| 585 BC | Thales of Greece makes the first known prediction of a solar eclipse. | |
| 1085 | Alfonso VI takes Toledo, Spain from the Muslims. | |
| 1787 | The Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. | |
| 1810 | Argentina declares independence from Napoleonic Spain. | |
| 1851 | Jose Justo de Urquiza of Argentina leads a rebellion against Juan Manuel de Rosas, his former ally. | |
| 1911 | Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico, resigns his office. | |
| 1914 | The British House of Commons passes Irish Home Rule. | |
| 1925 | John Scopes is indicted for teaching Darwinian theory in school. | |
| 1935 | Jesse Owens sets six world records in less than an hour in Ann Arbor, Michigan. | |
| 1946 | Jordan gains independence from Britain. | |
| 1953 | The first atomic cannon is fired in Nevada. |
China is rolling out sweeping brokerage reforms to nurture future global investment banks that officials hope could eventually compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley , a regulatory document showed.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission wants to allow domestic brokerages, which now get most of their money from trading stocks and underwriting new securities, to expand in futures and derivatives, asset management, private banking and private equity, according to a commission document distributed to securities firms earlier in the month.
The commodity commission’s members also voted on Friday to publicly disclose the existence of their investigation soon, an uncommon step that occurs only in the most serious cases. Last year, the agency confirmed that it was investigating the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm that misused customers’ money.
In the JPMorgan matter, the C.F.T.C. will potentially examine, among other things, whether the bank’s trading affected the market for credit derivatives — which lie at the heart of the bank’s trading debacle.
While the agency is not the bank’s front-line regulator, it does have jurisdiction over the derivatives industry. It started tracking the bank’s trading in April, one person said, after reports emerged that a London-based trader was taking large bets in credit derivatives that distorted the market. But it was not until recently that the agency opened a formal investigation.
The participants "portray taxation as a threat to the moral order because they believe taxes deprive deserving hardworking middle class people of dignity, while rewarding others who are undeserving (both rich and poor)," the researchers write this week in the journal Symbolic Interaction. [...]
The interviews in the new study revealed participants associated income taxes as violating the moral principle that hard work should be rewarded, the researchers noted. So rather than being associated with a free-market ideology or a person's own economic interests, at least for these taxpayers, tax hostility was more linked with moral principles.
"When Americans lash out at 'takeovers,' 'massive taxes' and 'bailouts,' they are looking at these issues from the perspective of a hardworking middle class besieged on all sides," Kidder said in a statement. "Tax talk is about dollars, but it is also about a moral sense of what is right."
The repugicans are criticizing the Department of Health and Human Services for signing a $20 million contract with a public relations firm to educate Americans about the preventive health benefits included in the Affordable Care Act. The campaign — mandated by the law — “must describe the importance of prevention while also explaining preventive benefits provided by the healthcare law,” essentially informing the public about the availability of preventive services without additional co-pays.ThinkProgress goes on to list several examples of the shrub educating the public on his new health care laws.
The repugicans touted the benefits of preventive medicine before Obama signed health reform into law and claimed that it could help lower the nation’s skyrocketing health care costs. But they’re now denouncing this campaign as an “unconstitutional” “propaganda” effort
CNN has received a copy of a letter that the Internal Revenue Service will be sending to taxpayers to inform them they will receive a rebate check this summer as part of the recently enacted tax cut law.CNN was given the letter by a Democratic staff member in the House, who said he received it from career IRS employees upset by what they described as its political and congratulatory tone.The following is the letter, entitled "Notice of Status and Amount of Immediate Tax Relief." It is not dated."We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and the shrub signed into law the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which provides long-term tax relief for all Americans who pay income taxes.While one can argue, credibly, that people need to know the details of a health care law that affects them directly, and about which, the repugicans themselves often remind us, people know little of. But why did the shrub need to tell people that he got a tax rebate passed? Surely, people would have noticed it in their own tax returns.
The civil rights movement, once a controversial left-wing fringe, has grown deeply embedded into the fabric of our national story. This is a salutary development, but a problematic one for conservatives, who are the direct political descendants of (and, in the case of some of the older members of the movement, the exact same people as) the strident opponents of the civil rights movement. It has thus become necessary for wing-nuts to craft an alternative story, one that absolves their own ideology of any guilt. The right has dutifully set itself to its task, circulating its convoluted version of history, honing it to the point where it can be repeated by any defensive college repugican in his dorm room.
Congressional hero of the SOPA wars, Senator Wyden, said about cyber security legislation (CISPA and Lieberman-Collins) that is expected to be taken up and passed in early June: "I believe these bills will encourage the development of an industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans' private data. These bills create a cyber industrial complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution."
Furthermore, privacy is awesome -- it lets you be yourself without fear of unjust scrutiny. But, these bills would end meaningful privacy and install meaningful surveillance. But, we can change the game: www.privacyisawesome.com.
CISPA passed the house recently. That seems like a blow, but unless a similar bill passes the Senate, that means nothing. We have one week to kill CISPA indefinitely. The playbook for this is rolling out today. If we can get senators to just stop and think for a minute before they vote on the bill, the clock will run out on it. To do that, we need to call Senate offices in the thousands requesting meeting at and information on Memorial Day events and during the Senators' recess, and get meetings in every state.
We're looking for people who can help keep building the movement for internet freedom, and who want to help stop CISPA.
Thousands of university students have marched through central Mexico
City to protest media coverage that they say favors the candidate of the
former ruling party in upcoming presidential elections.
"Portion sizes have been growing. So have we. The average restaurant meal today is more than four times larger than in the 1950s. And adults are, on average, 26 pounds heavier. If we want to eat healthy, there are things we can do for ourselves and our community: Order the smaller meals on the menu, split a meal with a friend, or, eat half and take the rest home. We can also ask the managers at our favorite restaurants to offer smaller meals."
Getting
parking in New York is pretty hard, so get ready to pay up if you want
your own personal parking spot. How much, you ask? How bout a cool million
bucks:The private garage at 66 E. 11th St. costs six times more than the national-average price of a single-family home.
Buying it would be the same as paying a $115 ticket for illegal parking every day — for 24 years.
For moguls or celebrities, however, the rare commodity of a Manhattan parking space inside their building, with a curb cut at the street, is a huge status symbol and selling point. [...]
The hot space is about 12 feet wide, 23 feet long and more than 15 feet high.
The spot could be “duplexed” if the buyer decides to install an elevator lift so he or she can slide both the Maserati and the Lamborghini in at the same time.
A
group of frat boys celebrating the end of classes got a bit more than
they expected, when the textbooks they were burning caused a fire that
burned down their frat house!"I think some of the guys that were maybe doing an end of year celebration and burning some books or whatever, so we'll look into that," says Sophomore and Pi Kappa Alpha president John Chestnut.
Warning over deep-ocean stowaways
Ancient walking mystery deepens
The researchers found that the amount of lightning correlated with the height of the plume, something they could not test using more limited data collected during an eruption at Alaska’s Mount St Augustine in 2006. This observation is important, says Behnke, because systems to monitor lightning could provide an estimate for the size of an eruption, which is not always easy to assess for remote volcanoes.
During a previous eruption at Mount Redoubt in 1989 and 1990, for example, the size of the plume wasn’t known and a plane nearly crashed after passing through the ash cloud and temporarily losing all power from its engines. Behnke and her colleagues suggest that VHF stations similar to the ones they installed at Mount Redoubt could be used to monitor volcanoes to give early warning of an eruption and an estimate of its size.
Airplanes
are built to withstand bolts of lightning, because strikes on planes
happen now and again. But in 1999, a glider soaring above Dunstable,
England, was struck by a bolt out of the blue -literally, because the
plane was not in a storm- which ripped the craft apart at the seams,
including peeling apart the laminated layers of its surface.Suspicion rapidly settled on the phenomenon known as ‘positive lightning’. Awareness of positive lightning’s significance has gradually increased in recent decades, and it is now believed to comprise up to 5% of all lightning strikes. The negative charge at a storm cell’s base is balanced by a strong positive charge at the cloud’s anvil-shaped top, up to 60,000 feet above the ground. While there is also a positive charge on the ground immediately underneath the storm cell, significant charge differentials can develop between cloud tops and negatively-charged land surfaces much further away. Occasionally these differentials are sufficient to spark a positively charged lightning strike— a huge high-energy arc capable of hitting the ground more than ten miles from the storm itself, often under clear skies and bright sunshine.But what happened to the glider and the two men inside? Find out at Damn Interesting.
Vast energies are required to deliver these bolts from the blue. Research suggests that positive lightning can generate currents and potentials ten times greater than negative strikes: up to 300,000 amps and 1 billion volts, or approximately 300,000.21 gigawatts of power in a single discharge.
Another amazing teen scientist is making headlines for developing advances in cancer research in his after-school hours. Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka from Maryland, winner of the world's largest high school science research competition, developed a test for pancreatic cancer that is not only 28 times cheaper and faster than current tests in place, but also 100 times more sensitive. Astoundingly, the urine and blood test that he developed can detect this type of cancer with 90 percent accuracy.
Two runners-up -- Nicholas Schiefer of Ontario, Canada and Ari Dyckovsky of Virginia -- earned $50,000 prizes for their innovations. Nicholas's "microsearch" research used information like tweets and Facebook status updates to improve search engine capabilities, while Ari looked into the atomic basis for quantum teleportation.
Public
restrooms are notoriously bad in China, so the authorities there are cracking
down with a new "two flies only" rule:Authorities in the Chinese capital have set new standards for public toilets, including a stipulation that they should contain no more than two flies.The third fly will mercilessly hunted down and swatted:
The new rules, published by the commission of city administration, also set standards on odor and cleaning litter bins.
| 1543 | Nicolaus Copernicus publishes proof of a sun-centered solar system. He dies just after publication. | |
| 1607 | Captain Christopher Newport and 105 followers found the colony of Jamestown at the mouth of the James River on the coast of Virginia. | |
| 1610 | Sir Thomas Gates institutes "laws divine moral and marshal, " a harsh civil code for Jamestown. | |
| 1624 | After years of unprofitable operation, Virginia's charter is revoked and it becomes a royal colony. | |
| 1689 | English Parliament passes the Act of Toleration, protecting Protestants. Roman Catholics are specifically excluded from exemption. | |
| 1738 | The Methodist Church is established. | |
| 1764 | Boston lawyer James Otis denounces "taxation without representation," calling for the colonies to unite in opposition to Britain's new tax measures. | |
| 1798 | Believing that a French invasion of Ireland is imminent, Irish nationalists rise up against the British occupation. | |
| 1844 | Samuel Morse taps out the first telegraph message. | |
| 1846 | General Zachary Taylor captures Monterey. | |
| 1861 | General Benjamin Butler declares slaves to be the contraband of war. | |
| 1863 | Bushwackers led by Captain William Marchbanks attack a Federal militia party in Nevada, Missouri. | |
| 1878 | The first American bicycle race is held in Boston. | |
| 1930 | Amy Johnson becomes the first woman to fly from England to Australia. | |
| 1941 | The British battleship Hood is sunk by the German battleship Bismarck. There are only three survivors. | |
| 1951 | Willie Mays begins playing for the New York Giants. | |
| 1961 | Civil rights activists are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. |
Fifty million people are eligible to cast their ballots and voter turnout is expected to be high as two days of voting begin on Wednesday.
The election is the final phase of a tumultuous transition marred by violence, protests and political deadlock, overseen by the ruling military council after a popular uprising ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak last year.
With none of the 13 candidates expected to secure more than half the votes to win outright in the first round, a runoff between the top two is likely in June.
Among the contenders is former foreign minister and Arab League chief Amr Moussa, who is seen as an experienced politician and diplomat but like Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, is accused of belonging to the old
regime.
A year-long probe found 1,800 cases of fake parts in US military aircraft, the Senate Armed Services Committee found.
More than 70% of an estimated one million suspect parts were traced back to China, the report said.
It blamed weaknesses in the US supply chain, and China's failure to curb the counterfeit market.
The failure of a key part could pose safety and national security risks and lead to higher costs for the Pentagon, the committee said.
Nations need food security goals
Ever
wonder what's going through your boss's head when he greets you in the
elevator? Since putting the company president in the hot seat is never a
good idea, we went ahead and did the asking on your behalf. Below, nine
higher-ups weigh in on everything from what makes an employee valuable
to what you may unwittingly be doing to jeopardize your job. Follow
these bigwigs' tips and you just might find yourself climbing the next
rung of the corporate ladder.Before Obama had even lifted a finger [on arriving in office], the CBO was already projecting that the federal deficit would rise to $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2009. The government actually spent less money in 2009 than it was projected to, but the deficit expanded to $1.4 trillion because revenue from taxes fell much further than expected, due to the weak economy and the emergency tax cuts that were part of the stimulus bill.
When Obama took the oath of office, the $789 billion bank bailout had already been approved. Federal spending on unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicare was already surging to meet the dire unemployment crisis that was well under way. See the CBO’s January 2009 budget outlook.
Obama is not responsible for that increase, though he is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill, from the expansion of the children’s’ health-care program and from other appropriations bills passed in the spring of 2009.
If we attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush, we find that spending under Obama grew by about $200 billion over four years, amounting to a 1.4% annualized increase.
After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4% annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.
When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations.
Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich's campaign fund.
A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches' net worth.
Treatment for diabetic patients is a postcode lottery with a massive
variation in quality of care from one region to another, a report has
revealed.The Archdiocese of Washington put an equally alarmist message in the church bulletins at Sunday’s Masses, warning of apocalyptic risk:As Dowd reminds us, the catholic bishops don't really speak for actual American catholics.
“1. Our more than 600 hospitals nationwide, which will need to stop non-catholics at the emergency room door and say, ‘We are only allowed by the government to heal catholics.’
I wasn’t surprised to see the Gallup poll Tuesday showing that 82 percent of U.S. catholics say birth control is morally acceptable. (Eighty-nine percent of all Americans and 90 percent of non-catholics agreed.) Gallup tested the morality of 18 issues, and birth control came out on top as the most acceptable, beating divorce, which garnered 67 percent approval, and “buying and wearing clothing made of animal fur,” which got a 60 percent thumbs-up (more from repugicans, naturally, than Democrats).All they speak for is a Vatican that every four years tries to throw the American election to the repugicans.
Polygamy, cloning humans and having an affair took the most morally offensive spots on the list. “Gay or lesbian relations” tied “having a baby outside of marriage,” with 54 percent approving. That’s in the middle of the list, above a 38 percent score for abortion and below a 59 percent score for “sex between an unmarried man and woman.”
On the opening day of the season, a baseball scout brings a race horse with him to add to the starting lineup.
While traveling through the desert somewhere in north west Africa in his Citroen 2CV , [Emile] is stopped, and told not to go any further due to some military conflicts in the area. Not wanting to actually listen to this advice, he decides to loop around, through the desert, to circumvent this roadblock.
After a while of treading off the beaten path, [Emile] manages to snap a swing arm on his vehicle, leaving him stranded. He decided that the best course of action was to disassemble his vehicle and construct a motorcycle from the parts. This feat would be impressive on its own, but remember, he’s still in the desert and un-prepared. If we’re reading this correctly, he managed to drill holes by bending metal and sawing at it, then un-bending it to be flat again.
Chimpanzees 'have personalities'
The fish, which are 1.5 meters (5 feet) long and currently cost 20,000 pounds ($31,600) each, are designed to swim like real fish and are fitted with sensors to pick up pollutants leaking from ships or undersea pipelines.
They swim independently, co-ordinate with each other, and transmit their readings back to a shore station up to a kilometer away.
"Chemical sensors fitted to the fish permit real-time, in-situ analysis, rather than the current method of sample collection and dispatch to a shore based laboratory," said Luke Speller, a scientist at British consultancy BMT Group who led the project.
