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Who could have possibly foreseen this?
A year ago we wished TEPCO the best of luck with the construction of the "Game of Thrones"-esque 1.4km giant wall of ice that was designed to surround the exploded Fukushima power plant and slow the movement of irradiated water below the damaged reactors, preventing it from flowing over into the ocean and surrounding land. A plan so idiotic we were at a loss for words trying to list the ways it could go wrong (we didn't bother with how it could go right because it clearly couldn't).
And, as it turns out, making a project overly complicated and ridiculous doesn't assure it will be a success. Quite the contrary. As Japan JIJI reports, Tepco said the project, which remains in its early stages, is experiencing a problem with an inner ice wall designed to contain highly radioactive water that is draining from the basements of the wrecked reactors.
A Tepco spokesman added that "We have yet to form an ice plug because we can't get the temperature low enough to freeze the water."
A year ago we wished TEPCO the best of luck with the construction of the "Game of Thrones"-esque 1.4km giant wall of ice that was designed to surround the exploded Fukushima power plant and slow the movement of irradiated water below the damaged reactors, preventing it from flowing over into the ocean and surrounding land. A plan so idiotic we were at a loss for words trying to list the ways it could go wrong (we didn't bother with how it could go right because it clearly couldn't).
A Tepco spokesman added that "We have yet to form an ice plug because we can't get the temperature low enough to freeze the water."
© M. Scott BrauerLaura Schulz, a primary investigator in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT
Led by Laura Schulz, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, the researchers found that not only can children make this distinction, but they can also compensate for incomplete information by exploring more on their own.
Determining whom to trust is an important skill to learn at an early age because so much of our knowledge about the world comes from other people, says Hyowon Gweon, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper describing the findings in the journal Cognition.
© UnknownIt soooo sucks to be soooo wrong
(HuffPo)"From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn't.... Liberals, you were right. We shouldn't have."I really, really hate to give Beck credit but credit I doth give. Tony Blair can SYFPH, Bill Kristol can SYFPH, Paul Wolfowitz can SYFPH! We shouldn't be there and I am very glad our Democratic President of the USA has stated that we won't be sending US men and women into this Heart Of Darkness.
Beck made this surprising declaration on his radio show on Tuesday while discussing the widening rift between Republicans and Democrats. He urged both parties to come together to oppose another war in Iraq.
"Not one more life. Not one more life. Not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more," he said. "This must end now. Now can't we come together on that?"
I am hopeful that the White House's current stance, that the USA will not use ground forces in Iraq regardless and air support unless the current regime restructures into an inclusive Shia/Sunni/Kurd structure. Preferably with al-Maliki resigning. I do not expect any buy-in from Republicans but this is an indication libertarians and tea partiers may not be seduced by neocon dreams.
I can hope.
BTW, this is not snark. I couldn't figure out how to embed the video but the Huff Post link has it.
An Indian boy - Arshid Ali Khan, 13 - is worshipped in the state of Punjab because he has a 7in 'tail'.
- Arshid Ali Khan has been hailed a reincarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman
- Local people believe their wishes will come true if they visit him
- But, Arshid is considering surgery to remove the tail and help him walk
- He has not been formally diagnosed but could have a type of spina bifida
Arshid Ali Khan, 13, has become a divine symbol in the state of Punjab.
Locals have hailed him a reincarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman - and refer to him as Balaji.
However, Arshid has to use a wheelchair and he is considering having the 'tail' removed.
He said: 'This tail has been given to me by God. I am worshipped because I pray to god and the wishes of people come true.
We spoke with Brad McQueen, a 5th grade teacher from Arizona who after working on the development/review of rubrics and questions on the PARCC/Common Core test grew disgusted with what he was seeing and decided to speak out about it, ultimately self-publishing a book titled "The Cult of Common Core."
Our interview was conducted via email, with slight alterations for grammar and brevity.
For more content like this, be sure to give Blaze Books a follow on Facebook and Twitter.
A man was arrested as a result of the Los Angeles operation
Police officers from around the world serve on the Virtual Global Taskforce. Its chairman, Ian Quinn, tells the BBC there has been an "explosion" in cases handled by US authorities. The US alone has 61 Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) units, each made up of state, local police and federal agents.
BBC News joined a recent operation in Los Angeles. Twenty one officers were briefed at dawn in a parking lot in central LA. Lt Andrea Grossman, from the Los Angeles Police Department, told us they conducted such operations "three to five times per week". The amount of images of child sexual abuse on the internet, she says, is "beyond out of control, we're now just getting to the surface of it".
Their target was a man who had tried to send obscene images via his Gmail account. The team was led by an officer holding a pump-action shotgun, backed up by others with an assault rifle and hand guns. A suspect was detained. The man's computer was analysed in a mobile laboratory, housed in a large camper van parked outside the address.
© ultraculture.org
Lawsuit alleging that Nestlé, ADM and Cargill benefit from child slavery in their cocoa supply chain in back in court, throwing new light on decades-old concern that the chocolate industry is built on the backs of slave children
Swiss multinational Nestlé, the largest food company on the planet - and anybody who consumes their products - has a chocolate problem.
More specifically, they have a child slavery problem.
Since the late 1990s, allegations have continually surfaced that the company benefits from slave children in its supply chain, and that slave children are used in its cocoa production in West Africa.
The allegations - including reports from UNICEF and the US State Department - brought enough attention and heat, including coverage from the BBC, that Nestlé's CEO Bradley Alford signed an international agreement to end cocoa child labor in 2001, but by 2005 had not met the agreement's deadline for eliminating the worst child labor offenses from the company's supply chain.
In the same year, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a class-action lawsuit on the behalf of three children from Mali who claimed that between 1994 and 2000 they had been lured into Côte d'Ivoire by child traffickers promising them easy work for good pay, subsequently enslaved on a cocoa plantation and regularly beaten. The lawsuit was later amended to name three companies as complicit in the chocolate-production slave trade: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Nestlé itself.
© El Paso County Sheriff's Department
According to The Gazette, 46-year-old Black Forest resident Kenneth Lankford entered a plea of not guilty on Thursday to the first degree murder of his wife, 51-year-old Terry Lankford. Kenneth Lankford said that he was also not guilty of murdering 51-year-old Carol Fowler, and wounding her husband, 52-year-old Thomas Fowler.
The Colorado Springs Gazette reported last month that Kenneth Lankford had told deputies that he was forced to shoot and kill his wife because she had been injured when he accidentally shot her during an argument.
"He said he didn't mean to shoot his wife, and he didn't mean to hurt the man, but that the woman's death was definitely a murder," Sheriff's Sgt. Greg White explained at a preliminary hearing in May.
© Shutterstock
According to the complaint Kevin Pack filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against Northridge High School Principal Gerald Rasler, his contract was terminated after he complained about the evangelical culture. "I was retaliated against and dismissed for filing the religious harassment complaint against Principal Gerald Rasler and for being an atheist," he told The Goshen News.
"I refused to pray, be a Christian or go along with any of [Rasler's] evangelizing in the school, and they dismissed me over it."
The school disputed that claim in a press release in which it said that poor performance was the reason his contract was terminated. "Middlebury Community Schools expects its teachers to place it students' educational growth and needs as a first priority," the release stated. "Unfortunately, some teachers do not meet those expectations; Mr. Pack was one of those teachers."
Comment: The prevalence of internet child pornography is indeed disturbing. What's more disturbing is the prevalence of pedophilia, and worse, involving high-level politicians, businessmen, and judges. Are the members of these pedophile-hunting units unaware of the Franklin scandal? Dutroux?