HPV Vaccine Is Credited in Fall of Teenagers’ Infection Rate

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, NYT

The prevalence of dangerous strains of the human papillomavirus — the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States and a principal cause of cervical cancer — has dropped by half among teenage girls in recent years, a striking measure of success for a vaccine against the virus that was introduced only in 2006, federal health officials said on Wednesday.

The sharp decline in the infection rate comes at a time of deepening worry among doctors and public health officials about the limited use of the HPV vaccine in the United States. Health departments across the country are scrambling for ways to increase vaccination rates, while nonprofit groups are using postcard reminders and social media campaigns and pediatricians are being encouraged to convince families of the vaccine’s benefits.

There are some signs that resistance to the vaccine may be growing. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in March found that 44 percent of parents in 2010 said they did not intend to vaccinate their daughters, up from 40 percent in 2008. Because it prevents a sexually transmitted infection, the vaccine comes with a stigma. Some parents worry it promotes promiscuity. And it has been controversial. During the Republican primary in 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, said the vaccine could have “dangerous side effects,” a concern that health officials say is unfounded.

The magnitude of the decline in HPV infections surprised public health experts because only about a third of teenage girls in the United States have been vaccinated with the full course of three doses. By comparison, vaccination rates in countries like Denmark and Britain are above 80 percent. Even Rwanda, in East Africa, has reached 80 percent.

(More here.)

Obama Readying Emissions Limits on Power Plants

By JOHN M. BRODER, NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama is preparing regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, senior officials said Wednesday. The move would be the most consequential climate policy step he could take and one likely to provoke legal challenges from Republicans and some industries.

Electric power plants are the largest single source of global warming pollution in the country, responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. With sweeping climate legislation effectively dead in Congress, the decision on existing power plants — which a 2007 Supreme Court decision gave to the executive branch — has been among the most closely watched of Mr. Obama’s second term.

The administration has already begun steps to restrict climate-altering emissions from any newly built power plants, but imposing carbon standards on the existing utility fleet would be vastly more costly and contentious.

The president is preparing to move soon because rules as complex as those applying to power plants can take years to complete. Experts say that if Mr. Obama hopes to have a new set of greenhouse gas standards for utilities in place before he leaves office he needs to begin before the end of this year.

(More here.)

Methane joins CO2 in rising to historic levels

Mean Methane Levels reach 1800 ppb

Arctic News

On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since measurements began in 1958. This is 120 ppm higher than pre-industrial peak levels. This unfortunate milestone was widely reported in the media.

Now another milestone has been reached that looks even more threatening than the above one. On the morning of June 16, 2013, methane levels reached an average mean of 1800 parts per billion (ppb). This is 1100 ppb higher than pre-industrial peak levels.

Vostok ice core analysis shows that temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide and methane have all moved within narrow bands while remaining in sync with each other over the past 400,000 years. Carbon dioxide moved within a band with lower and upper boundaries of respectively 200 and 280 ppm. Methane moved within lower and upper boundaries of respectively 400 and 800 ppb.

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IEA report shows how to stop growth in energy-related emissions by 2020

Four energy policies can keep the 2 °C climate goal alive

International Energy Agency
10 June 2013

Warning that the world is not on track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, the International Energy Agency (IEA) today urged governments to swiftly enact four energy policies that would keep climate goals alive without harming economic growth.

“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in London at the launch of a World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, which highlights the need for intensive action before 2020.

Noting that the energy sector accounts for around two-thirds of global greenhouse-gas emissions, she added: “This report shows that the path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C but also finds that much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth, an important concern for many governments.”

New estimates for global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2012 reveal a 1.4% increase, reaching a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt), but also mask significant regional differences. In the United States, a switch from coal to gas in power generation helped reduce emissions by 200 million tonnes (Mt), bringing them back to the level of the mid‑1990s. China experienced the largest growth in CO2 emissions (300 Mt), but the increase was one of the lowest it has seen in a decade, driven by the deployment of renewables and improvements in energy intensity. Despite increased coal use in some countries, emissions in Europe declined by 50 Mt. Emissions in Japan increased by 70 Mt.

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Making the power grid more sustainable, secure and cost-effective

THE POWER OF MICROGRIDS

Sierra Club Magazine, July/August, 2013

ONE OBSTACLE TO USING CLEANER, more local, renewable power is the power grid itself. Our antiquated system of regional grids is, for the most part, hardwired to route electricity from big power plants. In fact, utilities have warned that the grid could go haywire if local "decentralized" power exceeds 15 percent of supply.

Microgrids offer an intriguing path to semi-independence. A microgrid empowers a geographic area to use its own electricity when it's available and to rely on the existing utility grid when it's not. If the big grid flickers, the microgrid can hum along in "island mode" and keep critical functions running. As we enter an era of superstorms, that could mean fewer blackouts. And if those local energy sources are renewable, it means a smaller carbon footprint.

A solar-powered microgrid operates on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and some factories create mini-power plants from their own steam. Other institutions, including the University of California at San Diego and about 40 U.S. military bases, are building their own grids. Here's how a community microgrid might work one day in your neighborhood.

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Reason for murder: 'Family and friends come first'

Of Rats and Hit Men

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT

BOSTON — It all depends how you look at it, really.

One man’s hit man is another’s humanitarian.

Johnny “The Executioner” Martorano, who turned government witness and copped to killing 20 men and women as part of Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang, explained to Whitey’s lawyer Tuesday in federal court here that he was motivated by love of family and friends.

“I didn’t enjoy killing anybody,” he said. “I enjoyed helping a friend if I could.”

If anybody insulted, implicated or roughed up his brother or a friend’s brother, if anybody looked at him funny while he was with a date, if anybody ratted on his fellow gang members, if anybody could eyewitness a crime committed by an “associate,” he grabbed a .38 or a knife, a fake beard, a walkie-talkie or a towel to keep the blood off his car, and sprang into action. And somebody usually ended up in a trunk somewhere, sometimes still groaning.

(More here.)

Message to Erdogan: In today’s flat world, no more one-way conversations

Postcard From Turkey

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT

ISTANBUL — Having witnessed the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, I was eager to compare it with the protests by Turkish youths here in Taksim Square in 2013. They are very different. The Egyptians wanted to oust President Hosni Mubarak. Theirs was an act of “revolution.” The Turks are engaged in an act of “revulsion.” They aren’t (yet) trying to throw out their democratically elected Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What they’re doing is calling him out. Their message is simple: “Get out of our faces, stop choking our democracy and stop acting like such a pompous, overbearing, modern-day Sultan.”

The Turks took to the streets, initially, to protect one of Istanbul’s few green spaces, Gezi Park, from being bulldozed for an Erdogan project. They took to the streets because the prime minister — who has dominated Turkish politics for the last 11 years and still has strong support with the more religious half of Turkey — has stifled dissent. Erdogan has used tax laws and other means to intimidate the press and opponents into silence — CNN Turk, at first, refused to cover the protests, opting instead to air a show on penguins — and the formal parliamentary opposition is feckless. So in a move that has intriguing implications, Turkish youths used Twitter as their own news and communications network and Gezi Park and Taksim Square as their own parliament to become the real opposition.

In doing so, they sent a message to Erdogan: In today’s flat world, nobody gets to have one-way conversations anymore. Leaders are now in a two-way conversation with their citizens. Erdogan, who is surrounded by yes-men, got this lesson the hard way. On June 7, he declared that those who try to “lecture us” about the Taksim crackdown, “what did they do about the Wall Street incidents? Tear gas, the death of 17 people happened there. What was the reaction?” In an hour, the American Embassy in Turkey issued a statement in English and Turkish via Twitter rebutting Erdogan: “No U.S. deaths resulted from police actions in #OWS,” a reference to Occupy Wall Street. No wonder Erdogan denounced Twitter as society’s “worst menace.”

Three Turks in America responded to the events in Istanbul by starting a funding campaign on Indiegogo.com that bought a full-page ad in The New York Times supporting the protests. According to Forbes, they received donations “from 50 countries at a clip of over $2,500 per hour over its first day, crossing its $53,800 goal in about 21 hours.”

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The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, NYT

WASHINGTON — After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent’s killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode.

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.

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Obesity now a 'multimetabolic and hormonal disease state'

A.M.A. Recognizes Obesity as a Disease

By ANDREW POLLACK, NYT

The American Medical Association has officially recognized obesity as a disease, a move that could induce physicians to pay more attention to the condition and spur more insurers to pay for treatments.

In making the decision, delegates at the association’s annual meeting in Chicago overrode a recommendation against doing so by a committee that had studied the matter.

“Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans,” Dr. Patrice Harris, a member of the association’s board, said in a statement. She suggested the new definition would help in the fight against Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, which are linked to obesity.

To some extent, the question of whether obesity is a disease or not is a semantic one, since there is not even a universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a disease. And the A.M.A.’s decision has no legal authority.

(More here.)

Rep. Elijah Cummings releases a full IRS interview transcript

By Josh Hicks, Updated: June 18, 2013

The House Oversight Committee’s top Democrat on Tuesday released the full transcript of a congressional interview that he said “debunks conspiracy theories” about the IRS targeting controversy.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the committee, released interview transcripts in which an IRS manager in Cincinnati said he elevated the first tea party case that led the agency to begin singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

Cummings released partial transcripts from the manager’s interview last week, prompting warnings from committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) about releasing full interviews. Issa said in a letter to his Democratic counterpart that such leaks could help future witnesses “devise testimony consistent with the narrative that previous witnesses presented to committee investigators.”

Issa’s staff had already made some congressional interviews available to the media at that point.

Cummings last week said the chairman’s disclosures posed “exactly the same risk,” and he challenged Issa to identify and justify by Monday each line from the Cincinnati manager’s interview that he wanted withheld. Issa did not respond to the request.

(More here.)

NSA head: Surveillance helped thwart more than 50 terror plots

By Sean Sullivan, WashPost, Updated: June 18, 2013

Intelligence officials said Tuesday that the government’s sweeping surveillance efforts have helped thwart “potential terrorist events” more than 50 times since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and the officials detailed two new examples to illustrate the utility of the programs.

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, officials cited a nascent plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and a case involving an individual providing financial support to an overseas terrorist group.

“In recent years, these programs, together with other intelligence, have protected the U.S. and our allies from terrorist threats across the globe to include helping prevent the terrorist — the potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11,” National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander told the committee.

He said at least 10 of the plots targeted the United States.

(More here.)

Once unabashedly Obama-loving, Germans now wary of his e-surveillance policies

Obama’s German Storm

By ROGER COHEN, NYT

LONDON — Germany is normally a welcoming place for American leaders. But President Barack Obama will walk into a German storm Tuesday provoked by revelations about the Prism and Boundless Informant (who comes up with these names?) surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency.

No nation, after the Nazis and the Stasi, has such intense feelings about personal privacy as Germany. The very word “Datenschutz,” or data protection, is a revered one. The notion that the United States has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or Skype conversations of German citizens has been described as “monstrous” by Peter Schaar, the official responsible for enforcing Germany’s strict privacy rules. When the German bureaucracy starts talking about monstrous American behavior, take note.

What was scripted as a celebration of U.S.-German bonds on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech has turned into a charged presidential visit underlining how two nations that once had the same views about a shared enemy — the Soviet Union — now think differently about global threats and how to balance security and freedom in confronting them.

It would not be a surprise if Obama faced a banner or two at the Brandenburg Gate equating the United States with the Stasi; or, in an allusion to the chilling movie about the former East German spy service, one with this rebuke: “America, Respect the Lives of Others.”

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Obama Defends Authorization of Surveillance Programs

By PETER BAKER, NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama defended his authorization of recently revealed domestic and international surveillance programs in comments broadcast Monday night but rejected the suggestion that his policies were basically a warmed-over version of those of the last White House.

“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney,’ ” Mr. Obama told Charlie Rose on his PBS interview show. “Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yeah, you know, he took it all lock, stock and barrel.’ My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

In perhaps his most expansive explanation of his surveillance policies since leaked documents exposed a pair of secret programs, Mr. Obama said he had made important changes from the policies of George W. Bush, including making sure that surveillance was approved by Congress and a secret foreign intelligence court. “But I think it’s fair to say that there are going to be folks on the left – and what amuses me is now folks on the right who are fine when there’s a Republican president, but now, Obama’s coming in with the black helicopters,” he said.

Yet like Mr. Cheney, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend, Mr. Obama defended the effectiveness of surveillance programs in heading off threats to the United States. “The one thing people should understand about all these programs, though, is they have disrupted plots, not just here in the United States but overseas as well,” he said. He added that while other factors were at work, “we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs.”

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Outsourcing espionage

Put the Spies Back Under One Roof

By TIM SHORROCK, NYT

WASHINGTON — THE revelation that Edward J. Snowden, a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton, was responsible for the biggest leak in the history of the National Security Agency has sparked a furious response in Congress.

“I’m very concerned that we have government contractors doing what are essentially governmental jobs,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week. “Maybe we should bring some of that more in-house,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, mused.

It’s a little late for that. Seventy percent of America’s intelligence budget now flows to private contractors. Going by this year’s estimated budget of about $80 billion, that makes private intelligence a $56 billion-a-year industry.

For decades, the N.S.A. relied on its own computer scientists, cryptographers and mathematicians to tap, decode and analyze communications as they traversed phone lines and satellite networks. By the 1990s, however, advances in personal computing, the growth of the Internet, the advent of cellphones and the shift in telecommunications to high-speed fiber-optic lines has made it difficult for the N.S.A. to keep up.

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G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base

By JEREMY W. PETERS, NYT

WASHINGTON — After Republicans lost the presidential election and seats in both the House and the Senate last year, many in the party offered a stern admonishment: If we want to broaden our appeal, steer clear of divisive social and cultural issues.

Yet after the high-profile murder trial of an abortion doctor in Philadelphia this spring, many Republicans in Washington and in state capitals across the country seem eager to reopen the emotional fight over a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. Their efforts will move to the forefront on Tuesday when House Republicans plan to bring to the floor a measure that would prohibit the procedure after 22 weeks of pregnancy — the most restrictive abortion bill to come to a vote in either chamber in a decade.

The bill stands no chance of becoming law, with Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House. Republican leaders acknowledge that its purpose is to satisfy vocal elements of their base who have renewed a push for greater restrictions on reproductive rights, even if those issues harmed the party’s reputation with women in 2012.

But beyond Washington, advocates on both sides of the issue say the chance to limit abortion in the near future is very real. Republican-dominated state legislatures in South Carolina and Wisconsin are weighing bans similar to the one the House will vote on, which would impose the 22-week limit based on the scientifically disputed theory that fetuses at that stage of development can feel pain.

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FBI Secrets: Feds Reportedly Used Secret Evidence Obtained Under Secret Surveillance Law To Prosecute Accused Terrorists

Reuters | By John Shiffman, Kristina Cooke and Mark Hosenball Posted: 06/18/2013 12:14 am EDT | Updated: 06/18/2013 5:32 am EDT

WASHINGTON, June 18 (Reuters) - The FBI has used secret evidence obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to prosecute at least 27 accused terrorists since 2007, according to a Reuters review of public records.

While the recent spotlight has been on the use of the FISA law by the U.S. National Security Agency for surveillance programs following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the FBI also makes extensive use of the law for domestic counterterrorism.

The Reuters review highlights the extent to which the FBI has come to rely on FISA to investigate or thwart domestic attacks. It involved searching the national court docket using the database of Westlaw, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, and includes only cases where prosecutors are required to file a notice under FISA. Other cases where FISA was used may be sealed.

The 27 cases in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has used FISA evidence include both well-publicized and less-known investigations. They range from mass murder charges against Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan for the shootings of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, to the arrest in April of an 18-year-old in Chicago accused of planning to join an al Qaeda-linked group fighting in Syria. Both men await trial.

(More here.)

'Fixing' Obamacare to suit the clergy

The need to feed The Crazy will cost the GOP

By Jonathan Bernstein, WashPost, Updated: June 17, 2013

Could the Republican need to obsessively oppose Obamacare, even if the alternative is something that they themselves would regard as improving it, run smack into the priorities of their allies — and leave clergy, of all groups, paying the price?

That’s the potential outcome of a good reported story by Ann Kim and Ed Kilgore today. The story is that the details of the Affordable Care Act are causing trouble for clergy and other church employees:

Without the requested “fix,” as many as one million clergy members and church employees now enrolled in church-sponsored health plans could soon face the choice of leaving these plans (designed to meet their unique needs, such as the frequent reassignment of clergy across state lines) or losing access to the tax subsidies provided by the ACA to help lower-to-middle income Americans purchase insurance.

It’s entirely normal for legislative “fixes” to be needed once a new law gets implemented. Bill authors want to get everything right, but they also want to move legislation through Congress as quickly as they can, and sometimes no one sees that an obscure provision will prove problematic — or that a major provision needs exceptions that were not obvious at the time.

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Money laundering, American politics style

Dark Money Politics

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

In the world of nonprofit “dark money” groups, nothing is as it seems: political committees, through the magic of the internal revenue code, become tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations; a partisan campaign ad becomes principled “issue advocacy”; and federal election law that requires public disclosure of donors is rendered toothless by regulatory loopholes.

The flow of cash through organizations asserting tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code has been rising exponentially, from just $5.2 million in 2006 to $310.8 million in 2012.

There is one reason for this growth: 501(c)(4) groups do not have to reveal their donors.

Two pie charts — Figure 1 and Figure 2 — drawn up by the Center for Responsive Politics demonstrate the crucial role of conservative non-profits in driving this increase in spending.

The Center, which has dug deeply into this submerged area of American politics, has gathered a lot of the relevant data about the influence of money on American politics at OpenSecrets.org. It makes for instructive reading.

(More here.)

Firebrand for Science, and Big Man on Campus

By JOHN SCHWARTZ, NYT

AMES, Iowa — As the car pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks, William Sanford Nye unknotted his trademark bow tie and slipped it off.

“This might buy us a couple of minutes,” he said.

Roughly two minutes later, before his drink was ready, he was recognized anyway. Two awed young women approached to ask if he was really Bill Nye the Science Guy. Like more than a dozen other college students who would approach him over the next several hours, they asked if they could take a picture with him. He smiled, took a proffered iPhone, scooched the students in and, in a practiced gesture, stretched out his arm to take a shot of the three of them that you just knew was totally going on Facebook.

Mr. Nye had come to talk to them, and a few thousand of their friends, at Iowa State University. If he were a politician, college students would be his base. Instead, he is something more: a figure from their early days in front of the family TV, a beloved teacher and, more and more these days, a warrior for science. They, in turn, are his fans, his students and his army.

They have gone from watching him explain magnetism and electricity to defending the scientific evidence for climate change, the age of the earth and other issues they have seen polemicized for religious, political and even economic reasons.

(More here.)

Fracking litigation: Buying victims' silence

Drillers Silence Fracking Claims With Sealed Settlements

By Jim Efstathiou Jr. and Mark Drajem - Jun 6, 2013, Bloomberg

Chris and Stephanie Hallowich were sure drilling for natural gas near their Pennsylvania home was to blame for the headaches, burning eyes and sore throats they suffered after the work began.

The companies insisted hydraulic fracturing -- the technique they used to free underground gas -- wasn’t the cause. Nevertheless, in 2011, a year after the family sued, Range Resources Corp (RRC). and two other companies agreed to a $750,000 settlement. In order to collect, the Hallowiches promised not to tell anyone, according to court filings.

The Hallowiches aren’t alone. In cases from Wyoming to Arkansas, Pennsylvania to Texas, drillers have agreed to cash settlements or property buyouts with people who say hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, ruined their water, according to a review by Bloomberg News of hundreds of regulatory and legal filings. In most cases homeowners must agree to keep quiet.

The strategy keeps data from regulators, policymakers, the news media and health researchers, and makes it difficult to challenge the industry’s claim that fracking has never tainted anyone’s water.

(More here.)

Abrupt climate change not a rare event

Stalagmites, a Supervolcano, & 100K Years of Climate Data

Posted by Ross Pomeroy at Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:21:36

RealClearScience.com

Kim Cobb doesn't particularly enjoy spelunking. It's damp, dirty, often uncomfortable, and there's guano, lots of guano. Despite that fact, the Georgia Tech paleoclimatologist recently found herself studying stalagmites in the caves of northern Borneo.

Luckily, these caves weren't as dingy as others she's visited, and to top off the not-so-dreary experience, her team's work ended up being a complete success! By analyzing isotopes of oxygen stored in stalagmites, Cobb and her colleagues pieced together 100,000 years worth of past climate data from the Tropical Pacific. Their work has just been published in Science Express.

For the researchers, unraveling past climate secrets begins with rainfall. In Gunung Mulu and Gunung Buda National Parks in Borneo, raindrops seep down through cracks in the ground and eventually wind up dripping from cave roofs. Each splatter deposits a fractional amount of calcium carbonate on the subterranean floors, and in places where water drips repeatedly over many thousands of years, stalagmites slowly sprout, growing at a sloth-like pace of about one centimeter per millennium.

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Gravest threat to civil liberties not the N.S.A. but another 9/11

Living With the Surveillance State

By BILL KELLER, NYT

MY colleague Thomas Friedman’s levelheaded take on the National Security Agency eavesdropping uproar needs no boost from me. His column soared to the top of the “most e-mailed” list and gathered a huge and mostly thoughtful galaxy of reader comments. Judging from the latest opinion polling, it also reflected the prevailing mood of the electorate. It reflected mine. But this is a discussion worth prolonging, with vigilant attention to real dangers answering overblown rhetoric about theoretical ones.

Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the N.S.A. but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack. Reluctantly, he concludes that a well-regulated program to use technology in defense of liberty — even if it gives us the creeps — is a price we pay to avoid a much higher price, the shutdown of the world’s most open society. Hold onto that qualifier: “well regulated.”

The N.S.A. data-mining is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards. We have a vague feeling of uneasiness about these transactions, but it rarely translates into serious thinking about where we set the limits.

(More here.)

Parent of young cancer victim: 'I can’t wait for Obamacare'

Million-Anecdote Baby

By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT

A friend of mine has an adult child with cancer, a young man just old enough to be beyond the age of coverage under his parents’ health care plan. After nearly killing him, the dreaded Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission. But he’s still a pariah in the eyes of the insurance industry, which means they can deny him a policy that might save his life.

Not for long. In six months’ time, the heartless practice of refusing to let sick people buy affordable health insurance — private-sector death panels, the most odious kind of American exceptionalism — will be illegal from shore to shore.

“I can’t wait for Obamacare,” my friend gushed the other day. And she’s not alone. About one in 10 people with cancer in this country have been denied health coverage.

The cartoon version of the Affordable Care Act, that much-loathed government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, is now moving from Beltway gasbags and caricaturists into the hands of consumers. Its fate will be determined by the countless anecdotes of people who will apply the law to their lives.

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Tom Friedman: Government surveillance now is necessary to avoid harsher measures later

Blowing a Whistle

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT

I’m glad I live in a country with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to the debate about the disclosure of two government programs designed to track suspected phone and e-mail contacts of terrorists, I do wonder if some of those who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened — that the only thing we have to fear is government intrusion in our lives, not the intrusion of those who gather in secret cells in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan and plot how to topple our tallest buildings or bring down U.S. airliners with bombs planted inside underwear, tennis shoes or computer printers.

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.

(More here.)

IMF to US: Spending cuts 'unwise and unnecessary'

Fight the Future

By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT

Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role is that of stern disciplinarian to spendthrift governments, gave the United States some unusual advice. “Lighten up,” urged the fund. “Enjoy life! Seize the day!”

O.K., fund officials didn’t use quite those words, but they came close, with an article in IMF Survey magazine titled “Ease Off Spending Cuts to Boost U.S. Recovery.” In its more formal statement, the fund argued that the sequester and other forms of fiscal contraction will cut this year’s U.S. growth rate by almost half, undermining what might otherwise have been a fairly vigorous recovery. And these spending cuts are both unwise and unnecessary.

Unfortunately, the fund apparently couldn’t bring itself to break completely with the austerity talk that is regarded as a badge of seriousness in the policy world. Even while urging us to run bigger deficits for the time being, Christine Lagarde, the fund’s head, called on us to “hurry up with putting in place a medium-term road map to restore long-run fiscal sustainability.”

So here’s my question: Why, exactly, do we need to hurry up? Is it urgent that we agree now on how we’ll deal with fiscal issues of the 2020s, the 2030s and beyond?

(More here.)

New Leak Indicates U.S. and Britain Eavesdropped at ’09 World Conferences

By SCOTT SHANE and RAVI SOMAIYA, NYT

A new set of classified documents disclosed Sunday suggested that Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has provided a trove of documents to The Guardian newspaper, had obtained a wider range of materials about government surveillance than had been known, including one document revealing how American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009.

The latest disclosures, appearing again in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations was to open in Northern Ireland, where some of the leaders who were intelligence targets four years ago will be in attendance.

The newspaper reported Sunday night that Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q., the British eavesdropping agency that works closely with the N.S.A., monitored the e-mail and phones of other countries’ representatives at two London conferences, in part by setting up a monitored Internet cafe for the participants. In addition, the United States intercepted the communications of Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president and now the prime minister, the newspaper said.

The Guardian posted some G.C.H.Q. documents on its Web site with part of the contents blacked out. A spokesman for The Guardian said Sunday that the paper decided to redact the documents, and that enough was published “to show the authenticity of the report.”

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Who's avoiding taxes by sending money offshore? Find out here …

Offshore Tax Havens Database Is Made Available to the Public

The Huffington Post | By Alexander Eichler Posted: 06/15/2013 12:09 pm EDT

Are you interested in helping to track corporate cash as it travels around the globe?

On Friday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists made public a massive database, containing the names of tens of thousands of people and companies that have used offshore accounts to shelter their assets.

Drawing on a cache of 2.5 million leaked documents, the ICIJ has identified people and organizations in more than 30 countries using "tax havens" -- nations that impose few or no taxes on foreign assets held there. Offshore accounts are often used as a way of sidestepping tax laws in the investor's home country.

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Happy Father's Day!

Thanks to Zits

Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure

By STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO 06/15/13 02:53 PM ET EDT

WASHINGTON — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" – not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

(More here.)

The Grand Old Party is stuck on stupid

Following two presidential election defeats in 2008 and 2012, the Republican party is still making the same mistakes

Crystal Wright
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 15 June 2013 07.30 EDT

Stupid is as stupid does and, apparently, the Republican party didn't get Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's "stupid memo" because it looks dumber by the day. After losing the 2012 presidential election the "GOP establishment" from former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and every white man in between acknowledged that the party must make "the tent" more welcoming to minorities and women – where the votes increasingly are. So what does the GOP do? It keeps headlining white men behaving badly.

Americans were treated to a double feature of GOP stupidity this week brought to you by the senator from Arizona on 12 June. Republican Senator Jeff Flake had to apologize for his 15-year-old son's unsavory remarks on Twitter. According to Buzzfeed, Tanner Flake tweeted he would find "the faggot" who stole his bike and "beat the crap out of you." Tanner also posted screenshots of his scores from an online game "Fun Run" where he used the handle "n1ggerkiller".

If this isn't enough to make anyone's eyes roll in disgust, Buzzfeed reported that Tanner's Twitter account, which is now locked, revealed his repeated use of the racial slurs in January and February. Tanner made equally offensive comments on YouTube, including "nigger" and "faggot" along with calling Mexicans "scum of the Earth". Strong words for a 15-year-old, who also gleefully reminded everyone his father was a member of Congress, according Buzzfeed.

Issuing an apology, Senator Flake wrote:

"I'm very disappointed in my teenage son's words, and I sincerely apologize for the insensitivity. This language is unacceptable anywhere. Needless to say, I've already spoken with him about this, he has apologized, and I apologize as well."

(More here.)

Now say the words: 'economic cycle'

Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic Over Economy

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ, NYT

For more than a decade, the economy has failed to grow the way it once did. Unemployment has not stayed this high, this long, since the 1930s.

But could the New Normal, as this long economic slog has been called, be growing old?

That is the surprising new view of a number of economists in academia and on Wall Street, who are now predicting something the United States has not experienced in years: healthier, more lasting growth.

The improving outlook is one reason the stock market has risen so sharply this year, even if street-level evidence for a turnaround, like strong job growth and income gains, has been scant so far.

A prominent convert to this emerging belief is Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University near Washington and author of “The Great Stagnation,” a 2011 best seller, who has gone from doomsayer to a decidedly more optimistic perspective.

(More here.)

Goal of Broader Protection for Chimpanzees Emerges From Changing Perspectives

By JAMES GORMAN, NYT

More than 50 years ago, Jane Goodall, then a young researcher at what would become the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, began introducing the public to the “fantastic beings” she had studied and lived with. In her book “In the Shadow of Man” and in later works, she showed the world complex animals with intricate social lives and helped change the way the world looked at the great apes.

On Tuesday, Dr. Goodall, 79, now a longtime champion of chimpanzee conservation, participated in what may turn out to be another milestone. She joined the director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Daniel M. Ashe, in announcing a proposal to add chimpanzees in captivity to the endangered species list.

Wild chimpanzees have been listed as endangered since 1990, but the new proposal, which is open to public comment for 60 days, covers all chimps, including nearly 2,000 captive in the United States. The listing, if adopted, could block most experimentation on them, stop interstate trade in the animals and perhaps discourage use of chimpanzees in entertainment.

The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal came in response to a petition filed in 2010 by the Jane Goodall Institute, the Humane Society of the United States, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and other groups. It would require permits for interstate commerce involving any chimpanzees, or for what the law calls “taking,” which could be anything from harassment to major harm to something as simple as obtaining a blood sample. And those permits, Mr. Ashe said, would be granted only if the action could be shown to benefit the survival of the species.

(More here.)

U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata

By Barton Gellman, WashPost, Published: June 15

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.

What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama’s expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life?

Authoritative new answers to those questions, drawing upon a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials, offer the clearest map yet of the Bush-era programs and the NSA’s contemporary U.S. operations.

(More here.)

Come spy with me; come spy, come spy, come spy

Phones Leave a Telltale Trail 

By EVAN PEREZ and SIOBHAN GORMAN, WSJ

The April robbery at the Cartier store in Chevy Chase, Md., was brazen and quick. After grabbing 13 watches valued at $131,000, the suspects fled in a waiting car and melted into traffic. It was one of more than a dozen similar capers that had stumped police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But, in recent weeks, the FBI was able to arrest two men. Cellphone records from Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA and Sprint Nextel Corp. placed the suspects near the Cartier store at the time of the robbery, as well as near other heists, the FBI alleged in court filings. The T-Mobile records also allegedly showed the phone moving along the same path traveled by the suspects as police chased them.

This kind of information is at the center of the debate unleashed after a contractor leaked the details of the National Security Agency's phone-data collection program. The NSA program wasn't used in the ongoing robbery investigation, but the concept is the same. The so-called metadata represents one element of the voluminous digital trail left by most Americans in their daily lives. Each individual crumb might seem insignificant, but combined and analyzed, this data gives police and spies alike one of the most powerful investigative tools ever devised.

The data doesn't include the speech in a phone call or words in an email, but includes almost everything else, including the model of the phone and the "to" and "from" lines in emails. By tracing metadata, investigators can pinpoint a suspect's location to specific floors of buildings. They can electronically map a person's contacts, and their contacts' contacts.

(More here.)

Google to use balloons to provide free Internet access to remote or poor areas

By Cecilia Kang, WashPost, Published: June 14

Google has a truly sky-high idea for connecting billions of people to the Internet — 12 miles in the air to be exact — through giant helium balloons circling the globe that are equipped to beam WiFi signals below.

Google will announce Saturday it has 30 balloons floating over New Zealand to provide free Internet access to disaster-stricken, rural or poor areas. Eventually, as the balloons move across the stratosphere, consumers in participating countries along the 40th parallel in the Southern Hemisphere could tap into the service.

Called Project Loon, the experimental program was hatched by engineers at the company’s top-secret Google X laboratory in California’s Silicon Valley that invented driverless cars and eyeglasses equipped with voice-activated computers. Some of those technologies won’t immediately — or ever — make money for the firm. Google said it pursues these “moon shot” ideas with the aim of solving big problems and creating breakthrough technologies that ultimately will bring more users to its services.

These projects also help Google extend its sprawling reach into the lives of global Internet users, amid an intensifying debate over Internet privacy. Already, the company has the leading Web search, e-mail service and Internet video site, while its Android mobile software has become the most popular in the world.

(More here.)

Confidence in Congress drops to historic low

By Ed O'Keefe, WashPost, Updated: June 13, 2013

Lawmakers looking to become more popular with Americans should consider working at a bank. Or for a newspaper.

Americans’ confidence in the House and Senate has dropped so low that it now ranks as the least popular societal institution in U.S. history, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.

Public confidence in Congress is at just 10 percent, its lowest mark in the history of Gallup surveys, and more than half of Americans — 52 percent — say they have little or no confidence in lawmakers.

Making matters far worse, Congress ranks last on a list of 16 such institutions for the fourth consecutive year, lower than HMOs (19 percent), organized labor (20 percent), banks (26 percent) — even newspapers (23 percent) (Side note: Why, America, do you consistently hate newspapers? Hmm??).

(More here.)