WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold news conferences on Monday, Feb. 1, and Tuesday, Feb. 2, to discuss the fiscal year 2011 budget request and announce bold new developments in the nation's civil space effort.
A humanitarian mission to aid Haitian earthquake victims turned into a major embarrassment in Puerto Rico on Friday as pictures emerged of doctors drinking, mugging for cameras and brandishing firearms amid the victims' suffering.
The ethics committee of the commonwealth's medical board said it was launching an investigation into whether those involved should be disciplined.
Puerto Rican Secretary of Health Lorenzo Gonzalez called the episode "a sad situation."
Mr Romeike and his wife withdrew their three oldest children from school in 2006 after they encountered problems with violence, bullying and peer pressure.
However, the decision to educate their children at home brought the family into conflict with the German authorities.
The family endured harassment from the authorities, and on one occasion police officers came to the family’s home and forced the children to attend school.
The family fled to the US after Germany’s highest court ruled that in severe cases of non-compliance social services could remove home schooled children from their parents.
Describing the case, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman said that “the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate”.
The last time there was more snow in Des Moines in December and January, the world was emerging from a several-hundred-year era of cold temperatures dubbed the "Little Ice Age."
Des Moines received 6.4 inches of snow Monday at the airport, pushing the total snowfall since Dec. 1 in the city to 41.4 inches. That topped the 37.2 inches in Des Moines during the same period in 1897-1898.
The record snowfall for Des Moines in December and January is 50.2 inches in 1885-86. Elwynn Taylor, Iowa State University Extension climatologist, said the world was coming out of the Little Ice Age in the 1880s.
Climatologists said that during the era that lasted 200 to 300 years, North America and Europe experienced colder-than-typical winters that featured large amounts of snow.
December and January this winter also are second in snowfall for Iowa as well, state Climatologist Harry Hillaker said.
Four of Iowa's snowiest December-January periods dating to the winter of 1887-88 have occurred in the past 10 years.
Monday marked the 48th day in a row that snow depth at the Des Moines airport measured at least 5 inches.
It's expected to stay that way at least another week.
I'm fairly certain that the "spending freeze" will poll well in the near-term, and may even take Obama's approval numbers up a point or so with it.
Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania has some advice for his fellow Democrats skittish about health care reform in the wake of the Republican upset in that Massachusetts special election.
“My message to those Democrats is don’t be afraid,” Rendell told ABC News. “Listen, you got elected because you wanted to do something to change the quality of people’s lives -- here we have a chance to do something historic and if it means some of us are going to lose because of that so be it. At least you will have lost your office fighting for something and accomplishing something.”
He tells his fellow Democrats in Washington, DC, to “get that best bill as strong and as tight as you can then send it back to the Senate and let’s see if they (Republicans) are going to filibuster.”
“Make them filibuster,” he told ABC News in an interview for Good Morning America this morning. “Make them go before America people. Make the American people look at a modern day spectacle of what a filibuster would entail. I think it’s time to call their bluff. I think it is too easy to throw up your hands and say, ‘We don’t have 60 votes.’ Remember its 51 votes for passage, they have to filibuster. Make them filibuster.”
What has also been interesting is the attraction that Frank Capra's classic film Mr. Smith Goes To Washington still invites after almost 70 years. In part this is because this is the only well known depiction of a filibuster in the entire history of popular mass media. There are no docudramas out there depicting an actual historical example of a filibuster, largely because as actually used they have proved far less heroic. In fact it is a seedy little practice.
But Capra's portrayal still carries a great emotional impact. In many ways the filibuster in Mr. Smith is a classic immigrant fantasia. It is the iconic ideal that in America a single person can stand up to the entire world. Often times the immigrant has left their homeland because all of the pressures of that society threatened to crush them. It isn't that those types of pressures do not exist in America, as Jimmy Stewart's character could tell you, but it is that the political ethos of this country allows just enough space for a single man to hold his ground and, just maybe, win against all odds. Someone with the sensibilities of an immigrant, such as Capra, would naturally gravitate to stories that portray just those moments and wrap them up in a patriotic fervor. The total effect is warm, comforting, uplifting, and, (sadly) totally irrelevant to the political discussion of today.
The truth is the filibuster portrayed in the movie bears no resemblance to its modern incarnation. It actually isn't a filibuster at all anymore. Other business continues as if nothing is happening. Those engaging in the "filibuster" are not kept on the Senate floor. (That would presumably keep the Senators from pricey cocktail parties in Georgetown, and nobody would want that...at least nobody sitting in Congress.) A real filibuster, like portrayed in the film, is a dicey proposition. To decide on that course of action one had to weigh how it would be viewed by the public at large. You would be stopping the entire legislative process and could be vilified for that, but maybe the risk would be worth it if you could just get enough attention focused on your issue. Maybe with the benefit of the spotlight you could sway public opinion in your favor. It was risky, but honest.
Today, the "filibuster" is merely a dishonestly labeled minority veto.
Sen. John McCain says the movement he led to reform how political campaigns are financed is dead.
McCain says the Supreme Court has spoken on the constitutionality of political contributions by corporations. The Arizona Republican had sought to regulate them with a landmark campaign finance law he wrote with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.
Last week the Supreme Court ruled that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress.
McCain says there's not much that can be done about campaign financing now. Still, he predicts a backlash over time from voters once they see the amount of money that corporations and unions pour into political campaigns.
You're free to think this story unfolded solely because of luck and determination.
Matt and Mandy Poulter don't buy it. They are a religious couple, and they see accomplishments as the rewards of faith. They also are bulldogs, who jump into challenges few others would take on.
Last Tuesday, they completed an exhausting odyssey, in which they plucked their new daughter and four other orphans from earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Who's to say if prayers or moxie pulled them through?
The results are the same either way. Five children who otherwise would be sleeping under tarps in a hot, dusty courtyard in Haiti will be bedding down tonight with their new families in Pella.
The professional courtesy when researchers collect data is to permit them first opportunity to publish. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has written up this policy. The NIH writes in their section on timeliness of data sharing
“Recognizing that the value of data often depends on their timeliness, data sharing should occur in a timely fashion. NIH expects the timely release and sharing of data to be no later than the acceptance for publication of the main findings from the final dataset.”
The NIH writes with respect to their grantees
“In general, grantees own the rights in data resulting from a grant-supported project.”
NIH has just written down what is the professional courtesy with respect to data.
In the case of the site data that Anthony Watts has collected at considerable effort on his part and that of his outstanding volunteers, the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is not recognizing this professional courtesy. They already earlier have posted a (flawed) analysis of a subset of Anthony’s data. Simply recognizing Anthony’s pivotal role in identifying the current site characteristics of the USHCN sites, as listed in the Acknowledgements of the Menne et al (2009) paper (and the new JGR paper), is hardly adequate.
Floridians braced for a second surge of Arctic air that promised to dip well into the southern parts of the state. Key West already set a record low temperature on Thursday, bottoming out at 47 degrees -- shattering the previous low set back in 1897. Temperatures on Sunday and Monday are expected to be in the low-to-mid-40s.
The citrus growing regions in Florida and Texas will have to keep an eye on their crops as the cold air remains in the area, Meyers said. In southern Texas, the National Weather Service has issued a hard freeze warning through late Saturday morning, saying that the conditions "will kill temperature-sensitive vegetation and could cause widespread damage or destruction to crops."
