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Friday, 28 August 2009
1. Police: Kidnap suspect fathered victim's kids
San Francisco Chronicle
August 28, 2009
ANTIOCH -- Phillip Craig Garrido was already known as an oddball who said he could channel the voice of God through a makeshift box, but on Thursday, the eccentricity took on an aura of horror.
Eighteen years ago, authorities said, he kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard on her way to catch a school bus in South Lake Tahoe. Ever since then, they said, he kept her prisoner in a squalid backyard compound near Antioch, raping her and fathering two daughters by her - the elder of whom is now 15....
...Dugard, now 29, was found in such living conditions was appalling, said El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar, whose agency is leading the investigation. But more important, he said, was the fact that she was found at all.
"We're very happy to be in front of you under these circumstances - Jaycee Dugard was found alive," Kollar said....
Phillip Garrido is being held without bail in the El Dorado County Jail on suspicion of kidnapping, rape by force, lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, sexual penetration and conspiracy. Nancy Garrido was booked on suspicion of conspiracy and kidnapping and held on $4.2 million bail....
The Garridos were arrested Wednesday after Phillip Garrido came to a state parole office in Concord, accompanied by his wife, a woman - who turned out to be Dugard - and Dugard's two daughters, officials said.
Garrido was asked to come in because UC BERKELEY POLICE OFFICER ALLISON JACOBS had become suspicious after questioning him about handing out his religious materials on campus without getting clearance first, authorities said.
"Diligent questioning" and further investigation by state authorities and Concord police revealed that the woman was Dugard, state officials said....
[This story appeared in dozens of sources, including Oakland Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, and the San Jose Mercury. Full Story
2. Microbe Metabolism Harnessed to Produce Fuel
Live Science
August 28, 2009
Microbes such as the yeast we commonly use in baking bread and fermenting beer are now being engineered to produce the next generation of biofuels. JAY KEASLING, A PROFESSOR OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, is leading a team of scientists in an effort to manipulate the chemistry within bacteria so they will produce fuel from sugar.
At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), one of three research centers set up by the Department of Energy for the research and development of biofuels, Keasling is utilizing synthetic biology techniques involving chemistry, genetic engineering and molecular biology. Foundational work being done at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), where Keasling is director, will underpin the research at JBEI. SynBERC is funded by the National Science Foundation.
"For the most part, genetic engineering is done by taking components, like genes, from nature and using them," Keasling said. "But nature designed them for a different purpose, so the point of synthetic biology is to have well-characterized components that we can easily assemble to engineer biology and do genetic manipulation in a much easier way."... Full Story
3. US: California's higher education apocalypse
University World News
August 30, 2009
The fiscal crisis in California, the world's eighth largest economy, seems destined to jeopardize the integrity - and future - of higher education in the state.
Events escalated at the beginning of the state's new fiscal year on 1 July when the optimistic budget package signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in February proved to be untenable.
Without anticipated income and tax revenues, California's $24 billion budget deficit now requires draconian measures. To wit, the state has voted to cut $16 billion from its programmers and beg, borrow or steal the remaining $8 billion from municipal and state coffers.
The two university networks - the University of California and the California State University - expect to have their budgets cut by 20%, from $3.61 billion to $2.79 billion in 2009-10....
...the situation at UC has proved to be more equanimous. System-wide furloughs, approved by the Board of Regents, are expected to save the 10-campus institution an estimated $813 million. The remaining shortfall of $335 million will be met through various measures including student fee increases, debt refinancing and administrative cuts in the Office of the President.
Referring to the cuts as a "short-term solution", UC PRESIDENT MARK G YUDOF noted they were, "just one step toward finding the best ways to ensure long-term excellence and access for students and everyone we serve. We're doing all we can to minimize the impact of these cuts on the quality of all we do"....
All this, explains RUSSELL GOULD, CHAIR OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS, is necessary to avoid "limping along like this from budget cut to budget cut".
It is debatable whether the state's system of higher education will ever be able to bounce back from these cuts. As JOHN AUBREY DOUGLASS OF THE CENTER FOR STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION AT UC BERKELEY remarked: "It takes a long time to build these institutions, but they can be ripped apart very quickly and then it's really hard for them to recover."
While the national recession has had a huge impact on the situation in California, the state has itself to blame for its budgetary crisis. Apart from ambitious and unsustainable spending - while steadfastly refusing to raise taxes - the state has been struck hard by high unemployment and reduced personal income.... Full Story
4. CNN Highlights Dangers of Obama’s Deficit: ‘Taxes That Would Make a Scandinavian Revolt’
CNN
August 28, 2009
Amid all of the tributes to Ted Kennedy’s lengthy career of expanding the scope of government and its cost to taxpayers, CNN’s American Morning on Friday dug up a six-week old op-ed from the Tax Policy Center’s Len Burman warning that massive trillion-dollar deficits are a catastrophe that could lead to the end of the U.S. as a great power “or even a mediocre one.”
With the on-screen graphic reading “Higher Taxes Inevitable?” business correspondent Christine Romans announced to viewers “I’ve just got to tell you about this handwringing that's happening, and what it's going to mean for you. We're spending vastly more than we take in. We will for the foreseeable future. We're racking up these deficits, we pay interest on all of this debt.”...
Next year, our debt will exceed 60 percent of our total economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP). We would not meet the standards Poland and Estonia needed to qualify for admission into the European Union....
With these massive deficits, rates will eventually rise to reflect the growing riskiness of government bonds. BERKELEY ECONOMIST DAVID ROMER has shown that investors may, overnight, go from being willing to lend to the government at low rates to being afraid to hold T-bills at any price. If this happens, the rise in rates could be extreme - not just a percentage point or two. Full Story
5. Lawmakers kill bill limiting UC, CSU exec pay
San Francisco Chronicle
August 28, 2009
California lawmakers killed a bill Thursday that would have kept public universities from raising executives' pay in hard economic times - even though it would have meant "significant savings" of several million dollars, according to a state analysis.
The issue of executive pay at the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND CALIFORNIA State University is controversial at a time when both school systems are reducing courses, raising fees, cutting faculty pay and laying off staff.
Senate Bill 217 was supposed to force thousands of executives earning more than $200,000 "to share the burden during difficult budget years," said its author, Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco....
Finally, they said, they should be in charge of salaries. The Assembly Appropriations Committee's analysis of the bill shows that, in the end, it was that argument that persuaded committee Chairman Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, to bury the bill without a vote. Full Story
6. Incurring Deficits Through Haste and Waste
Real Clear Politics
August 28, 2009
The 10-year deficit is going to be $2 trillion higher than earlier predicted, says the Obama administration even as it proceeds with the kind of reckless spending objectives that have already given us plans for a $221,000 condom study at Indiana University....
The recession does seem to be going away, at least temporarily, but the $800 billion "stimulus" has likely had little to do with it, according to a number of central bankers and other economists who recently met at Jackson, Wyo. Their view, says a story in The Wall Street Journal, is that the spending has been too slow in arriving and that the package was poorly crafted....
The economists at the Wyoming session were also plenty worried about the long-term deficits. One of them, ALAN AUERBACH OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, is quoted as saying they could cause "serious economic disruptions." As you might guess, Republican members of Congress have been using even tougher language. One wrote in Politico about growing debt throwing the "economy and future generations into the abyss of stagnant growth and national decline" and said things would become far worse if Democrats enacted an Obama health-care plan estimated by nonpartisan sources to cost $1 trillion over the next 10 years....
In the end, because it derives from the same kind of ideological hubris and political irresponsibility as the stimulus package, this plan will likely do about as much to improve health care as the condom study at Indiana will do to lower the unemployment rate, and we simply cannot afford it. Full Story
7. Fashion blogger's Google suit seen as weak
San Francisco Chronicle
August 28, 2009
The blogger who anonymously tarred a fashion model as a "skank" before being outed by Google Inc. under court order generated considerable public outrage when she announced plans to sue the company for $15 million, but few lawyers other than her own believe she has a case....
As Port's name quickly spread throughout the tabloids, she decided to fire back. Her attorney, Salvatore Strazzullo, told the New York Daily News Port plans to charge that Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity."...
"It will be a very difficult case to prove," said CHRIS HOOFNAGLE, A LECTURER AT THE UC BERKELEY LAW SCHOOl who focuses on information privacy.
There are two major problems with the approach, he said. First, while there's a legal obligation of trust between doctors and patients or lawyers and clients, no such inherent understanding between a blogger and a free online service has been recognized by the courts.
Second, even if Port does successfully argue that such a relationship existed, Google can claim that its duty was limited - in the same way that a lawyer can break his confidentiality obligation to prevent a crime. The company could maintain that it complied by not revealing Port's identity up until the point it was ordered to do so by the court.... Full Story
8. COMMENTARY: Promising SXSW Panel Proposals
Electronic Frontier Foundation
In the past few years, interesting conversations about new media and innovation have taken place at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival. Voting for the panels to be featured in 2010 is taking place until September 4 -- here are a few proposals that we think will yield interesting discussions:
A panel titled "Reading ReInvented: Can You Steal this Book?" organized by JASON SCHULTZ AT THE UC BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW seeks greater clarity on the future of the book -- a topic in serious need of attention from the smart and creative in light of Amazon's remote deletions on the Kindle, concerns with Google Book Search, and more. The panel proposal includes some interesting, open-ended questions, including "Who owns what we read?" and "What will libraries look like?"... Full Story
9. Commentary: Does Obama care about New Orleans?
CNN
Special to CNN--New Orleans, hit so hard by what so many (including President Obama in his Sunday interview with the local newspaper) still see fit to describe, mistakenly, as a natural disaster, is making remarkable progress, while the agency that so disastrously failed at building a protective system mandated by Congress -- the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- may be making some of the same mistakes in rebuilding that system. And the White House, for the second consecutive administration, seems not to care.
Me? I'm a humorist, a comic actor, a sometime musician-filmmaker-novelist-blogger. What the hell do I know about what happened to the city I love?...
While the national media packed up and moved away after the initial orgasm of anger at FEMA, the local media reported something remarkable: The Corps was claiming that the flooding was due to the "overtopping" of its levees and floodwalls, while two teams of pro-bono forensic investigators were finding evidence that no overtopping had occurred.
As the Corps started denigrating these investigators, they kept digging, and kept coming up with the real story, available now for all to see (though all too few have) as the ILIT report from the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and the Team Louisiana report from Louisiana State University.
Their conclusions: The "hurricane protection system" built by the Corps had serious design and construction flaws, baked into the system over 40 years under administrations of both parties, that caused catastrophic failure in more than 50 locations under storm surge conditions markedly less than the system was advertised to withstand....
President Obama, who has mainly limited his comments about New Orleans to feel-good boilerplate, did pledge to make good on President Bush's promise on that eerie, floodlit night in a deserted Jackson Square in 2005, to rebuild New Orleans better and stronger. But he has yet to actively intervene to make sure New Orleans gets state-of-the-art flood protection and robust and timely coastal wetland reconstruction. Like President Bush, President Obama so far seems to be acting as if just saying it makes it so. Full Story
10. Cal starts true freshman who's truly short
San Francisco Chronicle
August 28, 2009
BERKELEY -- Isi Sofele became accustomed to the routine during his time at Cottonwood High in Salt Lake City. College recruiters showed up tempted by Sofele's speed and flashy statistics (1,436 yards rushing as a junior and 1,920 more as a senior) - and departed after verifying another number (his 5-foot-7 height).
So there was an unmistakable sense of satisfaction in Sofele's voice Thursday, as he spoke about CAL'S DECISION TO PLAY HIM AS A TRUE FRESHMAN. He will start on the kickoff and punt coverage teams (as the "gunner") and might see action on kickoff returns....
He wanted to play in the Pac-10 and received scholarship offers from Cal, Washington and Washington State. Several schools, such as Arizona State, expressed interest until they saw him in person and realized he really is, well, short.
"A lot of people were scared," he said. "They came to our school, looked at me and said, 'He's too small, he's too skinny.' Cal gave me a chance, and I came out here and proved them right." Full Story
11. Sweet Crude: A Virsana Prods. and Verite Coffee presentation.By John Anderson
Variety
A movie about crime and shame, "Sweet Crude" is also a classic example of urgent, righteous-indignation agitprop cinema that succeeds in being not just angry, but art. Commercial prospects for this look at the cruel corporate exploitation of the Niger Delta will depend on how cannily its producers/promoters can frontload "Sweet Crude's" unusual assets -- d.p. Sean Porter's painterly shooting, Julie Wolf's funk-ethereal music and helmer Sandy Cioffi's frighteningly gentle narration, all of which blend toseductive psychological effect, suggesting gossamer dreams about paradise lost, with an undertone of unrefined fury.
After 50 years and $700 billion in oil sucked out of the ground by Royal Dutch Shell and its co-conspirator, Chevron, the Niger Delta is among the most polluted places on Earth, says UC BERKELEY GEOGRAPHY PROFESSOR MICHAEL WATTS, Cioffi's most astute talking head. Watts clarifies something else essential about Nigeria: The exploited African nation is "a very shaky, rickety federation" that isn't a natural nation at all, but has always been a ripe candidate for divide-and-conquer colonialism. Full Story
12. Fall arts: Shocking images of Abu Ghraib inspire art exhibit
Oakland Tribune
August 28, 2009
From the horrors of Abu Ghraib to images created in post-World War II Japan, Bay Area museums and galleries will be offering some provocative and challenging exhibits this fall.
The most gripping show of the season arrives Sept. 23 at the BERKELEY ART MUSEUM. "Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series" will feature a selection from Botero's acclaimed works illustrating abuse at the infamous military prison in Iraq.
This isn't the first time Botero's paintings have visited the Bay Area. In 2007, following "Abu Ghraib's" first American museum showing in Washington, D.C., crowds inundated UC BERKELEY'S DOE LIBRARY to view the blistering images and meet the silver-haired artist.... Full Story