TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2014


NEWS CLIPS FOR THE DAY


With the stroke of Obama's pen, new fuel standards on the way – CBS
By Rebecca Kaplan CBS News February 18, 2014

With Congress too divided on environmental issues to put forward legislation, President Obama is moving forward with his go-at-it-alone strategy and using his executive authority to set new fuel standards for trucks.

In a speech at a Safeway distribution center in the Maryland suburbs Tuesday, the president will direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation to write new standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by March 31, 2016. In 2010, these vehicles made up just four percent of vehicles on the road, but accounted for about 25 percent f fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. Behind passenger cars and light trucks, they are the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions within the transportation sector.

In addition to the environmental benefits, the president will likely argue that the fuel efficiency upgrades will save companies money on fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicle. The first round of standards put forward by his administration, which were finalized in September 2011, are projected to save 530 million barrels of oil – an approximate $50 billion in fuel costs over the lifetime of those vehicles. The standards will also help reduce greenhouse gas emission by 270 million metric tons.
He’ll also continue the strategy of working with private companies – something he is already doing on education and unemployment initiatives – to achieve his goals on the environment. The federal government already has a partnership with several companies like ARAMARK, Coca-Cola and Staples through what is called the “National Clean Fleets Partnership,” which encourages companies to reduce diesel and gasoline use.

The EPA provides resources and support to those companies to help them meet their goals, and Americans can expect to hear some success stories on Tuesday. Among those highlighted by the administration: AT&T has already deployed it’s 7,500th alternative fuel vehicle, half of the fleet of 15,000 it has promised to deploy by 2018. It saved them 7.7 million gallons of gasoline. Enterprise, the car-rental company, has started offering plug-in electric and hybrid cars to their customers and operate more than 80 percent of their 500 airport shuttle buses using biodiesel or compressed natural gas.
Some goals are unlikely to get met. The president will likely repeat his call for Congress to repeal $4 billion in subsidies for the oil and gas industry, which will not interest most Republicans. He’ll also ask them once again to  create an Energy Security Trust, a $2 billion investment in technology that will help get cars and trucks off oil. It would be funded by revenues generated from federal oil and gas development.



Medium and heavy duty vehicles made up “just four percent of vehicles on the road, but accounted for about 25 percent f fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.” Even so, they are behind passenger cars and light trucks in fuel use and pollution. The federal partnerships with private companies is also helping in various ways. This is a good measure for him to initiate on his own. This is the kind of policy which will help a great deal with carbon emissions, and doesn't even require a fight with lawmakers. Good job, Mr. Obama!





Getting clean water from the sea, at a high price – CBS
By Bruce Kennedy Money Watch February 18, 2014

The ongoing severe drought in California is the just the latest in a recent series of water crises that have kept large areas of America parched.
Parts of Texas and the Southwest are still recovering from historic drought conditions that dried up the region several years ago. And given global climate change and the world's growing population, the costly process of desalination -- turning ocean or brackish water into clean, drinkable fresh water -- is being considered a viable option in California and elsewhere.

In California alone, 17 desalination plants are either under construction or being planned, including the $1 billion Carlsbad facility near San Diego, scheduled to open in 2016. Once fully operational, that plant is expected to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day.

"We'll produce enough water to meet the daily needs of 300,000 San Diego residents," Peter MacLaggan, senior vice president at Poseidon Resources, the company partnering with the San Diego County Water Authority on the project, said last month. "We'll have at least one water supply that's drought-proof -- it won't matter whether it snows in the Rockies or rains in the Sierras."

That desalinated water, however, won't be cheap.
"When you want to desalinate, it's incredibly energy-intensive, and therefore cost-intensive," said Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. "And that's the rub of it. It's drought-resistant, it's abundant, it's never going to go away, but it's costly to do."

There are two main desalination processes. Thermal, as the name implies, involves heating salt water and then distilling pure, drinkable water from the steam. And there's reverse osmosis, the process Carlsbad will use -- where sea water or brackish water is forced through filter membranes that remove the salts.

Thermal desalination is huge in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. That method makes economic sense there, says Webber, "because they have energy but don't have water, so they trade energy for water."

California also expends a lot of energy -- as well as hundreds of millions of dollars annually -- to store, pump and deliver water across the state.
The question, then, is whether Californians will be willing to purchase the expensive water that desalination facilities produce. As an example, Webber points to the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination facility in Florida, which can produce up to 25 million gallons of drinking water daily. But due in part to the cost, the Tampa Bay plant is rarely run at full capacity.

Desalination can make economic sense when it's combined with good design and proper integration into a region's infrastructure. And given its growing use worldwide -- industry website Desalination.com says more than 60 million cubic meters of drinking water are produced worldwide daily by desalination -- technological advances could help reduce the cost of turning salt water into fresh water.

"I do see that water is the next oil," Webber notes, "that water is the great resource of the 21st century over which battles [will be] fought, money is invested."




I was wondering if they would be doing this in California when the cracked ground was shown on the TV news. I'm glad they already have several plants in place or being planned in California. With drought being one of the most likely results of climate change, they are on their way to fighting that battle. As a country, we are lucky we have access to the sea on all sides except the north. Maybe that's one problem we can solve. Of course, it will take fuel, and the burning of fossil fuel for desalination will almost surely lead to more carbon emission problems from that source.





Michael Dunn, in just released phone calls, describes himself as victim after killing teenager – CBS
By Pia Malbran, Noreen O'Donnel CBS News

The man who shot and killed a teenager in Florida after an argument over loud music told his fiancee in a telephone call a month after his arrest that he was both the victim and the victor in the deadly encounter.

"You know I was thinking about that today, I was like I'm the f*** victim here, I was the one who was victimized," Michael Dunn said from jail in December 2012, a month after the shooting. "I mean I don't know how else to cut it, like they attacked me, I’m the victim. I'm the victor, but I was the victim too."

Dunn, a 47-year-old computer programmer, was convicted on Saturday of attempted murder for shooting into a car full of teenagers after the argument but the jury deadlocked on the most serious charge of first-degree murder. A mistrial was declared on the murder charge.

Dunn killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis in the parking lot of a Jacksonville gas station on the evening of Nov. 23, 2012. Dunn fired 10 shots at the red Dodge Durango that Davis and three other teens were riding in, hitting Davis three times. He died at the scene.

In the conversation with his fiancee, Rhonda Rouer, he also complained about being in a room by himself, but added: "But I guess it would be better than being in a room with them animals."

A short while later, he said, "I was in a room with three black guys."
"Two were kids and one was an old man," he continued. "And they asked what I was in for and I told them. And I gave them some of the details and they were like 'Straight up, that's what they get.'"

Audio of nine of Dunn's calls was released on Monday by the state attorney in Florida. All took place in December 2012 while he was in jail and were with Rouer or his parents, Phillip and Sandra Dunn. Also released was a letter that he wrote describing the shooting.

At first the teenagers turned down the music in their car, as he had asked, but then he wrote that he could hear one of the passengers in the back seat shouting that he should kill Dunn.

"He bends forward and picked something up with both hands," Dunn wrote. "As he's doing this, he says 'yeah-I'm going to f****** kill you!" and now I can tell what he's picked up, as he just laid a gun barrel against the window sill. I can see about four inches of the barrel sticking up and it looks thick enough to be a 12 gauge maybe a 20 gauge shotgun."

At first he was paralyzed by fear by the sight of the shotgun, he wrote.
"Something happened inside of me when he advanced towards me and my paralysis left me," he wrote. "Between fear, adrenaline and muscle-memory, I grabbed my pistol from the glove box. As I was doing so, I shouted, "You're not going to kill me you son of a b****!"

Dunn, who is white, testified that he fired in self-defense.
But no weapon was found in the SUV and Davis' friends said they did not hear him threaten Dunn. The state's medical examiner testified that the trajectory of Dunn's bullets into Davis' body showed that Davis was sitting down when he was shot.

Authorities said that Dunn became enraged about the music and the argument. One person walking out of the store said he heard Dunn say, "You are not going to talk to me like that."

The state attorney, Angela Corey, has said her office will seek a retrial of Dunn on the first-degree murder charge.

Dunn's defense attorney, Cory Strolla, has said he plans to appeal.
In another telephone call, Dunn's father told him of the shooting, "This thing is viral. It's all over the place. It's like that, you know, because he was a black kid."
A short while later, Phillip Dunn said again, "It's gone viral."
"In a good way or a bad way?" Michael Dunn asked.
"A bad way, bad way," his father responded.
And his father warns him not to be seen smiling.
"You can cry for a half hour, crack one smile and they'll have you as a heartless son of a b**** that's smiling about it," he said.




I did watch the last part of the trial, and saw Dunn's examination. I had heard only news reports up to that time, and thought Dunn was just another “angry white man” with a lot of prejudice against blacks. When I watched him talk, I saw that Dunn was more distressed than angry, and that he answered questions and witnessed very well.

I, myself, did frequently see “angry young black men” on the bus as I went to work, going around in groups with their pants hanging loose down around their hips so they could show the colorful underwear that they were wearing. I wanted to confront them because I do consider that to be obscene, but I never did. I wish we had a law against wearing your pants down low like that, because it shouldn't be happening. I'm sure their parents don't know they're doing that. Their parents think they're model citizens. To an outsider, it looks like a gang of delinquent youths looking for trouble. To be fair, I did see a white boy a couple of times doing it – he apparently thinks it's cool. They're all being idiotic as far as I'm concerned.

It is clear that when Davis said he was going to kill him, Dunn got angry because he admits to shouting back at him “You're not going to kill me, you SOB.” He didn't immediately go for his gun, he said, but after Davis showed the barrel of a shotgun and opened the car door and put his head out, he did. A witness did not see Davis get out of the car, and thought he heard Dunn say “You're not going to talk to me that way.” That doesn't sound like Dunn was ruled by fear, if it is true.

Then after the shooting, Dunn left the scene without calling the police. Due to that extreme misjudgement on his part, the police didn't know to look for a shotgun on the scene or at the second location where the students car went to, so the defense lost it's only real piece of evidence – the shotgun.

I can easily imagine the action happening the way Dunn described it, so I felt “a reasonable doubt” that he committed first degree murder. I don't agree with people going around with guns on their person or in their cars, however. I think that is the direct cause of most shootings. I also know, though, that if Dunn had simply pulled out of that parking place and moved to another one without confronting the youths the whole thing would have never happened.

I think the police should fine people who play loud music, shout angrily or just generally act up in public, because I don't want an unruly and hostile atmosphere to be my surroundings. Jacksonville is a rough city. We are the “murder capital of Florida.” I do sympathize with Dunn if he was, in fact, telling the truth about what happened, because I think anybody would have been frightened by those boys. Their parents need to tell them to turn their music down in public and don't go around angrily confronting people. The boys were not innocent in the matter. Dunn asked them politely to turn the music down and they did, but then decided to turn it back up again. They shouldn't have had it up in the first place.

Now Dunn will serve the rest of his life in prison unless he can win an appeal, and the Davis youth is dead. Both could have backed down rather than escalating. It's a tragedy.





Asteroid races past Earth at 27,000 mph – CBS
Reuters February 18, 2014

An asteroid estimated to be the size of three football fields whizzed close to Earth on Monday, roughly a year after one exploded over Russia and injured 1,200 people.

Slooh Space Camera tracked the approach of the asteroid as it raced past the planet at about 27,000 mph, starting at 9 p.m. EST), the robotic telescope service said in a statement on Slooh.com.

The Dubai Astronomy Group provided Slooh photos of the part of the sky where the rock was expected to be seen, but its motion could not be picked out immediately in a live webcast against the backdrop of night-time stars.

The 295-yard asteroid was streaking past Earth at a distance of about 2.1 million miles little more than a year after another asteroid exploded on Feb. 15, 2013, over Chelyabinsk, Russia. That asteroid injured 1,200 people following a massive shock wave that shattered windows and damaged buildings.

Chelyabinsk region officials had wanted to mark the anniversary by giving a piece of the meteorite to each 2014 Winter Olympic athlete who won a medal on Saturday at the Sochi Games. However, the International Olympic Committee at the last minute said it could be done only after the games and separately.

Slooh's flagship observatory on Mount Teide in Spain's Canary Islands was iced over and unable to be used for the 2000 EM26 viewing, Paul Cox, Slooh's technical and research director, said on the one-hour webcast.

"We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids -- sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth," Cox said in a statement before the show.

He added, "We need to find them before they find us!"




Every time I read one of these reports I shudder. It's just a matter of time before there is a direct hit by some rock that is too large to burn up in our atmosphere. Russia, for some reason, has had several of those events. There was a great documentary on TV in which aged Russian people were interviewed and told their scary stories. That one was called The Tunguska Event. See the Wikipedia information below.
Every time the scientists say how they can ward off such a strike, I am not reassured, since the atomic bomb or satellite to push the rock out of its orbit don't seem that convincing to me. It may just be the next great disaster that befalls the earth. I hope it doesn't happen while I'm alive.


Tunguska event
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tunguska event was a large explosion caused by the impact of a small asteroid or comet, which occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 07:14 KRAT (00:14 UT) on June 30 [O.S. June 17], 1908.[1][2][3] The explosion occurred at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) at 60.886°N, 101.894°E. Different studies have yielded widely varying estimates of the impacting object's size, on the order of 60 m (200 ft) to 190 m (620 ft).[4] It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history. It is classified as an impact even though the asteroid or comet is believed to have burst in the air rather than hitting the surface.[5]




­ Mayor Wants To Drive Horse-Drawn Carriages Out Of NYC – NPR
by Janet Babin
February 18, 2014
­
During New York City's mayoral race last year, then-candidate Bill de Blasio promised to fix big-picture problems, like income inequality and universal pre-K.
So he raised some collective eyebrows when he announced what one of his first initiatives as mayor would be:
"We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York City," he said. "They're not humane; they're not appropriate to the year 2014; it's over."

Horse carriage rides are a staple in cities around the country. Animal rights activists have argued for decades that the practice is inhumane, and they've been gaining some political allies. A Chicago alderman recently called for a carriage ban.
When the new mayor of New York reiterated on Comedy Central's The Daily Show that horses don't belong in the city, host Jon Stewart poked fun at the proposal, asking: "Should we even be living here? ... Sometimes I look at their stable and I go, like, what do you think that'd go for, $1,600 a month? What do you think?"
Stewart's studios are just around the corner from the largest of New York's four carriage horse stables, called Clinton Park.

It looks like Cinderella's parking garage, with rows of fancy carriages lined up against whitewashed walls. The stalls appear clean and roomy, 8 by 10 feet — with freshly laid hay and clean water available. Driver Jean Michnej calls to Scoobi, his horse, and Scoobi answers with a neigh.

Scoobi is one of about 220 horses in the city; there are about 160 working carriage drivers. In fiscal year 2013, the New York City Health Department issued just 16 violations to carriage horse owners.

Still, Allie Feldman, executive director of the animal rights group New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, says it's inherently inhumane to keep horses in New York City.

"They're pounding the pavement for up to nine hours a day; they don't get any time to have turnout; they get no time to graze the grass, to roll, to socialize with other horses," she says.

Stephen Malone, spokesman of the Horse and Carriage Association, says the activists should be thanking the carriage industry for giving horses a job that keeps them in demand.

"A lot of these horses come from very, very bad backgrounds and are rescued from very abusive situations. This is not an abusive situation," Malone says.

Thousands of tourists take carriage rides through Central Park each year, like dental hygienist Cynthia Holt of North Carolina, who came on Christmas. She says her driver doubled as a tour guide.
"He was just such a pleasure to talk to, and he knew right off the bat that we weren't from New York City; I guess it was our accent," she says.
Holt plans to come to New York again this year, and she's hoping to take another spin in the horse carriage through Central Park.

"I think it would be very disappointing if we just couldn't take that carriage ride," she says. "That would be one thing that I would want to do again."

In a Back to the Future kind of moment, the animal rights group and the mayor's administration are crafting a plan to replace the horse and carriage with electric-powered antique cars. It would mark the second time in history that the car has supplanted the horse.



I can't get any evidence of mistreatment from this article, and as the man said, there aren't many jobs for horses anymore. Maybe walking around on hard pavement all day is hard on their feet, and nine hours does seem like a long time. I wonder if there is another reason why the mayor wants to get rid of the horses – street cleaning, perhaps? A little touch of nature in New York City sounds like a good idea to me. A horse has more natural charm than an auto, even if it is a vintage auto. Still, the animal rights activists say it's inhumane, and the mayor is determined. I guess that will be the end of the matter.




­ Despite Law, Health Plans Refuse Medical Claims Related To Suicide – NPR
by Michelle Andrews
February 18, 2014
­
Dealing with the aftermath of a suicide or attempted suicide is stressful enough. But some health plans make a harrowing experience worse by refusing to cover medical costs for injuries that are related to suicide, even though the federal health law doesn't allow such exclusions, legal and government analysts say.
Yet patients or their loved ones often don't realize that.

Under federal rules from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, employment-based health plans can't discriminate against a particular person by denying eligibility for benefits or charging more because they have a specific medical condition such as diabetes or depression.

Insurers, however, are allowed to deny coverage for all members for injuries caused by a specific activity or for those that arise from a particular cause spelled out in the policy. These are so-called source-of-injury exclusions.

So an insurer that generally covers head injuries or broken bones could decide against covering those injuries if they're caused by risky recreational activities such as skydiving or bungee jumping. Likewise, insurers sometimes apply source-of-injury exclusions to injuries that are intentionally self-inflicted, including suicide or attempted suicide.

Mental health advocates and government experts point to the HIPAA rules, noting that source-of-injury exclusions aren't allowed if they're the result of a medical condition. So if someone is severely depressed and sustains injuries from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, for example, the health plan can't deny claims for medical treatment, say experts, if the plan would generally cover the treatment for someone whose wounds were not self inflicted.

Further, the 2006 regulations "make clear that such source-of-injury exclusions cannot be imposed even if the mental health condition is not diagnosed before the injury," said an email from a spokeswoman at the Department of Labor.

When a 24-year-old young woman with bipolar disorder attempted suicide last year by taking an overdose of an anti-anxiety medication, her mother assumed that the mother's employer plan covering them both would pay the bills for her daughter's emergency room visit and her three days in the hospital near her home in Fort Wayne, Ind. But the insurer declined to pay the $6,600 hospital charge, citing an exclusion for care related to suicide.

"I knew I could appeal the decision, but I didn't think I had any grounds to do so," the mother says. "I thought that's just the way it was."
After negotiating with the hospital, the bill was reduced by half and her daughter has been paying the balance off in installments, she says.

"Suicide is a common exclusion," says Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health policy at George Washington University. "Insurers are all over the place on this, and state law varies tremendously." In court cases arising from a denial of benefits, "if the suicide attempt is related to a diagnosis that was treated, typically [the courts] will not deny coverage," says Ann Doucette, a George Washington University professor who's involved in research related to suicide.

Still the insurance industry says the issue hasn't raised major concerns. "It's not something we've been hearing about," says Susan Pisano, a spokesperson for America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group.

Roughly 38,000 people commit suicide annually, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. More than 90 percent of people who die by suicide have a mental health condition, says Jennifer Mathis, director of programs at the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are mental illnesses commonly associated with suicide.

The HIPAA nondiscrimination rules apply to all employment-based health insurance. The health law extended those rules to the individual insurance market, including plans sold on and off the health insurance marketplaces. All individual market plans must cover mental health and substance use disorder services as well.

Suicide exclusions have historically been more common on the individual market than the group market, say experts. Some plans that are currently offered on the health insurance marketplaces contain these clauses, says Carrie McLean, director of call centers at online health insurance vendor ehealthinsurance.

"I looked at several major carriers' exclusions, and some specifically spelled it out," she says.

Plan language might exclude coverage of injuries related to suicide in all cases or make an exception if the patient's mental health is in question, she says. The language in one plan, for example, said that no benefits would be payable for expenses resulting from "intentionally, self-inflicted bodily harm, whether sane or insane."

Under the mental health parity law, health plans generally have to provide mental health and substance use disorder benefits that are comparable to benefits for medical/surgical care. But if a plan denies coverage following a suicide or suicide attempt, it's probably not a parity issue, according to the Department of Labor.
"In the case of a suicide or attempted suicide, it is generally medical/surgical claims that are involved to treat physical injuries" rather than prescription drugs and therapy that would be covered by mental health parity requirements, the Labor Department spokeswoman said.

Questions about suicide exclusions in individual market plans should be directed to the state department of insurance or the federal Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Labor Department. If someone is enrolled in a group plan that has a suicide exclusion, that person may file an appeal with the health plan.




Source-of-injury exclusions are new to me. I knew that not all plans cover mental health treatment, and that the Affordable Care Law makes coverage mandatoryforits plans. These plans are employer related plans, I see. I suppose the reason plans don't like to cover mental health treatment is that it so often involves very expensive hospital stays, and may be needed again later after a period of recovery. I can see their not covering injuries relating to things like bungee jumping. That is just a foolish activity, to me, and severe back injuries or worse can easily happen. It is clear, though, that if you haven't read your health plan to see its coverages you are running a grave risk. I haven't read every word of mine. There is just too much of it, and insurance language is too much like other “legalese,” so I didn't have the determination to do that. I did read the short cut explanations in the booklet that the plan issued, so I think I understand it all.