Bypassing Congress, President Obama announced today the implementation of his own version of the DREAM Act that will begin granting work permits to as many as 800,000 illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, graduated from high school, and stayed out of trouble with the law.
According to the AP:
The new policy will grant immunity from deportation to “illegal immigrants [who] were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have no criminal history, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED, or served in the military.” It will also allow them to apply for a two-year work permit that can be repeatedly renewed if they stay out of trouble.
How is Obama’s election-year move possible? A memo by Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano describes the new policy as a matter of “prosecutorial discretion”
Our Nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a strong and sensible manner. They are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Indeed, many of these young people have already contributed to our country in significant ways. Prosecutorial discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here.
From : dailyintel
###
Thesaurus.com “Thesaurus.com – the largest and most trusted free online thesaurus brought to you by Dictionary.com. Quickly find synonyms and antonyms.”
The largest earthquake in recent history was a 9.5 and occurred in Chile in 1960. It caused giant ocean waves as far as 6,000 miles (10,000 km) away. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
POOF, THE LIGHT GOES OFF !
A 72-year-old man goes for a physical. All of his tests come back normal so the doctor says, “Harry, everything looks great. How are you doing mentally and emotionally? Are you at peace with God?”
Harry replies, “God and I are tight. He knows I have poor eyesight, so he’s fixed it when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, poof!, the light goes on. When I’m done, poof!, the light goes off.”
“Wow, that’s incredible,” the doctor says.
A little later in the day, the doctor calls Harry’s wife. “Mrs.. White,” he says, “Harry is doing fine but I had to call you because I’m in awe of his relationship with God. Is it true that he gets up during the night and poof! the light goes on in the bathroom, and when he’s done, poof! the light goes off?”
“OH GOOD GRIEF!” Mrs. white exclaims, “He’s pissing in the fridge again!”
###
Al Capone…the original gangster….
###
Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during the past 540 million years.
Each of these ‘Big Five’ saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.
In a study to be published in the March 3 issue of the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, paleobiologists assess where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction, compared with the past 540 million years, and they find cause for hope as well as alarm.
“If you look only at the critically endangered mammals – those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations – and assume that their time will run out, and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal, and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm,” said principal author Anthony D. Barnosky, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, a curator in the Museum of Paleontology and a research paleontologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
MORE.
###
Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Creations of Neandertals, Not Modern Humans dability
Hand stencils in El Castillo cave are older than previously thought. Image: courtesy of Pedro Saura
In a cave in northwestern Spain called El Castillo, ancient artists decorated a stretch of limestone wall with dozens of depictions of human hands. They seem to have made the images by pressing a hand to the wall and then blowing red pigment on it, creating a sort of stencil. Hand stencils are a common motif in the cave paintings of Spain and France, and like all cave art, they have long been considered to be the work of anatomically modern humans like us. But a new analysis of the age of the paintings in El Castillo and other Spanish caves shows that some of these paintings are much older than previously thought—old enough, in some cases, to be the handiwork of our cousins the Neandertals.
Determining the ages of cave paintings—from the hands in the Panel de las Manos in El Castillo to the mammoths and other Ice Age beasts that adorn the walls of Chauvet in France—has proved a difficult thing to do. Scientists can reliably assess the antiquity of human and animal bones as well as charcoal from hearths using proven techniques such as radiocarbon dating. But the thin layers of pigment found on cave walls usually do not contain the carbon needed for that approach, leaving archaeologists to estimate the age of the art based on its style or its apparent association with datable remains.
MORE.
###
Get Ready, Because Voyager I Is *This Close* to Leaving Our Solar System
We’re on the cusp of one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of all time, but we may not know when the moment strikes. Or, rather, there may be no moment.
An artist’s rendering of the two Voyager spacecraft at the outer edge of our solar system (NASA)
Last week, in the corners of the Internet devoted to outer space, things started to get a little, well, hot. Voyager 1, the man-made object farthest away from Earth, was encountering a sharp uptick in the number of a certain kind of energetic particles around it. Had the spacecraft become the first human creation to “officially” leave the solar system?
It’s hard to overstate how wild an accomplishment this would be: A machine, built here on Earth by the brain- and handiwork of humans, has sailed from Florida, out of Earth’s orbit, beyond Mars, beyond the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn, and may now have left the heliosphere — tiny dot in the universe beholden to our sun. Had it really happened? How would we know?
We’re not quite there yet, Voyager’s project scientist and former head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Ed Stone, told me. The spacecraft is on it’s way out — “it’s leaving the solar system” — but we don’t know how far it has to go or what that transition to interstellar space will look like.
Voyager launched in 1977. Today, Voyager I is about 121 astronomical units (the rough distance from the Sun to the Earth) away. That is so far that it takes 16 hours for the radio signals it transmits to reach us. (Voyager II is about 22 astronomical units — approximately seven years — behind.) It is traveling at about 17 kilometers per second (38,000 miles per hour), propelled by the slingshot effect from flying by Jupiter and Saturn. (“It’s well above escape velocity,” Stone said.) The spacecraft’s cameras have been turned off since 1990, when it took the pictures for the famous Family Portrait mosaic that captures the planets as they appeared as Voyager I looked back over the solar system it had traveled across.
MORE.
###
Thinking Big – Synthetic Biology Gallery
This photo gallery captures the beginnings of an exciting new science called Synthetic Biology. Although it is still in a very early, experimental phase, Synthetic Biology could become the defining technology of the 21st century, bringing with it new thinking, new questions, and radical new possibilities.
MORE.
###
Bulgarian Museum to Display “Vampire” Skeleton
Bulgaria’s national history museum plans to display a new item in its collection next week: a vampire. The so-called vampire is in fact the 700-year-old skeleton of a man who was pierced through the chest with an iron rod—after death—in a pagan ritual intended to prevent him from turning into a bloodsucking immortal. Archaeologists excavating a monastery near the Bulgarian city of Sozopol recently discovered the remains, which date to a time when superstitions about vampires were widespread in the region. The director of the museum said excavations have unearthed more than 100 “vampire” burial sites throughout the country, mostly of noblemen who were pierced with wooden or iron stakes. More …
###
Marilyn Monroe by: George BARRIS
###
5 Things Every Organization Can Learn From Anonymous
You may find them annoying. You may find them threatening. But there’s no denying that Anonymous is still one of the most prevalent, powerful and decentralized movements out there.
Though largely misunderstood, various groups within the hacktivist and trolling phenomenon have continued to work in secret, waging the odd cyber protest, or stealing and publishing data in acts of Robin-Hood style vigilanteism against governments, companies and individuals.
The aims aren’t always clear, but somehow in the last few years Anonymous has become the number one perceived threat among people who work in IT security, and it refuses to leave the headlines. The movement’s ability to survive speaks to the power of leaderless groups, crowd sourcing and spontaneity.
From HERE>
###
I watched this LIVE on tv when I was in high school!
National Archives: No new JFK docs
President and Mrs. Kennedy ride through Dallas moments before Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. (Credit: Reuters)
Acquiescing to CIA demands for secrecy, the National Archives announced Wednesday that it will not release 1,171 top-secret Agency documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy in time for the 5oth anniversary of JFK’s death in November 2013.
“Is the government holding back crucial JFK documents,” asked Russ Baker in a WhoWhatWhy piece that Salon published last month. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. In a letter released this week, Gary Stern, general counsel for the National Archives and Record Administration, said the Archives would not release the records as part of the Obama administration’s ongoing declassification campaign. Stern cited CIA claims that “substantial logistical requirements” prevented their disclosure next year.
“This is a deeply disappointing decision that deprives everyone of a fuller understanding of the JFK assassination,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, who is writing a book about the impact of JFK’s assassination on American politics. “The 50th anniversary of that terrible event is the perfect opportunity to shed more light on the violent removal of a president. This adds to the widely held public suspicion that the government may still be hiding some key facts about President Kennedy’s murder.”
Read it all HERE.
###
For all you gardeners out there:
Composting
Compost is a dark, soil-like substance made of decomposed plant material. It is generally used in agriculture to improve soil structure and as a form of fertilizer. A range of methods and tools can be used for composting, but the process can also be as simple as letting a pile of dead plant matter—such as grass clippings or vegetable waste—sit and decompose for a year or more. Even in winter, the interior of the pile will remain hot due to the digestive action of microbes. What is “compost tea”?
###
###
Hidden vitamin in milk yields remarkable health benefits
ScienceDaily (June 14, 2012) — A novel form of vitamin B3 found in milk in small quantities produces remarkable health benefits in mice when high doses are administered, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The findings, recently reported in the June 2012 issue of the journal, Cell Metabolism, reveal that high doses of the vitamin precursor, nicotinamide riboside (NR) — a cousin of niacin — prevent obesity in mice that are fed a fatty diet, and also increase muscle performance, improve energy expenditure and prevent diabetes development, all without side effects.
The Swiss researchers, led by Dr. Johan Auwerx, performed the mouse experiments, while the ability to give the animals sufficient doses of NR was made possible by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers, who played key roles in uncovering the biological story of NR.
MORE.
###
Want a hot dog?
###
30 Best Room Pictures of the Week
MORE.
###
Big Bang theory a bust: Scientist claims there’s something out there
Maps of circles of cosmic background radiaton may be a clue to the events that occured before the Big Bang. Picture: NASA Source: Supplied
WHAT if there was an entire universe that existed before the Big Bang?
This is the theory of a leading Oxford University scientist who claims to have evidence of stars and galaxies that existed long before the universe as we know it formed, The Daily Mail reported.
Professor Roger Penrose says that cosmic radiation discovered by one of NASA’s telescopes is older than the Big Bang.
The researcher shows that the cosmic radiation background (CMB) formed in concentric circles that had cooled to a temperature of -270C over the 14 billion years since the universe came into being.
MORE.
###
Charles Goodyear Granted Patent for Vulcanization (This day in 1844)
Goodyear was the inventor of vulcanization, a process that makes rubber harder, less soluble, and more durable. Previously, rubber products were sticky and volatile, often melting in heat or hardening in cold. He obtained a patent for vulcanization in 1844 but was still badly in debt at the time of his death. Goodyear had no official connection to the famed Goodyear Tire Company, which was founded decades later and named in his honor. Why was he in prison when he began experimenting with rubber?
###
The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion
Does what goes around come around? Do you get what’s coming to you? Do you reap what you sow?
Children are often heard to whine to their parents: “But that’s not fair!” and their agitated parents reply: “Tough, life’s not fair.”
With age you hear people express less and less surprise at life’s unfairness. We still whine about it, but we’re less surprised.
Still, there’s some part of us that likes to believe the world should be fair. Psychologists call this kernel of teenage righteousness ‘the just-world hypothesis’. Here it is stated by Lerner and Miller (1978):
“Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve”
This simple statement has all sorts of strange effects. Here’s a depressing one from Hafer and Begue (2005):
MORE.
###
‘Dark Angel’ and Mexican Meth Manufacturers’ Financial Network in the U.S.
In a U.S. operation dubbed “Dark Angel,” local and federal law enforcement officers on May 30 arrested 20 individuals involved in methamphetamine trafficking across five states. Authorities confirmed that the leader of the trafficking network, Armando Mendoza-Haro, has links to Mexico, where the methamphetamine was likely produced. The group appears to have used legitimate companies to transport methamphetamine from California to the Denver area and elsewhere in the Western and Midwestern United States. The group then sent the profits back to California, where the cash was wired to banks in China and the Cayman Islands.
Mexico’s methamphetamine trade seems to be booming these days. Earlier in 2012, the Mexican military made the largest single seizure of methamphetamine ever (15 tons, worth around $1 billion) outside Guadalajara. As the United States increased its restrictions on the pharmaceutical chemicals used to produce methamphetamine, Mexican producers stepped in to meet the growing demand. Details from Operation Dark Angel provide insight into how traffickers in the United States are getting their product to market and, more interestingly, how they are laundering their profits.
MORE.
###
Originally posted 2012-06-15 11:32:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
