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Senate approves bill to strip public employees of collective bargaining
seattletimes
Wisconsin Senate GOP bypass Democrats to cut union rights
Republicans voted 18-1 Wednesday night to pass nonfiscal provisions of the budget-repair bill — including those that would eliminate or severely limit collective-bargaining rights for most public employees.
Republicans control the Senate but had been blocked from voting on the issue after Democrats left the state Feb. 17 to prevent a quorum. Instead, Republicans used a procedural maneuver to force the collective-bargaining measure through: They removed elements of Gov. Scott Walker’s bill that technically were related to appropriating funds, thus removing a requirement that 20 senators be present for a vote.
In the end, the Senate’s 19 Republicans approved the measure without any debate on the floor or a single Democrat in the room.
Walker issued a statement praising the action: “The Senate Democrats have had three weeks to debate this bill and were offered repeated opportunities to come home, which they refused.”
The fight over the legislation has drawn national attention, with unions calling it an attack on all organized labor and some GOP lawmakers and governors calling it a necessary step to control state spending.
“You are cowards!” spectators in the Senate gallery screamed as lawmakers voted. Within hours, a crowd of a few hundred protesters had grown to thousands outside the state Capitol in Madison.
“The whole world is watching!” they shouted as Read more…
Gaddafi Strikes At Oil Refinery, Escalating the War
Libyan government warplanes have struck an oil facility near the rebel-held eastern town of Ras Lanuf during a heavy bombardment aimed at driving out opposition forces trying to topple Libya’s leader Moammar Gadhafi.
The warplanes bombed the As Sidr oil facility Wednesday, causing a fire and sending huge plumes of smoke into the sky. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Forces loyal to Gadhafi also shelled rebel positions west of Ras Lanuf, forcing the rebels to retreat. The oil port represents the front line of the rebels’ advance out of their stronghold of eastern Libya.
Libyan government forces also were tightening their siege of the western town of Zawiya, the closest rebel-held area to Gadhafi’s power base in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Residents said Gadhafi loyalists were surrounding rebels holding out in Zawiya’s central square, using snipers and tanks in the assault.
In remarks broadcast on state television Wednesday, Gadhafi called on Read more…
Pace of polar ice melt ‘accelerating rapidly’: study
(AFP)
WASHINGTON — The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is “accelerating rapidly” and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA and published Tuesday.The findings suggest that the ice sheets — more so than ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps — have become “the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.”
This study, the longest to date examining changes to polar ice sheet mass, combined two decades of monthly satellite measurements with regional atmospheric climate model data to study changes in mass.
“That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising — they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers,” said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.
“What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening,” he said.
Under the current trends, he said, sea level is likely to be “significantly higher” than levels projected by Read more…
SUBLIMINAL FLICKER Part II: Fluorescent Lights and Flicker Sensitivity
If you have incandescent light bulbs, I suggest you keep them… Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act Oh yeah if you did not know, ALL CFLs are Made in China. NOT ONE is produced in USA!
by Richard Conrad, Ph.D
Subliminal: below the threshold of conscious perception; inadequate to produce conscious awareness but able to evoke a response.
All types of fluorescent lights have some amount of flicker. Most of this flicker is invisible, at least to the conscious mind. Flicker is invisible when it consists of pulses or waves of light that repeat one after the other so rapidly that they appear to fuse together into steady light. Our flicker fusion frequency (the frequency above which we no longer consciously see flicker) ranges from about 25 to 55 Hz (Hz means times per second). Flicker fusion frequency varies with the person, with the intensity and color of the light, and also depends on where the light falls on the retina. Optic nerve signals proportional to flicker at frequencies far above the conscious flicker fusion frequency do reach our brain from the eye (as shown by EEG and other studies). Any invisibly flickering light that affects the brain is what I call Read more…
Breaking: Newly Obtained Homeland Security Documents Reveal Radical Shift In Internet Policy
FIGHT BACK: Internet user arrested for linking to other websites.
Brian McCarthy ran a website, channelsurfing.net, that linked to various sites where you could watch online streams of TV shows and sports networks. A couple months ago, the government seized his domain name and on Friday they arrested him and charged him with criminal copyright infringement — punishable by five years in prison.
We just obtained a copy of the complaint (below) that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made against him — and they don’t even allege that he made a copy of anything! Just that he ran what they call a “linking website” which linked to various sites with copyrighted material. Under that sort of thinking, everyone who’s sent around a link to a copyrighted YouTube video is a criminal.
This is another shocking overreach by DHS and ICE — a steamship-era department that’s proving once again that it doesn’t understand the Internet. We need to push back — and fast — before they try to lock up more Americans.
PETITION TO JANET NAPOLITANO, DIRECTOR OF HOMELAND SECURITY, AND JOHN MORTON, DIRECTOR OF IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT: There’s nothing wrong or illegal about posting a link to a website. This is another shocking overreach by ICE: You need to drop the charges against Brian McCarthy right away.
Sun Emitting Solar Flare
Look at the size of that solar flare! Lots of activity on the way folks.
Gold and Silver over the next month or so
Last month I calculated Silver was about to go ballistic – I think a 28 % price rise is pretty impressive in one month. I presumed gold would follow at a more leisurely pace. It did. Short term though the fundamentals of each are disconnected. Gold is reflective of safe haven mode where as silver is in highly speculative mode.
Silver hasn’t finished yet by a long shot, but it is pausing for breather. In January I thought out what is happening and it seems now we are due a pull back. In January I did ludicrous calculations to prove the state of the market to justify my thought process. The dips are now very shallow. I was surprised that silver broke $35 so quickly and seems to Read more…
Middle East Unrest Could Harm WMD-Free Zone Talks
Protesters chant slogans on Saturday during a demonstration outside an Egyptian state security building in the outskirts of Cairo. Recent political instability throughout the Middle East could complicate efforts to establish a regional weapons of mass destruction-free zone, current and former officials said (Wissam Nassar/Getty Images).
The unrest and revolutions sweeping through the Middle East have raised doubts over the potential for regional nations to hold previously planned talks focused on forming a weapons of mass destruction-free zone, Arms Control Today reported in its March issue (see GSN, March 1).
At the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference in New York, member nations agreed to hold a 2012 meeting on “the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction.”
“We are absolutely committed” to the WMD-free zone meeting, White House WMD point man Gary Samore said in an interview last month. “But there’s a lot of uncertainty because of the unrest in the Middle East.”
In the last two months, longstanding regimes in Tunisia and Egypt have fallen, and protests in Libya have escalated into full-scale fighting between militants and forces loyal to Col. Muammar Qadhafi. Protests have also erupted in Bahrain, Jordan, Oman and Read more…
China Approves Kuwaiti Refinery
BEIJING—China has given final approval to Kuwait to build an oil refinery in the south of the country in a joint venture with China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., a person with firsthand knowledge of the decision said Tuesday.
China, dependent on oil imports, has been making deals with major producers to process more crude domestically.
The $9 billion project between Kuwait Petroleum Corp. and Asia’s largest refiner by capacity, also known as Sinopec, has been under negotiation for more than five years. It includes a refinery with a capacity of 300,000 barrels a day in the city of Zhanjiang in Guangdong province and an ethylene plant with a capacity of a million tons a year, along with related utilities, jetties and oil pipelines, according to previous comments from government and company officials involved in the Read more…
People Of Earth: Prepare For Economic Disaster
It is not just the United States that is headed for an economic collapse. The truth is that the entire world is heading for a massive economic meltdown and the people of earth need to be warned about the coming economic disaster that is going to sweep the globe. The current world financial system is based on debt, and there are alarming signs that the gigantic global debt bubble is getting ready to burst. In addition, global prices for the key resources that the major economies of the planet depend on are rising very rapidly. Despite all of our advanced technology, the truth is that human civilization simply cannot function without oil and food. But now the price of oil and the price of food are both increasing dramatically. So how is the current global economy supposed to keep functioning properly if it soon costs much more to ship products between continents? How are the billions of people that are just barely surviving today supposed to feed themselves if the price of food goes up another 30 or 40 percent? For decades, most of the major economies around the globe have been able to Read more…
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