40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions. Reducing food losses by just 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables.

President Obama on Wednesday delivered an angry condemnation of the Islamic militant group believed to be behind the beheading of an American journalist, labeling the group a cancer and calling on Muslims around the world to reject its brand of “hateful terrorism.”.

“No faith teaches people to massacre innocents,” Obama said. “No just god would stand for what they did.”

The president said he had spoken with the family of the journalist, James Foley, and expressed his support.

“Jim was taken in an act of violence that shocks the conscience of the entire world,” Obama said. “We are all heartbroken at their loss.”
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THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Today, the entire world is appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley by the terrorist group, ISIL.

Jim was a journalist, a son, a brother, and a friend. He reported from difficult and dangerous places, bearing witness to the lives of people a world away. He was taken hostage nearly two years ago in Syria, and he was courageously reporting at the time on the conflict there.

Jim was taken from us in an act of violence that shocks the conscience of the entire world. He was 40 years old -- one of five siblings, the son of a mom and dad who worked tirelessly for his release. Earlier today, I spoke to the Foleys and told them that we are all heartbroken at their loss, and join them in honoring Jim and all that he did.


Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers. Let’s be clear about ISIL. They have rampaged across cities and villages -- killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims -- both Sunni and Shia -- by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion. They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people.

So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.

And people like this ultimately fail. They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.

The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people. We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. When people harm Americans, anywhere, we do what’s necessary to see that justice is done. And we act against ISIL, standing alongside others.


The people of Iraq, who with our support are taking the fight to ISIL, must continue coming together to expel these terrorists from their communities. The people of Syria, whose story Jim Foley told, do not deserve to live under the shadow of a tyrant or terrorists. They have our support in their pursuit of a future rooted in dignity.

From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread. There has to be a clear rejection of these kind of nihilistic ideologies. One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.

Friends and allies around the world, we share a common security and a common set of values that are rooted in the opposite of what we saw yesterday. And we will continue to confront this hateful terrorism, and replace it with a sense of hope and civility. And that’s what Jim Foley stood for, a man who lived his work; who courageously told the stories of his fellow human beings; who was liked and loved by friends and family.

Today, the American people will all say a prayer for those who loved Jim. All of us feel the ache of his absence. All of us mourn his loss. We keep in our prayers those other Americans who are separated from their families. We will do everything that we can to protect our people and the timeless values that we stand for.

May God bless and keep Jim’s memory, and may God bless the United States of America.

More than just "hardball politicking," this was abuse of power from a governor who tried to shut down the public integrity unit that is charged with investigating government corruption and fraud —[font size="3"] an agency that was looking into whether Texas' cancer research institute funneled more than $40 million in taxpayer funds to Abbott and Perry donors, without proper oversight[/font].

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[font size="3"]Perry will continue to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt. But there wasn't a single Democrat involved in the investigation and indictment.[/font]

A Republican judge, appointed by Rick Perry, appointed another Republican judge to handle Perry's corruption case.San Antonio attorney Michael McCrum was named as special prosecutor. McCrum was a U.S. prosecutor under George H.W. Bush and was submitted for U.S. attorney by Sen. John Cornyn. And Perry was indicted by a randomly selected grand jury of his Texas peers.

Indicting a governor doesn't happen every day. The last time a governor was indicted in Texas was almost 100 years ago. And while Perry even continues his behavior as a bully by threatening that "those responsible will be held accountable," that doesn't change the fact that a jury of his peers found enough evidence to bring the governor to trial.
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“MonsterMind.”

They could just as easily have called it Skynet, the computer network of Terminator franchise fame that eventually led to the destruction of the modern world.

Though not as advanced just yet, MonsterMind is a new autonomous cyber weapons system developed by the National Security Agency and according to Edward Snowden is capable of not only intercepting every single digital communication within the United States, but it can automatically detect and launch retaliatory strikes without any human involvement if a threat has been identified.


[div class="excerpt" style="background:#ffddee;"]During the interview Snowden explained a previously unrevealed NSA cyber weapon called “MonsterMind,” which has the capability to detect incoming cyber attacks and retaliate automatically without any human supervision. Such a program has dangerous global reactionary implications, according to Snowden, who said such cyber-attacks are often routed through computers inside innocent and unsuspecting third-party countries.

“These attacks can be spoofed,” Snowden said. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

Beyond the possibility of mutually assured cyber-destruction, Snowden explained that for the weapon to work, the signals intelligence agency would have to compromise the privacy of “virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the U.S.”

“The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” Snowden said. ”And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

Hamas is not permitting Palestinians to be treated at an Israeli military field hospital and its blood bank politely declined Israeli blood donation offers.

... An Israeli women's organization that is donating large amounts of items for new mothers and their babies did not want its name mentioned for fear Hamas officials who govern Gaza will reject the contributions if they know they were donated almost entirely by Jewish Israelis. So they are being delivered by a third party.
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SOLAR cells that work at night. It sounds like an oxymoron, but a new breed of nanoscale light-sensitive antennas could soon make this possible, heralding a novel form of renewable energy that avoids many of the problems that beset solar cells.

The key to these new devices is their ability to harvest infrared (IR) radiation, says Steven Novack, one of the pioneers of the technology at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls. Nearly half of the available energy in the solar spectrum resides in the infrared band, and IR is re-emitted by the Earth's surface after the sun has gone down, meaning that the antennas can even capture some energy during the night.

Lab tests have already shown that, under ideal conditions, the antennas can collect 84 per cent of incoming photons. Novack's team calculates that a complete system would have an overall efficiency of 46 per cent; the most efficient silicon solar cells are stalled at about 25 per cent. What's more, while those ideal conditions are relatively narrowly constrained for silicon solar cells - if the sun is in the wrong position, light reflects off a silicon solar cell instead of being absorbed - the antennas absorb radiation at a variety of angles. If the antennas can be produced cheaply, the technology could prove to be truly disruptive, says Novack.

Unlike photovoltaic cells, which use photons to liberate electrons, the new antennas resonate when hit by light waves, and that generates an alternating current that can be harnessed.
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Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.

The new approach, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny loops of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each "nanoantenna" is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair.

Because of their size, the nanoantennas absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. Nanoantennas can take in energy from both sunlight and the earth's heat, with higher efficiency than conventional solar cells.

"I think these antennas really have the potential to replace traditional solar panels," says physicist Steven Novack, who spoke about the technology in November at the National Nano Engineering Conference in Boston.
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