Saturday, June 28, 2014
Friday, June 27, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Just how unsafe is the seafood we eat? Click the link below to find out.
http://msnvideo.msn.com/?videoid=88589a01-a0a4-4738-92fd-4be159ef7716&from=sharepermalink-link
http://msnvideo.msn.com/?videoid=88589a01-a0a4-4738-92fd-4be159ef7716&from=sharepermalink-link
Friday, June 20, 2014
Congress probes how IRS emails could go missing
![Lois Lerner: This March 5, 2014 file photo shows former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner speaking on Capitol Hill in Washington.]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/a7/b11385fddec633867652f4b3f9eb/_h353_w628_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
AP Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke, File![AP]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/df/78612cb8c1874cac1d6e56a70dd11/_h17_w0_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"}){kind=small}
By EILEEN SULLIVAN and JACK GILLUM of Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight federal employees connected to the tea party investigation experienced hard drive crashes, resulting in an unknown number of lost emails, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen told lawmakers Friday in an unusually tense congressional hearing.
A week ago acknowledged it could not produce some of the emails of the IRS executive at the center of the probe because her computer crashed in 2011. Koskinen acknowledged to lawmakers that the hard drive was recycled and presumably destroyed.
"I want that hard drive and I want the hard drive of every computer that crashed," said the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. , R-Mich.
Koskinen said the IRS took extra measures to try to retrieve the lost emails. But he was unapologetic about the computer crashes or the period when the IRS advised Congress that emails it had sought were lost.
"I don't think an apology is owed," Koskinen said.
Koskinen says it's not clear whether all eight of the hard drive crashes resulted in lost emails.
Koskinen also said appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate the IRS handling of tax-exempt applications would be a "monumental waste of taxpayer funds."
The congressional investigation has been highly politicized because of allegations that the IRS improperly singled out tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Friday's hearing was unusually tense, as Camp and other Republicans occasionally interrupted Koskinen and continued to ask other questions before Koskinen had an opportunity to answer.
The senior on the committee, Rep. of Mich., chided his colleagues that, "Witnesses deserve some respect."
An investigation is ongoing.
The former IRS official at the center of the investigation, Lois Lerner, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right at least nine times to avoid answering lawmakers' questions. Lerner did not learn that IRS staffers were improperly reviewing applications of tea party and other conservative groups for tax-exempt status until weeks after her computer crashed, according to an earlier audit by the inspector general for tax administration.
Lerner's computer crashed sometime around June 13, 2011, according to emails provided to Congress. She first learned about the tea party reviews on June 29, according to the inspector general.
Koskinen told Congress that Lerner's hard drive was unavailable to them because it had been recycled.
The IRS said last week it became aware of the missing emails in February of this year. The IRS did not know whether the other computer crashes have resulted in lost emails as well. It will also not say how often its computers fail and lose data.
The lost emails are raising questions even by the government's records officer. In a June 17 letter to the IRS, Paul Wester Jr. asked the agency to investigate the loss of records and whether any disposal of data was authorized. Wester, the chief records officer at the National Archives and Records Administration, was responding to the IRS' June 13 disclosure of Lerner's lost emails.
Wester's letter did not address the lost records of six other employees that the IRS disclosed that day. Wester said the IRS is required to report its finding within 30 days. Federal agencies are supposed to report destruction of records — whether accidental or intentional — to the National Archives "promptly" after an incident.
The IRS said that after Lerner's computer crashed in June 2011, technicians were not able to retrieve data from her hard drive.
In May, more than two months after the IRS discovered the emails were missing, the IRS assured Camp that it would provide all applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, including all files, correspondence and internal IRS records related to them. Camp had asked for the records in May 2012.
It's similarly unclear why the IRS didn't attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, "There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable."
Shawn Henry, the FBI's former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.
"If they knew there was a problem in 2011," said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, "they could have or should have been able to recover it."
The IRS told Congress last week that recovering emails has been a challenge because doing so is "a more complex process for the IRS than it is for many private or public organizations."
The IRS was able to find copies of 24,000 Lerner emails from between 2009 and 2011 because Lerner had sent copies to other IRS employees. Overall, the IRS said it was producing 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering 2009 to 2013. The agency said it searched for emails of 83 people and spent nearly $10 million to produce hundreds of thousands of documents.
At the time that Lerner's computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees' email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today.
The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.
"To have a large agency like the IRS have a very weak policy for email archiving and retention is quite shocking," Villeneuve said. "If this were a private enterprise and they couldn't produce this information on demand, they'd be in trouble. They'd either be fined or accused of hiding information."
The IRS has said technicians sent Lerner's hard drive to a forensic lab run by the agency's criminal investigations unit. But the information was not recoverable, a technician told her in an Aug. 5, 2011, email.
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014
We're Last! Again! U.S. Health Care Ranks Poorly
By Maggie Fox
The latest look at the U.S. health care system compared to other rich countries shows — yet again — that the United States comes in dead last.
Americans spend far more per person on medical care, yet are less healthy than people in 10 other countries. The system is less fair than systems in other rich countries and it’s far less efficient, ranking last of 11 nations, the Commonwealth Fund report reads.
The nonprofit Commonwealth Fund has been publishing its report — based on data from the World Health Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and its own research — for a decade.
“Among the 11 nations studied in this report — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States — the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2004 editions,” the report reads.
“Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last or near last on dimensions of access, efficiency, and equity."
The embarrassing reports have been an impetus for health reform in the U.S. including the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Before the issue became a divisive political debate, both Republicans and Democrats agreed strongly on the need for health reform.
Some politicians have held up other countries’ health systems as examples of what they don’t want for the U.S., but the report finds countries with nationalized medical systems outperform the U.S. on all the measures.
“On indicators of efficiency, the U.S. ranks last among the 11 countries, with the U.K. and Sweden ranking first and second, respectively,” the report reads.
Americans aren’t living any longer, either. “The U.S. and U.K. had much higher death rates in 2007 from conditions amenable to medical care than some of the other countries, e.g., rates 25 percent to 50 percent higher than Australia and Sweden. Overall, France, Sweden, and Switzerland rank highest on healthy lives,” the report reads.
“The U.S. ranks a clear last on measures of equity. Americans with below-average incomes were much more likely than their counterparts in other countries to report not visiting a physician when sick; not getting a recommended test, treatment, or follow-up care; or not filling a prescription or skipping doses when needed because of costs.”
The Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, seeks to fix this by making private health insurance and Medicaid far more widely available.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
ISIS Becomes Richest Terror Group in the World
Click on the link below to watch the video.
http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nightly-news/isis-becomes-richest-terror-group-in-the-world-280624707806
Friday, June 13, 2014
Obama: We Will 'Do Our Part' in Iraq, But Won't Send Troops
VIET NAM REPEATING ITSELF. WHEN WILL WE LEARN?
Click on Link below to read the full story.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/obama-we-will-do-our-part-iraq-wont-send-troops-n130536
U.S. contractors in Iraq relocated due to security concerns
![Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, June 11, 2014.]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/9d/3aacd0d07bcbc2c120b1875df612f7/_h353_w628_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
REUTERS: Stringer![Reuters]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/4a/e07b8dadb83df2faa22fa8d5ea4068/_h17_w0_m6_otrue_lfalse.gif"})
By Reuters
"We can confirm that U.S. citizens, under contract to the Government of , in support of the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program in Iraq, are being temporarily relocated by their companies due to security concerns in the area," spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
She declined to say how many contractors were being relocated and their location, but said the U.S. Embassy and consulates were still operating normally.
"The U.S. Embassy and consulates in Iraq remain open and continue to operate on a normal status," Psaki said.
Lockheed spokesman Michael Rein said about 25 Lockheed employees were being evacuated from the Balad area in northern Iraq as part of a larger effort to ensure their safety given growing violence in the region.He said the employees were in Iraq working with the Iraqi air force as it prepared for the arrival of the first of 36 fighter jets, which are to be ferried to Iraq later this year.
Rein said it was too soon to say if shipments of the F-16 warplanes would be delayed as a result of the violence.Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily was at Lockheed's Fort Worth, Texas, plant last week to accept delivery of the first of the F-16s that will form the centerpiece of the country's first air force since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Faily told that Iraq was completing work on the air base in Balad where the new jets will be housed. He said some Iraqi pilots had already been trained to fly the new planes, and more were in training now.
Insurgents from an splinter group, the (ISIL) which operates in Iraq and neighboring Syria, overran the city of on Wednesday after capturing the country's second city, Mosul, and were moving towards Baghdad.
(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Sandra Maler and Eric Walsh)
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Check out the link below. Is this another Viet Nam?
Who are the militants plundering Iraq?
ISIS Militants Rampage Across Iraq: What You Need to Know
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/isis-militants-rampage-across-iraq-what-you-need-know-n129436
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Scientist Makes Mutant, Infectious Flu Virus in Lab
By Maggie Fox
Flu experts have made a mutant version of the 1918 “Spanish flu” virus that killed tens of millions of people, sparking a new debate over whether such work is too dangerous.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin says the experiments are important for helping scientists understand how new pandemics start, and for designing better flu vaccines.
"Because avian influenza viruses in nature require only a few changes to adapt to humans and cause a pandemic, it is important to understand the mechanisms involved in adaptation and identify the key mutations so we can be better prepared," Kawaoka said in a statement.
PHILIPPE LOPEZ / AFP - Getty Images
The moratorium was lifted in 2012 and researchers started their work again last year.
“The risk exists in nature already, and not doing the research is really putting us in danger,” Kawaoka said at the time.
“The worst-case scenario is the emergence of a novel avian influenza virus that exhibits high pathogenicity in human, like highly pathogenic avian H5N1 viruses, and efficient transmissibility in humans, like seasonal influenza viruses,” Kawaoka’s team wrote in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.
H1N1 has shown up again — it caused the so-called swine flu pandemic in 2009. It wasn’t nearly as deadly as other new flu viruses that cause pandemics, probably because it was a mutated form that included bits and pieces of flu viruses that had been infecting people for decades.
But other circulating influenza viruses worry experts.
H5N1 has infected 665 people in 15 countries, killing 392 of them, since 2003.
The H7N9 virus appeared a year ago in China, infecting more than 440 people and killing more than 122 of them.
Flu viruses are very prone to mutation and experts say any of the various bird flus could evolve into a strain that infects people easily, causing a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
To understand what this might look like, Kawaoka’s team first searched a giant database of known bird flu viruses, taken mostly from ducks, to find those whose genetic elements most closely matched those seen in the 1918 flu.
They found plenty. “Our study demonstrates the continued circulation of avian influenza viruses that possess 1918 virus-like proteins and may acquire 1918 virus-like properties,” they wrote.
They made a few genetic tweaks to create a version that easily passed in small, airborne droplets to infect ferrets in different cages. Ferrets are the animals that are most like humans when it comes to catching flu.
Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health called for limits on such experiments last month.
“Potential pandemic pathogen experimentation poses a significant risk to public health, arguably the highest level of risk posed by any biomedical research,” they wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Monday, June 2, 2014
NSA scoops up images for facial recognition programs
![NSA spying]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/52/a446cd4a7c7cbbd99fa29cd48af94b/_h353_w628_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
AFP
The US National Security Agency is scooping up large quantities of images of people for use in facial recognition programs, the New York Times reported Sunday, citing top secret documents.
The Times said documents, which were obtained from fugitive former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, show a significant increase in reliance on facial recognition technology at the agency over the past four years.
The report said the NSA was using new software to exploit a flood of images included in intercepted emails, text messages, social media posts, video conferences and other communications.
It cited leaked 2011 documents as saying the NSA intercepts "millions of images per day," including 55,000 "facial recognition quality images."
The images represented "tremendous untapped potential," according to the report, which said NSA officials believe advances in technology could revolutionize the way the agency finds intelligence targets.
“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” a 2010 document quoted by the newspaper said.
The Times said it wasn't clear how many people, including how many Americans, had been caught up in the effort, but noted that neither US privacy laws nor US surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images.
A NSA spokeswoman said, however, that the agency would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans it collects through its surveillance programs.
The agency has been at the center of controversy over the scope of its global electronic surveillance program since they were first revealed by Snowden in June 2013.
The former intelligence contractor is in Russia, where he was granted temporary political asylum last year.
Next up at the ballot box: Undreaming California
![File photo of the California state flag flying above City Hall in Santa Monica]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/ab/69f5ecbb12e5d7c3b650bdd6c6fe6d/_h353_w628_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
Reuters
File photo of the California state flag flying above City Hall in Santa Monica
By Sarah McBride and Prudence Crowther of Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Creating the state of California took a revolt that led to the short-lived Bear Republic, a war with Mexico, and various international treaties. Now, some northern natives hope to take it apart, starting with a couple of ballot initiatives.
Tuesday, voters in Del Norte and Tehama Counties will consider a measure calling for separation from California and the formation of a new state. Supporters are hoping to generate momentum for pulling together portions of northern California and southern Oregon into an entity to be called Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson once imagined that part of western North America might develop into a freestanding republic.
Local vexations with state government were cited by Aaron Funk, an aptly named organizer of the movement: “lack of representation, lack of infrastructure, inability to use a lot of our resources.”
Heavy winter rains often wash out U.S. 101, a major artery in the region. That really rankles him. So do restrictions on timber harvesting. Most of all, Funk loathes the region's paltry representation in California's senate, with its population-based allocation. Just 28,000 people call Del Norte County home, compared to 38 million for the state overall.
Business owners are doubly confounded, he said, and face “mounds of paperwork, red tape.” Funk owns and lives in a recreational vehicle park in the coastal town of Klamath.
Opponents of the measure say it sounds an economic death knell for the area, given its poverty and high unemployment.
“We will continue to face the same challenges,” wrote Del Norte County officials in their formal argument against the measure. “Except we will no longer be subsidized by the State.”
Efforts to chop up California boast a long history. Disgruntled residents first proposed a state of Jefferson, also comprising counties in nearby southern Oregon, in the 1940s.
In 1993, after voters in 27 counties approved, the state Assembly agreed to a nonbinding statewide vote on whether to divide California into three. But the measure never made it into the state Senate, and the referendum was never held.
More recently, venture capitalist Tim Draper suggested splitting California into six separate states, while fellow venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan proposed that Silicon Valley secede from the country.
Good luck to any of these measures, say scholars of constitutional law, who point out that such separations require approval of the state legislature and the U.S. Congress.
“There is no incentive,” said Ethan Rarick, director of the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you’re one of 100 senators," he reasoned, "you don’t want to become one of 102.”
Supporters of the latest separation initiative say it has a better chance of passing in Tehama County than Del Norte County, where opposition has been well organized.
But advocates like Funk say they must try, at least to publicize their frustrations.
“It puts us at the table,” he said
Local vexations with state government were cited by Aaron Funk, an aptly named organizer of the movement: “lack of representation, lack of infrastructure, inability to use a lot of our resources.”
Heavy winter rains often wash out U.S. 101, a major artery in the region. That really rankles him. So do restrictions on timber harvesting. Most of all, Funk loathes the region's paltry representation in California's senate, with its population-based allocation. Just 28,000 people call Del Norte County home, compared to 38 million for the state overall.
Business owners are doubly confounded, he said, and face “mounds of paperwork, red tape.” Funk owns and lives in a recreational vehicle park in the coastal town of Klamath.
Opponents of the measure say it sounds an economic death knell for the area, given its poverty and high unemployment.
“We will continue to face the same challenges,” wrote Del Norte County officials in their formal argument against the measure. “Except we will no longer be subsidized by the State.”
Efforts to chop up California boast a long history. Disgruntled residents first proposed a state of Jefferson, also comprising counties in nearby southern Oregon, in the 1940s.
In 1993, after voters in 27 counties approved, the state Assembly agreed to a nonbinding statewide vote on whether to divide California into three. But the measure never made it into the state Senate, and the referendum was never held.
More recently, venture capitalist Tim Draper suggested splitting California into six separate states, while fellow venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan proposed that Silicon Valley secede from the country.
Good luck to any of these measures, say scholars of constitutional law, who point out that such separations require approval of the state legislature and the U.S. Congress.
“There is no incentive,” said Ethan Rarick, director of the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you’re one of 100 senators," he reasoned, "you don’t want to become one of 102.”
Supporters of the latest separation initiative say it has a better chance of passing in Tehama County than Del Norte County, where opposition has been well organized.
But advocates like Funk say they must try, at least to publicize their frustrations.
“It puts us at the table,” he said
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Breast Cancer Gene Also Causes Lung Cancer
Mutations in a gene best known for raising the risk of breast cancer can also double the risk of lung cancer in smokers, researchers reported Sunday.
Dave Martin / AP, file
One in four smokers with the mutation in BRCA2 will develop lung cancer, the researchers report in the journal Nature Genetics.
The finding adds another cancer type to the list of cancers that BRCA mutations can cause. They already greatly raise the risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.
Smoking tobacco causes a range of ills, from heart disease to stroke, emphysema and, of course, cancer. But any individual smoker has only about a 15 percent chance of developing lung cancer. The researchers wanted to see if there might be a genetic factor at work.
They were not looking for mutations in BRCA2, even though it is a well-known cancer-associated gene. They did what’s called a genome-wide association study, which looks at all the known genes. There’s a big international study going on and the researchers compared genetic data on more than 11,000 lung cancer patients and 15,000 people who did not have lung cancer.
They found 50 potential mutations of interest, and then honed in on some mutations in the BRCA2 gene. One mutation in particular, found in about 2 percent of people of European descent, really raised the risk.
“For a smoker carrying this variant (2 percent of the population), the risk of developing lung cancer is approximately doubled, which may have implications for identifying high-risk ever-smoking subjects for lung cancer screening,” the researchers wrote.
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It’s “the strongest genetic association in lung cancer reported so far,” they added.
Cancer screening for smokers is controversial, but experts say at the least high-risk smokers should be screened. It is not yet clear whether this finding raises the possibility of adding people with the genetic mutation to that group.
More important, say some experts, is that the discovery suggests that cancer drugs called PARP inhibitors might help lung cancer patients with this mutation. The drugs are increasingly being shown to help patients with other cancers showing BRCA mutations.
Cancer experts have been debating whether to screen for many cancers, but in the case of people with a strong family history, many agree that cancer screening is a good idea.
One company called Myriad Genetics once held patents on the most common tests for BRCA mutations, but the Supreme Court ruled they cannot patent tests based on human DNA in this way and other companies have jumped in, lowering the price and potentially making the tests more widely available.
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