 2009. Gosnell wasn't at the clinic at the time. His staff administered the drugs repeatedly to the 4-foot-11, 110-pound Mongar as they waited for him to arrive. No one who answered the phone Wednesday at a listing for Ash Mongar in Virginia could comment.

"Those are the kind of stories that break your heart," said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, which rejected Gosnell from membership years ago because he did not meet its standards of care. The group's 400 members perform about half the abortions in North America, she said.

"Unfortunately, some women don't know where to turn. You sometimes have substandard providers preying on low-income women who don't know that they do have other (safe) options," she said.

Authorities who raided Gosnell's clinic early last year in search of controlled drug violations instead stumbled upon a stench-filled clinic with bags and bottles of aborted fetuses scattered throughout the building.

"By day it was a prescription mill; by night it was an abortion mill," the grand jury report said.

Oddly, Gosnell also kept jars of severed feet on his shelves, Williams said. Gosnell also had a taste for macabre jokes, once muttering that a nearly six-pound baby born alive to a 17-year-old who was seven-and-a-half months pregnant could "walk me to the bus stop," the report said.

Gosnell typically worked weeknights, arriving hours after his unskilled staff administered anesthesia and drugs to induce labor. He then "forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

In addition to the two women who died, scores more were injured from perforated bowels, cervixes and uteruses, authorities said. Some were left sterile at the clinic, which had no trained nurses or medical staff other than Gosnell, they said.

"He does not know how to do an abortion," Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore said. "Once he got them there, he saw dollar signs and did abortions that other people wouldn't do."

Women came from across the city, state and mid-Atlantic region for the illegal late-term abortions, authorities said. He didn't advertise, but word got around. They paid $325 for first-trimester abortions and $1,600 to $3,000 for abortions up to 30 weeks. The clinic took in up to $15,000 a day, authorities said.

"People knew near and far that if you needed a late-term abortion you could go see Dr. Gosnell," Williams said.

White women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area because Gosnell believed they were more likely to file complaints, Williams said.

Few if any of the unconscious patients knew their babies had been born alive and then killed, prosecutors said. Many were first-time mothers who were told they were 24 weeks pregnant, even if they were much further along, authorities said.

State regulators ignored complaints about Gosnell, or the 46 lawsuits filed against him. State officials, who arrived to testify with lawyers in tow, "enraged" the grand jury, Williams said. Yet he could find no criminal charges with which to charge them, in part because of the time that had elapsed.

The state's reluctance to investigate, under several administrations, may stem partly from the sensitivity of the abortion debate, Williams said. Nonetheless, he called Gosnell's case a clear case of murder.

"A doctor who with scissors cuts into the necks, severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies who would survive with proper medical attention commits murder under the law," he said. "Regardless of one's feelings about abortion, whatever one's beliefs, that is the law."

The grand jury spent a year investigating Gosnell's practice. According to the report, Gosnell had no nurses on hand to monitor the women's medication or recovery, no hospital on standby for emergencies and few if any medical records because Gosnell destroyed them. His staff testified about "scores of gruesome killings" of infants born alive.

"These killings became so routine that no one could put an exact number on them," the grand jury report said. "They were considered 'standard procedure.'"

Authorities charged that Gosnell deliberately hired unqualified staff so he could pay them low wages. He sent his six children to private schools - one is now a doctor and another a professor - and has a beach house at the New Jersey shore, prosecutors said.

Besides the five charged with murder, five other clinic employees, including Gosnell's wife, were charged with conspiracy, drug and other crimes. Pearl Gosnell, the doctor's third wife, performed extremely late-term abortions on Sundays when the clinic was otherwise closed, the report said. All 10 charged were in custody.

Williams, a Democrat, released the report a day after Republican Gov. Tom Corbett succeeded Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. Spokesman Kevin Harley pledged Corbett's administration would do more to oversee such clinics.

Lawyer William J. Brennan, who represented Gosnell during the investigation, noted that the doctor served patients in a low-income city neighborhood for decades.

"Obviously, these allegations are very, very serious," Brennan said.

Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or just under six months, and most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said.

In a typical late-term abortion, the fetus is dismembered in the uterus and then removed in pieces. That is more common than the procedure opponents call "partial-birth abortion," in which the fetus is partially extracted before being destroyed.

Gosnell earned his medical degree from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and is board certified in family practice. He started, but did not finish, a residency in obstetrics-gynecology, authorities said. Read more at cnsnews.com

 

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More than Half of the States Now Suing to Overturn Obamacare

Amplify’d from cnsnews.com

More than Half of the States Now Suing to Overturn Obamacare

By Fred Lucas

(CNSNews.com) – A majority of the states in America now challenge the constitutionality of the $1 trillion health-care overhaul, commonly called Obamacare.

Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wyoming have petitioned the federal courts to join 20 other states legally challenging the constitutionality the health-care law. With the separate Virginia lawsuit, a total of 26 – more than half the states in the country – are now seeking to challenge the law in court.

The five states have joined a 20-state lawsuit being led by Florida challenging the constitutionality of the law’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Virginia filed a separate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the mandate.

The Supreme Court is expected to ultimately decide on the matter. Virginia was victorious at the district court level. The Florida-led suit is still pending. Other jurisdictions have ruled the mandate is constitutional.

“This lawsuit is about standing up for the rule of law and protecting the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in a statement. “Our federal government is designed to be a government of limited, enumerated powers, and we do not believe it has the power to order citizens into commerce so it can then regulate their conduct under authority of the Commerce Clause. Whatever the merits or demerits of health care reform, the ends cannot justify the unconstitutional means.”

Maine Attorney General William Schneider announced his state would ender the lawsuit on Tuesday.

“The federal health care reform law mandates that all citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a costly penalty,” Schneider said in a statement. “This would be an unprecedented expansion of federal power, violating the 10th Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.”

The Florida-led case, of which the small-business advocacy group the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) is also a plaintiff, is currently before U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson in Pensacola, Fla. Oral arguments were held on Dec. 16. This case first challenges the constitutionality of the mandate. But it also challenges the law on 10th Amendment grounds, charging the new law imposes significant costs and burdens on states with Medicaid costs.

“Having more than half of the nation’s states involved in this case, along with NFIB, who represents more than 350,000 small businesses nationwide, sends a strong message to the courts that this law is detrimental to the entire nation and must be overturned,” said Karen Harned, executive director, NFIB Small Business Legal Center.

“The healthcare law sets a dangerous precedent of giving Congress unlimited power to force citizens to purchase private products,” Harned said. “This unconstitutional power grab by the federal government violates the rights of individuals, small business owners and the rights of states to function as sovereign entities. We are excited these additional states have joined our efforts against this unconstitutional law.”

The NFIB announced Wednesday that Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wyoming were joining the fight.

“The federal government simply does not have the right to force someone to buy a product – be it health insurance or any other type of goods or services that an individual may or may not want – or face a penalty,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said in a statement.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said the Constitution “places limits on the power of the federal government, and these limits must be defended or they will disappear.”

He added: “Never before has the federal government required an individual to either buy government-approved insurance or pay a penalty. And nowhere does the Constitution authorize Congress to regulate in this manner.” Read more at cnsnews.com

 

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What About the Twins? The Deadly Logic of Abortion

Once we buy into the logic of abortion, there is no end to the trail of tears.

Saturday will mark the 38th anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that opened the floodgates for abortion in America. On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision, declaring that women have a constitutional right to an abortion. Hard as it is to imagine, the justices in the majority really believed that their decision would end the national debate over abortion. Not by a long shot.

Nearly four decades later, the argument rages on — and so does the carnage. The national abortion rate is over twenty percent. Just last week it was reported that the abortion rate in New York City is over forty percent, and among African-Americans in that city, nearly sixty percent. Across the United States, an abortion industrial complex now claims over a million unborn lives each year. The carnage just continues.

In recent days, two horrifying accounts of abortion have gripped the human conscience. From Australia, news came of a couple who had aborted twin boys, just because they wanted a baby girl. Having three sons already, the couple aborted the twins because they want a daughter after the death of a previous baby girl who died shortly after birth.

The couple is now appealing to a legal tribunal, demanding the right to use gender selection in the course of an IVF procedure. Australia, unlike the United States, has laws against gender selection. The couple is pressing for an exception.

The abortion of the twin boys precipitated an international outcry, with headlines carrying the news around the world. But, even as millions were morally troubled by the account, many were unable to muster a moral argument against the abortions. Why? Because the logic of abortion has been so widely accepted in the larger society.

The very idea of gender-selection abortions is abhorrent, and most people would almost surely argue that such abortions should not be allowed. But the logic of abortion rights demands that a woman be recognized as having a right to an abortion at any time for any reason or for no reason. Once you accept abortion as a moral option, it is virtually impossible to preclude any abortion for any reason. The Culture of Death is built upon the logic of abortion on demand. Once the floodgates were opened, it is almost impossible to stem the tide.

On January 19, the Associated Press reported that a Pennsylvania doctor had been charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of one woman and seven babies, “who were born alive and then killed with scissors.”

The description of Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel. Investigators found bags and bottles containing aborted babies and parts of babies. District Attorney Seth Williams said that Dr. Kermit Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy, and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord.”

Williams described Gosnell’s clinic as a “house of horrors.” Gosnell, it turns out, made millions of dollars by performing abortions, including late-term abortions, by the thousands. According to the prosecutors, Gosnell performed “as many illegal late-term abortions as he could.”

Dr. Gosnell has been charged with multiple counts of murder, and for this fact, we should be thankful. But the reality is that what Dr. Gosnell did is just a more graphic display of the horror inside every abortionist’s chamber.

These two cases illustrate the pattern of moral confusion found among the public. News of the “house of horrors” in Pennsylvania brings prompt moral outrage, and understandably so. But is the abortion clinic on the corner, established for the purpose of killing unborn children, any less a house of horrors?

The couple in Australia openly admitted aborting their twin boys because they want a daughter. Millions around the world seem outraged by their decision, but having accepted the basic logic of abortion, they are hard-pressed to define when any abortion demanded by a woman might be unjustified and thus illegal.

The Christian revulsion over abortion and the destruction of human life is based in the knowledge that God is the Author of all life and of every life, without exception. Abortion is the business of death, and it is the great wound that runs through the nation’s conscience. These shocking accounts may sear their way into the nation’s collective conscience, but unless the basic logic of abortion rights is overturned, such accounts will erupt again and again.

Once we buy into the logic of abortion, there is no end to the trail of tears. In the case of the Australian couple, a professor of medicine commented that they should be able to select the gender of their baby after aborting the twin boys. “I can’t see how it could possibly hurt anyone,” he said.

What about the twins?

Related Posts The Perverse Logic of Abortion The Deadly Logic of Anti-Blasphemy Laws What Makes Abortion Plausible? What Makes Abortion Unthinkable?, Part Five What Makes Abortion Plausible? What Makes Abortion Unthinkable?, Part Six When Abortion Collides with Totalitarianism (Audio) Read more at www.albertmohler.com

 

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Teen Burglars Accidentally Snort Man's Ashes

Some teens in Florida (natch) recently robbed a woman's home, taking, among other things, the ashes of her father and two Great Danes. Hungry for drugs, they snorted them. Upon realizing their mistake, they threw the ashes in a lake.

Send an email to Richard Lawson, the author of this post, at richardl@gawker.com. Read more at gawker.com

 

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Fox Rejects 'Jesus Hates Obama' Super Bowl Ad

There is a line Fox won't cross, and a proposed Super Bowl ad from jesushatesobama.com crosses that line. Fox has rejected the ad, the Huffington Post reports.

The 30-second ad—set to the tune of the Civil-War era "Battle Hymn of the Republic"—shows bobble-headed versions of Obama and Jesus, with a scornful look on Jesus' face.

The camera zooms in on Jesus, and just like that, Obama falls into a fishbowl waiting below. Jesus, suddenly sporting a "Jesus Hates Obama" T-Shirt, looks pleased.

The website admits that the company doesn't really believe Jesus hates Obama. "However, we do believe in freedom ... as in the freedom to make fun of the Obama administration with novelty T-shirts," the website reads. "Our products may be a joke but so are the policies of this administration."

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Deadly Philadelphia Gas Explosion Caught on Video

A gas explosion killed one 19-year-old utility worker in Philadelphia's Tacony neighborhood today and injured six others. A bystander caught the enormous fireball on video.

Send an email to Adrian Chen, the author of this post, at adrian@gawker.com. Read more at gawker.com

 

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Why Your City Will Ban Toys and Everything Else

San Francisco has banned Happy Meals, plastic grocery bags, cat declawing, cigarettes in drugstores, municipal bottled water buys, city deals with former slave traders, and more. Laugh all you want — your local government may well be following suit.

SF Weekly's Joe Eskenazi says city goverments are growing increasingly authoritarian:

When you put San Francisco's laundry list of bans alongside New York City's fatwa against trans fats, Chicago's slavery disclosure ordinance (they beat us to it), or Seattle's mandatory composting laws (beat us again, damn it!), it becomes clear that a left-leaning pack of cities is fundamentally changing the role - and pushing the limits - of local government. It's a movement fueled by the perception that state and federal government are unable or unwilling to tackle big problems like pollution or rampant obesity.

Which, basically, yes: At a time when federal agencies have proven utterly incompetent at enforcing even existing laws on food safety, drug safety, financial oversight, consumer protection, online privacy and even at assisting cities and states in times of natural disaster, it's no wonder enlightened municipalities have felt it necessary to take matters into their own hands, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Sometimes they just want to move more quickly than the Feds; San Francisco's government-sponsored health care program predates the Obama Administration's by at least four years.

If only local governments had the constitutional authority to ban toxic investment schemes and depraved, con-artist bankers. It's not like anyone else will.

[Photo of toy Hummer included with McDonald's Happy Meal via gadgetdude/Flickr]

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How 25 Tons of Bombs Made an Afghan Town Disappear

This is Tarok Kolache, a small village in Afghanistan's Arghandab River Valley. Or at least, it used to be, until the Taliban and the U.S. military got to it.

What happened to Tarok Kolache, and why? In a post on pundit Tom Rick's Foreign Policy blog, military writer and West Point graduate Pamela Broadwell writes that the Taliban "had conducted an intimidation campaign to chase the villagers out." The Taliban fighters and their "dense pattern[s]" of IEDs "terrified" the Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, which sustained heavy losses in two attempts to clear the village, and eventually Lt. Col. David Flynn decided the only way to maintain momentum was to blow it to bits:

The plan was for one team to clear a 600-meter path with MICLICs from one of his combat outposts to Tarok Kalache. "It was the only way I could give the men confidence to go back out." On October 6, Flynn's unit approved use of HIMARS, B-1, and A-10s to drop 49,200 lbs. of ordnance on the Taliban tactical base of Tarok Kalache, resulting in NO CIVCAS. Their clearance of Babur, Khosrow Sofla, Charqolba Sofla, and other villages commenced October 7, aided by USSF, ABP, and an additional infantry company from B/1-22 IN.

"NO CIVCAS" means "no civilian casualties." But, as Wired's Spencer Ackerman—who flagged Broadwell's post in an excellent post of his own—wonders:

It seems difficult to understand how Broadwell or the 1-320th can be so confident they didn't accidentally kill civilians after subjecting Tarok Kolache to nearly 25 tons worth of bombs and rockets. The rockets alone have a blast radius of about 50 meters [164 feet], so the potential for hitting bystanders is high with every strike. As she clarified in a debate on her Facebook wall, "In the commander's assessment, the deserted village was not worth clearing. If you lost several KIA and you might feel the same." But without entering Tarok Kolache to clear it, how could U.S. or Afghan forces know it was completely devoid of civilians?

Indeed! Even if there were truly no civilian casualties, at least one Afghan villager wasn't particularly pleased—he accused Flynn of "ruining his life after the demolition." He likely wasn't the only one, and there isn't a lot of room to spare when it comes to Afghan impressions of NATO forces in Arghandab, where locals trust the Taliban over Karzai.

Luckily, Gen. Petraeus has apparently authorized up to $1 million for reconstruction, and Flynn and his men are rushing to rebuild the village—so as to get out in front of the Taliban's "information operations gun." But you have to wonder how diverting so many resources to rebuilding a village you just blew up aids the "momentum" originally sought.

And they might be too late anyway. An independent analyst interviewed by Ackerman expresses similar concerns, telling him that the destruction of Tarok Kolache likely toppled whatever goodwill U.S. troops had built up—as Ackerman drily puts it, "it's not standard procedure for U.S.-led troops to destroy whole villages." Looking at those photos, it's not hard to see why.

[Wired; Foreign Policy]

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Amplify’d from www.nydailynews.com

Workers sue Duane Reade for secretly putting cameras in bathrooms to record employees

BY Oren Yaniv DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Adams for News Employees are suing Duane Reade for secretly recording them on cameras in the store bathrooms.

Sixteen Duane Reade workers are suing the pharmaceutical giant for trying to catch them with their pants down.

The employees claim bathrooms at the drugstore chain's warehouse were secretly equipped with video and recording devices - and managers threatened to can anyone who dared complain.

"To be watched in the bathroom - this really goes beyond all decency," said lawyer Adam Thompson, who filed the whopping $110 million Brooklyn Supreme Court lawsuit.

The surveillance apparatus was hidden in air vents at the Maspeth, Queens, facility by a security officer, the suit says.

When it was noticed in January 2008, higherups removed it and then called employees to a meeting where they were told to "let it go" - or face termination, according to the document.

"Basically, you had an employer abridging their rights as citizens to file a complaint," Thompson said. "Who knows how far this went?"

Duane Reade issued a statement denying the allegations.

"We don't believe the suit has merit, and we will defend ourselves in court," the company promised.

Plaintiff Aldo Chumpitaz, 36, of Woodside, Queens, speculated the eagle eyes were installed to catch workers who steal or tamper with merchandise.

"I saw the camera and told a supervisor, 'How is it possible?'" recalled Chumpitaz, who was fired in 2009 over an unrelated matter. "He told me, 'It wasn't working.'"

Thompson insisted the cameras "were absolutely working."

Workers who found them were "livid," he added. "Who'd want to see that posted on the Internet?" Read more at www.nydailynews.com

 

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Pesticide Just Makes Bedbugs Stronger

There is no hope. Discouraged and terrified scientists now tell us that the modern urban bedbug has spent the last decade drinking in our best poisons while emitting tiny cackles, growing stronger and stronger and stronger and scarier.

New scientific studies reveal facts that would have been better left unknown, as we at least would have been able to soothe ourselves by entertaining thoughts of hope, albeit futile ones.

In New York City, bedbugs now are 250 times more resistant to the standard pesticide than bedbugs in Florida, due to changes in a gene controlling the resilience of the nerve cells targeted by the insecticide

We New Yorkers must learn to get along with our bedbug companions, for we have no choice. Their rapidly thickening exoskeletons and poison-destroying enzymes are rendering our once-potent chemicals laughably insufficient. Is ours the final generation that will grow up having known the halcyon days when bedbug infestations were seen as a controllable phenomenon?

Laboratory tests in the U.S., Europe and Africa show today's bedbugs can survive pesticide levels a thousand times greater than the lethal dose of a decade or so ago.

Yes.

[WSJ. Photo: liz.novack]

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