Friday, November 1, 2013
manessmorrison2@yahoo.com

News Clips For The Day


Feds to investigate mysterious death of Georgia teen Kendrick Johnson -- NBC

By Gabe Gutierrez and Jeff Black
Federal investigators will probe the strange death of Georgia teen Kendrick Johnson, whose body was found rolled up in a gym mat at his high school in January, they announced Thursday.
U.S. Attorney Michael Moore said in a news conference in Macon, Ga., that the FBI and federal prosecutors were now involved in the case, which the local sheriff had closed — calling it a a freak accident.
Johnson’s parents, however, have said they suspect their 17-year-old son was murdered and have waged a public battle to reopen the case, alleging a cover-up by local officials.
"I am of the opinion that a sufficient basis exists for my office to conduct a formal review of the facts and investigation surrounding the death of Kendrick Johnson," Moore said on Thursday.
"My objective is to discover the truth, and I believe that can only be done by gathering all of the relevant information surrounding Mr. Johnson's death," he said, adding that federal jurisdiction is limited in the case.
Kendrick Johnson's parents and their attorneys join Rev. Al Sharpton to discuss the newly announced federal investigation into their son's death.
Lt. Stryder Jones, a spokesman with the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, said the department welcomed the probe, “but we stand behind our initial investigation."
Johnson’s parents have hired civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who also represented the family of slain teenager Trayvon Martin.
On Wednesday, a small portion of the surveillance video taken at Lowndes High School in Valdosto, Ga., where Johnson was found dead was released, though it did not show the fateful moment.
The parents were awaiting the release of even more video footage — about 1,900 hours worth — from the two days when Johnson went missing.
A judge ordered that the recordings be released after the parents had requested the action to learn more about how their son died.
One part of the the newly released footage shows Johnson walking into the gym and onto the basketball court where other people are playing, but the video does not show his death or anything leading up to it. 


Now the ball is rolling. If the FBI investigates, I have more hope of a solution to the crime, as they usually pour lots of personnel and legal efforts into their cases. I'll keep following this as time goes on. I don't think there will be any more impediments to the investigation now.




How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit 'send' on your email – NBC

By Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black,
The Internet makes it easy to send information to far-flung places in an instant – hit “send,” and poof, there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?
Every second of every day, billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, much of it created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.
Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo's data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.

Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say they worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called for new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.
Critical questions are being raised about data safety in light of hacking reports and news about NSA data collection. NBC's Stephanie Gosk explains what happens after you hit 'send' on an email message.
Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switches and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.
“For your email account, you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.
Google alone has six such large data centers in the United States and seven more overseas.
“A lot of people think if I'm in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that's really not the case,” Zetter said.
Jim Stickley, a cybersecurity expert, said it's those cables where the vulnerability lies.
“You have thousands and thousands of miles out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has found somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture data on this network.”
On Thursday, Google issued a statement, which said, in part: "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks." 
Google said it is now working to encrypt its high-speed fiber optic lines in order to counter NSA snooping.
But even if that company’s system is secure, it’s clear that these Internet giants have become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.
“We have put all of our digital eggs into their baskets; they're not in ours anymore,” Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC News. “And whether that's wise in terms of privacy and security is, I think, a very open question.”
Bruce Schneier, a Harvard Law School fellow who writes frequently on cybersecurity, said there's only one surefire way to protect yourself from snooping, and it’s an idea most people won’t like: Give up your email.
“You cannot be on the systems. That’s what you can do,” he said in a telephone interview. “Whenever you go into a cloud, you have to trust the cloud provider. There’s nothing you can do. It’s not your data. It’s their data.”
One reason there is so much data collection, Schneier said, is that “surveillance is very, very cheap — that’s the problem."
He added, "Adding encryption makes surveillance more expensive, which means they can’t do it as much.”
So, for anyone feeling a little digitally vulnerable, there appears to be only one way around it:  Write a letter and get a stamp.


This is sad news. We are too much in love with our computers, our emails, our Facebook to go back in time to the 1980s. It's like working on a manual typewriter again – slower and more difficult. I personally don't care if they collect my emails, because I haven't written any rants against the government or crimes there, though I have written several irate and pointed letters to politicians. I do care about the idea of privacy for our society, though, and if the wrong kind of politicians were to take over by election, as Hitler did in Germany, and then make use of the vast store of political information that exists on American citizens we could have a sea change in our republic. That sounds like a good subject for a novel. Of course, it has been done – 1984.




How a dog wags its tail may say a lot -- to other dogs
Megan Gannon LiveScience

Is that pooch a lefty or a righty? The direction its tag wags has plenty of meaning, a new study has found.
Tail wagging could convey more meaning among dogs than previously thought.
Dogs have different emotional responses to their peers depending on the direction of a tail-wag, a new study found. Seeing a fellow dog swing its tail to the right keeps canines relaxed, while a wag to the left side of the dog's body seems to induce stress, the researchers say.
For their study, a group of researchers recruited 43 pet dogs of various breeds. The animals were outfitted with a vest that monitored their heart rates, and they were shown videos of other dogs either wagging their tails to the left or to the right. [7 Surprising Health Benefits of Dog Ownership]
The pets that watched left-side tail wagging behaved more anxiously and their heart rate sped up, the researchers said, while the dogs that watched one of their peers wag their tail to the right stayed cool; they even began to approach the dog on the screen, suggesting they saw the right-side wagging as a signal of companionship, the researchers said.
But right-left tail wags may not be a form of secret dog language, the researchers say. They think the direction of tail wagging — and other dogs' responses to it — could arise from automatic responses rooted in the different hemispheres of the canine brain.
Just like the left and right sides of the brain in humans are thought to control different emotions and behaviors, the direction of wagging might match hemispheric activation, explained study researcher Giorgio Vallortigara of the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento in Italy.
"In other words, a dog looking to a dog wagging with a bias to the right side — and thus showing left-hemisphere activation as if it was experiencing some sort of positive/approach response — would also produce relaxed responses," Vallortigara said in a statement.
"In contrast, a dog looking to a dog wagging with a bias to the left — and thus showing right-hemisphere activation as if it was experiencing some sort of negative/withdrawal response — would also produce anxious and targeting responses as well as increased cardiac frequency," Vallortigara added. "That is amazing, I think."
Vallortigara and colleagues say understanding these responses could help improve dog welfare, and perhaps even help develop new strategies to keep them calm at the vet.
The research was detailed Thursday in the journal Current Biology.


This writer mentions that the human brain also produces different emotions “and behaviors” on the two halves – I wonder which emotions and behaviors? I knew the parts of the brain had different functions, but I've never heard this before about different emotions being on different halves.


From website brynmawr.edu (1998):
In Left Vs. Right Brain Modes, a direct comparison is presented in several categories. The left hemisphere is described as verbal, analytical, logical. The right hemisphere is nonverbal (responding to touch and music), intuitive, and sensory. In some ways the descriptions fit with the "left- handed artist" stereotype, such as the left hemisphere being factual, and the right brain responsive to color and shape. However, in other categories the "left handed artist" seems contradictory. For example, the left hemisphere (right-handedness) understands symbols and representations, while the right brain (left-handedness) is precise. As expected, the left hemisphere is identified with practicality and rationality, while the right hemisphere is emotional and originative.

From theorderoftime.com:
The left hemisphere specializes in analytical thought. The left hemisphere deals with hard facts: abstractions, structure, discipline and rules, time sequences, mathematics, categorizing, logic and rationality and deductive reasoning, knowledge, details, definitions, planning and goals, words (written and spoken and heard), productivity and efficiency, science and technology, stability, extraversion, physical activity, and the right side of the body. The left hemisphere is emphasized in our educational system and in our society in general, for better or for worse; as Marshall McLuhan speculated, "The day when bureaucracy becomes right hemisphere will be utopia."

The right hemisphere specializes in the "softer" aspects of life. This includes intuition, feelings and sensitivity, emotions, daydreaming and visualizing, creativity (including art and music), color, spatial awareness, first impressions, rhythm, spontaneity and impulsiveness, the physical senses, risk-taking, flexibility and variety, learning by experience, relationships, mysticism, play and sports, introversion, humor, motor skills, the left side of the body, and a holistic way of perception that recognizes patterns and similarities and then synthesizes those elements into new forms.

The above two articles are about human brain functions. Most of the articles I found are basically about dominance between the two halves of the brain. I didn't find anything about anger being on one side of the brain, while happiness is on the other. If we are left-handed, we are dominant on the right side of our brain, which is our “emotional and originative” side, dealing with “intuition, feelings and sensitivity.” If a dog's brain functions the same way ours does, then the left-wagging is connected to emotions, so maybe that causes anxiety in the other dog when he sees it.

Another thing the orderoftime article above stated is that the left hemisphere deals with “extraversion” while the right side deals with “introversion.” So maybe the left-wagging is showing a withdrawal or introversion, which could certainly cause a fight to develop. This makes the most sense to me, as a cause of anxiety in the observer dog.

This reminds me of the news article I posted about a month ago on the sound similar to panting that dogs exhibit when they greet each other and when they are initiating playing. This sound causes the observer dog to relax and start to get to know the other and maybe play. I know dogs can sense it, and quickly, when a human either is afraid of dogs or just doesn't like them. They respond sometimes with a growl and show their teeth, undoubtedly increasing the human's fear, when the same dog will be perfectly friendly when approached by a friendly person. So what comes around goes around!





Obama considered replacing Biden with Hillary Clinton, says new book
Vidya Rao
President Obama’s top aides considered replacing Vice President Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2012 election, a new book reveals. 
NBC News has confirmed that that then-Chief of Staff Bill Daley conducted polls to see how voters would react, but learned that it wouldn’t impact Obama’s chances of getting elected.
Obama’s political adviser denied the claim on social media Thursday:
Never any - any - consideration of VP/HRC switch. Not even entertained by the only person who mattered. Or most of us. Back to Halloween.
— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) October 31, 2013
Clinton also denied that that there was any chance she would be vice president, telling Savannah Guthrie in a 2011 interview that it wasn’t “even in the realm of possibility.”
But the Obama campaign did shut Biden out of strategy sessions, Andrea Mitchell reported on TODAY Friday, after he endorsed same-sex marriage on “Meet the Press” before a planned announcement by the president.
The reveal comes from authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in their new book “Double Down,” the follow-up to their account of the 2008 election, “Game Change,” which shared a range of insider information — from Sarah Palin’s private meltdown to John Edward’s public missteps — and was also turned into an HBO film.
“Double Down,” which goes on sale Tuesday, also reveals some friction between President Obama and President Bill Clinton, saying that Obama told an aide “I like him … in doses,” a sentiment Obama was forced to swallow when he turned to the former president for help after his disastrous first presidential debate in 2012.
In addition, the authors claim that while presidential candidate Mitt Romney thought about choosing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as his running mate, Christie was not forthright about his past work as a lobbyist and his medical history.
"The Garden State governor's background was littered with potential land mines," the authors wrote. The Romney camp issued a statement Thursday saying that Christie did indeed comply with all requests and did share his medical reports.
Tune in to TODAY Monday, when authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann will be on live to discuss the book. 

From Wikipedia about Mark Halperin the author:

2004 elections[edit]
In October 2004 the Drudge Report published a memo Halperin sent to ABC News staff about coverage of the U.S. presidential election directing them not to "reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable" and that both John Kerry and George W. Bush used "distortion" in their campaign, but that Kerry’s distortions were not "central to his efforts to win."[8] Halperin was criticized by conservatives who used the memo to reinforce long-standing complaints of media bias.[9][10] ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider confirmed the authenticity of the memo and said Halperin "takes his responsibility to be fair as seriously as a heart attack."[11] In 2006, Halperin would criticize the media for being biased in favor of Kerry after a controversial remark that the senator made.[12]
MSNBC suspension[edit]
On June 30, 2011, Halperin was suspended from his duties at MSNBC for "slurring" President Barack Obama on the program Morning Joe, saying the President came off as "kind of a dick" during the previous day's press conference.[13][14] His suspension was lifted a little over a month later.[15]
In December 2011, Halperin was listed as #1 in Salon.com's 2011 Hack List, his reporting described as "shallow and predictable" as well as "both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race." [16]


These would probably be interesting books to read, because the details quoted in this article are about both political parties. I read a book about Bill Clinton that was clearly biased, and was so full of scandalous accusations against him that I didn't believe half of it. His books may be of the same type. I do hope that Obama wasn't tempted to follow his advisers on the suggestion, because Joe Biden is very human, but intelligent and likeable -- partly because he is prone to “gaffs.” He isn't rigid. I didn't find most of his gaffs to be as bad as the press painted them. His greater openness is sometimes a relief from Obama's more careful personality, and for that matter, Obama has spoken too quickly or critically sometimes, too. Hillary Clinton will get her chance next election, I think. I'll see about voting for her then.





Foster mom retires after taking in 150 kids – NBC
Morgan Brasfield TODAY contributor
She’s known as “Mom Trom” to her 153 children. Yes, 153 children, three of whom are biological and 150 others who have always felt like her own.
“We had always been the family that had everyone else’s kids at the house for the summer. Friends, cousins and second cousins, they were always at our house,” remembers Marlene Tromczynski, 72, of Kent, Ohio.
Marlene Tromczynski hugs one of her foster sons' daughter. She began taking in foster children almost 40 years ago.
But it wasn’t just casual visits from friends and family that filled the Tromczynski home, it was foster children, most of whom were fleeing from abusive families and an unhealthy home life.
Since 1974, Tromczynski has taken 150 children, mainly teens, into her home. The first child, Lori Busch, now 54, was 14 when she fled her abusive home and was placed with Tromczynski.
“I was nervous coming into this family with someone that I didn’t know, but I felt very loved and cared for right away,” recalls Busch. “I welcomed the different things in the house, like sitting down for dinner and using silverware. My first night, Marlene tucked me into bed and gave me a quilt to sleep with. She said ‘I love you’ and meant it. I wasn’t used to all of that.”
Tromczynski and her husband had never planned to start fostering teens, but after a great experience hosting a foreign exchange student they became open to the idea of caring for a child more permanently.
“We decided we’d like to help someone and they, in turn, would help our family be rounded out. We felt like having another girl in our house of two boys and one girl would help even out the score for our daughter.”
But five years after taking in Busch, Tromczynski’s husband died suddenly of a heart attack and her devastated family had to start to rebuild.
“Instead of going out and trying to find a new mate, I invested myself into the kids and the community,” says Tromczynski, “So many people lose their children when their spouse dies, but I needed them and they needed me.”
What resulted was nearly 40 years of fostering children, as many as six at a time living in the house and almost all of them teens.
“Nobody wanted to take care of the teenagers. Everybody wanted the cute little babies,” she said.
And what could have been a competitive battle of the wills ended up being, for the most part, a peaceful household dominated by teens and their single mother.
“We did have challenges, no doubt, but the new kids would watch how the other kids who had been in our house longer behaved and would learn from them. I would seldom have issues.”
Ed Tromczynski, 51, from Hudson, Ohio, is one of Marlene’s biological sons and says that establishing rules of the household right off the bat is what kept the house so peaceful.
“The older kids who had already been there became the experts and taught the ‘newbies’,” says Tromczynski. 
“My mother’s formula was a unique combination of showing immediate love and warmth, but also relying on the kids that were already there to tell the new ones, ‘You’re about to get the best meal of your life so you better set the table and wash your hands.’”
“Here were kids that had only been here for an hour, but had already gotten a hug, warm comforter, someone to tuck him in, and a real person caring for them from both my mother and the other kids.”
Ed Tromczynski says that this compassion was nothing new, and his mother and father had always instilled a “we” is better than “me” mentality in their family. Part of that, says Marlene Tromczynski, was ensuring that the foster children never came into her home feeling alone.
“I never told them that their parents didn’t love them,” says Tromcynski. “Instead, I would tell them that they did love them, but they just couldn’t take care of them right now, and in the meantime I was just the helper.”
Busch has carried Tromczynski’s acceptance with her her entire life. “My family has been there for me 100 percent,” says Busch. “Marlene never made me feel like I was not a biological child.”
Tromczynski recently retired from her role as foster mom and says she is going through withdrawals of not having a household full of kids. But with 153 children, and now grandchildren, Tromczynski never truly has to worry about an empty nest.
“As a parent, the best thing you can do is put your children first. It’s about them and it’s not about you, and the best thing you can do is give them love and attention and remind them that you care what happens to them,” says Tromczynski. 

This woman is a hero, I think. She has the temperament to step in and rescue some of these children who may not be so adoptable, such as teenagers who may have mental health issues due to abuse. There are stories about foster parents that are not so positive – that some of them take on more foster children in order to get the extra money, for instance – but this woman is really helpful to the kids. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans adopted a large family and managed to bring them up well. I always admired them for that, not just because they were movie heroes.

I wish more people would adopt or take in foster children rather than having large biological families, because the world population is already too high, causing famine and extreme poverty in some places. Where they don't have good birth control, women are often run down by the effort of caring for 18 or 20 children, even dying young from the physical stress of continuous childbirth. This woman has done a great deal to help the world by giving care where it was badly needed.





Iraq's Maliki at White House to seek US help battling increasing violence

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News
The prime minister of Iraq, a country in the grip of its worst violence in five years, is in Washington to ask for American help to fight what he calls the growing influence of al Qaeda.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is set to meet with President Barack Obama on Friday afternoon at the White House. In a speech on Thursday, he cast the United States and Iraq as partners that had “shed blood together fighting terrorism.”
The visit to Washington is Maliki’s first in two years. For the prime minister, who pushed to get American troops out of Iraq four years ago, the request for help is an illustration of an increasingly dire security situation.

This is the deadliest year in Iraq since 2008. More than 7,000 people have been killed, according to the casualty database Iraq Body Count. Iraqis say that they live in constant fear of explosions and assassinations.
Maliki, in an Op-Ed earlier this week in The New York Times, blamed al Qaeda and its affiliates, and portrayed the attackers as common enemies of the United States and Iraq.
“Imagine how Americans would react if you had a terrorist organization operating on your own soil that killed dozens and maimed hundreds every week,” he wrote. “For Iraqis, that isn’t a hypothetical question.”
Outside experts and some American officials take a different view — blaming a power struggle between religious factions within Iraq and spillover from the civil war in Syria, which shares a border with Iraq.
U.S. officials blame Maliki for moving closer to Iran and refusing, against requests from Washington, to give Sunni and Kurdish minorities in the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiites.
A group of senators, including John McCain, R-Ariz., sent a letter to Obama earlier this week urging him to press Maliki to come up with a “comprehensive political and security strategy that can stabilize the country.”
The letter blamed a resurgent al Qaeda and the spillover from Syria, but it also faulted Maliki for an autocratic leadership style that has alienated Sunnis and Kurds and has driven some Sunnis to join al Qaeda.
On Thursday, Maliki said in a speech that the United States and Iraq were partners that “shed blood together fighting terrorism.” He wants Maliki wants American Apache attack helicopters and other military help to fight militants.
“We have a request — I won’t say a right — it’s a request,” Maliki said Thursday at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. “It’s not only about Iraq, but it’s about all the countries in the world that are suffering from terrorism.”
In the speech, he denied that violence in his country is being fomented by sectarian strife among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions.
“There is no problem between Sunnis and Shiites,” he said. “The Sunnis are killed today but also the Shiites,” he said. “It is al Qaeda who is killing all of the Iraqis.”
Maliki, in a December 2010 interview with The Wall Street Journal, ruled out the presence of American troops in his country by the end of the next year. The last American troops left in December 2011.


I hope Obama can find a way to help them without sending in more troops. It seems to me we tried that, already. Still, it is al Qaeda that he is fighting, and aafter destroying their previous government we owe them something. I'll be interested to see what happens.