Is Your Neighbor a Democrat? Obama Has an App for That. Screenshots taken from two different searches of the Obama for America app, which displays the names and addresses of nearby Democratic voters. For each targeted address, the app displays the first name, age and gender of the voter or voters who live there: "Lori C., 58 F, Democrat. " All this is public information, which campaigns have long given to volunteers. But you no longer have to schedule a visit to a field office and wait for a staffer to hand you a clipboard and a printed-out list of addresses. With the Obama app, getting a glimpse of your neighbor's political affiliation can take seconds.
While The New York Times dubbed [2] the app "the science-fiction dream of political operatives," some of the voters who appear in the app are less enthusiastic about it. "I do think it's something useful for them, but it's also creepy," said Lori Carena, 58, a long-time Brooklyn resident, when she was shown the app. Even low-tech tools used to distribute voter data can upset some voters. Why did 28,000 rivers in China suddenly disappear? For years, China claimed to hold an estimated 50,000 rivers within its borders. Now, more than half of them have abruptly vanished.
Last week, China's Ministry of Water Resources announced the results of a three-year survey of the country’s waterways, revealing startling declines in water supply. According to the census, there were 22,909 rivers in China as of 2011, each covering an area of at least 100 square kilometers. That marks a decrease of about 28,000 from the government's previous estimates, raising fears among environmentalists and putting Beijing on the defensive. China's longest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, have each seen declining water levels in recent years, but the government's survey — its most comprehensive to date — may shed new light on the breadth and gravity of the country's crisis.
"pollution is destroying the limited resources we have" Together, they form a potentially disastrous combination. Dead pigs and cancer villages "An emergency relief effort" Paris Is Now Using Tiny Black Sheep to Mow Its Grass, Adorably - Adam Clark Estes. Parisiens did a funny thing on Wednesday. As spring flowers started to peek above the soil and the sun rode higher in the sky, a number of the city dwellers flocked to greet their newest lawnmowers: a small group of shaggy black sheep. As the latest effort in Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë's grand plan to make the City of Lights a greener place — the local government's calling the effort "eco-grazing" — four two-foot-tall sheep from the Breton breed will live and, more importantly, eat in a half acre patch of park in the city's 19th Arrondissement, the home of the Conservatoire de Paris, one of Europe's premier music schools.
In October, they'll find a warmer clime. It's honestly a pretty sensible idea. For centuries, if not millennia, grazing animals like sheep and cows have been used both to trim and to fertilize fields. In fact, many of the oldest urban parks were originally populated by farm animals, sometimes just during the day when their owners went into to town to do business.
Starving Sea Lion Pups Still Washing Up by the Hundreds in California | Wired Science. Rescued sea lion pups at the Marine Mammal Care Center (MMCC/Photo taken under authorization of Stranding Agreement and MMPA/ESA Permit No. 932-1905/MA-009526) There’s no indication the ocean plans to stop littering Southern California’s shores with the tiny bodies of starving sea lion pups any time soon. For three months, these frail animals have been found stranded along California’s waterfront. As of Apr. 4, roughly 1,100 pups have entered marine mammal rehabilitation centers in the area. They likely represent a fraction of the animals in trouble offshore. “We’re still getting strandings of animals at kind of equal rates to what they had been,” said Sarah Wilkin, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine mammal stranding coordinator for the state of California. “We don’t know how long the event is going to go on.” Last week, NOAA declared the mass stranding an “Unusual Mortality Event.”
But there hasn’t been an El Niño event in years. Trickle-Down Taxation: Maryland Residents Facing 'Rain Tax' Video no longer available We're sorry, but the video you are trying to watch is no longer available. In 1965, disgusted by what he viewed as confiscatory taxation by the British authorities -- a supertax instituted by the Labor government was taking 95 percent of top earners' income -- George Harrison wrote a bitter song from the perspective of a maniacal tax collector: If you drive a car, I'll tax the street, If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat, If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet. But even Harrison's "Taxman" never conceived of a levy on the weather, something currently being instituted in Maryland. Some background: The Chesapeake Bay faces a serious pollution problem. This solution is being called -- with the combined goodwill these two concepts evoke -- a rain tax.
How the money will be spent is another murky situation; for the full details, head over to The Gazette. 10 Weird Tax Laws Colorado: Some Food Packaging Not Essential Share Facebook.
St. Louis Landfill Fire | Politics News. What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill - Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Research finds invasive kudzu bugs may pose greater threat than previously thought. Research finds invasive kudzu bugs may pose greater threat than previously thought Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Researchers found kudzu bugs were able to feed exclusively on soybeans, reach maturity and reproduce. This means the crop pests could spread much further than previously thought. Credit: Alejandro Del Pozo-Valdivia, North Carolina State University The invasive kudzu bug has the potential to be a major agricultural pest, causing significant damage to economically important soybean crops.
Conventional wisdom has held that the insect pests will be limited to areas in the southern United States, but new research from North Carolina State University shows that they may be able to expand into other parts of the country. Kudzu bugs ( Megacopta cribraria ) are native to Asia, and were first detected in the U.S. in Georgia in 2009. Eggs laid in the spring hatch into a first generation, which we'll call "Generation A.
" North Carolina State University: