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Zorro's JournalPG&E to close Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear power plant
Source: LA Times
California’s last nuclear power plant will be phased out by 2025, under a joint proposal announced Tuesday morning by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and labor and environmental groups.
Under the proposal, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County would be retired by PG&E after its current Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating licenses expire in November 2024 and August 2025.
The power produced by Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors would be replaced with investment in a greenhouse-gas-free portfolio of energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage, PG&E said in a statement.
The proposal is contingent on a number of regulatory actions, including approvals from the California Public Utilities Commission.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-diablo-canyon-nuclear-20160621-snap-story.html
The times they are a'changin'.
Ex-L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca has Alzheimer’s disease, but he still faces a 6-month prison term
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, but he nonetheless should serve time in prison for lying to federal investigators during a probe into jail abuses by sheriff’s deputies, the U.S. attorney’s office has concluded.
In a court filing released late Monday, Assistant U.S. Atty. Brandon Fox confirmed rumors about Baca’s health, writing that an expert on Alzheimer’s had evaluated the former sheriff for the government and verified the diagnosis.
Calling Baca “a study in contrasts” for his high achievements in office and the ethical failures that were his downfall, as well as “a physically fit 74-year-old who is able to function in his daily life,” Fox urged U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson to sentence Baca to six months in prison. Baca is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
The punishment, Fox wrote, is “appropriate after taking into account all sides of defendant Baca, including his crime, his current health and his likely prognosis.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-baca-alzheimers-20160620-snap-story.html
Venezuela’s Season of Starvation
When it comes to buying food on his government-mandated day of the week, William, a 44-year-old farmer, doesn’t mess around. At sunset each Tuesday, William, a father of two, joins a line of dozens of people outside the Unicasa supermarket in central La Victoria, 34 miles west of Caracas. William and a friend spend the night taking turns sleeping on the street, with one of them standing watch at all times to guard against robbers, line-cutters, and rats. When it rains, they take shelter under a palm tree, waiting for dawn. Their weekly ritual is the only way to guarantee a good spot in line the next morning, when the supermarket begins distributing basic foodstuffs like rice and cooking oil.
When morning arrives, William and his friend stand in line under the piercing sun, enduring temperatures of up to 95 degrees. At noon, they finally pass through a cordon of police and National Guardsmen to enter the supermarket and claim their prize for 18 hours of hell: the right to purchase two kilograms of cornmeal and one kilogram of pasta. “I am doing this because I have children,” William says. In the old days, he always voted for President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. “How can this be happening? We have the world’s largest oil reserves, but we don’t have food.”
Many Venezuelans are asking those very same questions. The food shortage, precipitated by Chávez’s economic policies and a precipitous drop in oil revenue, is the worst in the country’s history. It has led the government to limit purchases of basic foodstuffs and set their prices. Nonetheless, basic goods such as coffee, sugar, rice, milk, pasta, toilet paper, hand soap, and detergent remain impossible to find. According to Datanalisis, the country’s leading polling agency, over 80 percent of regulated foodstuffs have vanished from store shelves. As a result, many Venezuelans now make do with a single meal a day, or resort to rustling through garbage bins to find food. Others have begun hunting pigeons, dogs, and cats, as Ramón Muchacho, the mayor of the Chacao borough in Caracas tweeted.
Maduro, who succeeded Chávez in March 2013 and may face a recall vote this year, seems to have no answers for the unfolding crisis. And as temperatures rise, shortages deepen, and inflation explodes, his tenure is increasingly at risk thanks to the shortsighted economic controls and state expropriations of private companies championed by his mentor, whose dreams of creating a Socialist state are now in tatters.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-season-starvation-210000119.html
Angry Assange starts 5th year cooped in London embassy
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange started his fifth year camped out in the Ecuadoran embassy in London on Sunday, an occasion his supporters were to mark with events celebrating whistleblowers.
Supporters said they were planning to stage songs, speeches and readings in several cities worldwide at 1830 GMT.
Assange was due to speak to his followers on a live video stream from inside the embassy.
The 44-year-old is wanted for questioning over a 2010 rape allegation in Sweden but has been inside Ecuador's UK mission for four full years in a bid to avoid extradition.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/angry-assange-starts-5th-cooped-london-embassy-053838175.html
The Trump effect: Could Arizona go blue for the first time in 20 years?
If there is one place where the dramas and subplots of Campaign 2016 collide, it is across the sprawling and scorching desert state of Arizona.
Here lives Donald Trump’s restive base of white voters unsettled by the country’s social transformation and fired up to dismantle Washington’s power structure. Here also lies the Democrats’ sleeping giant — an estimated 350,000 Latinos who are not registered to vote but who could mobilize against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee over his incendiary rhetoric.
Then there are the politicians. One senator, Jeff Flake (R), is a vocal Trump critic sounding the alarm about an electoral wipeout. The other, John McCain (R), alternates awkwardly between his maverick persona and a Trump apologist as he navigates an unexpectedly difficult reelection race. Also on the ballot is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Trump backer whose long crusade against undocumented immigrants makes him a lightning rod.
This leaves the Democrats — who have withered away as the state took a hard-right turn in the Obama era — sensing their best chance in two decades to turn Arizona and its 11 electoral votes blue. They think that Trump, who campaigned in Phoenix on Saturday, is energizing a new generation of Latino voters who haven’t participated in elections before.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-trump-effect-could-arizona-go-blue-for-the-first-time-in-20-years/2016/06/18/a1ffe53e-34aa-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html
Pentagon-sanctioned hackers home in on 138 security gaps
Source: Boston Herald
High-tech hackers brought in by the Pentagon to breach Defense Department websites were able to burrow in and find 138 different security gaps, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said yesterday.
The so-called white-hat hackers were turned loose on five public Pentagon internet pages and were offered various bounties if they could find unique vulnerabilities. The Pentagon says 1,410 hackers took part in the challenge and the first gap was identified just 13 minutes after the hunt began.
Overall, they found 1,189 vulnerabilities, but a review by the Pentagon determined that only 138 were valid and unique.
The experiment cost $150,000. Of that, about half was paid out to the hackers as bounties, including one who received the maximum prize of $15,000 for submitting a number of security gaps. Others received varying amounts, to as low as $100.
Read more: http://www.bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2016/06/pentagon_sanctioned_hackers_home_in_on_138_security_gaps
Donald Trump Embraces Donors, Super PACs He Once Decried
When it comes to raising money, Donald Trump is morphing into the very kind of bootlicking presidential candidate he’s insisted — over and again — that he wasn’t, isn’t and wouldn’t become.
On one hand, it’s hard to blame Trump.
The real estate mogul, after all, is sprinting headlong into the buzz saw that is Hillary Clinton’s big-money machine — a machine composed not only of her own moneyed campaign, but allied political committees, super PACs and nonprofit groups that are together raising hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes from billionaires (such as George Soros) who are even more billionaire-y than The Donald.
Consider that last week alone, Team Clinton aired about 3,400 ad spots — mostly eviscerating Trump — on broadcast and national cable television, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from media tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG. The Trump campaign aired no such TV ads at all, while a supportive super PAC managed fewer than 100.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-embraces-donors-super-144819464.html
How Hillary Clinton went from loser to winner
Before she won this year’s Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton was a loser. Her defeat by Barack Obama in 2008 was painful and public. She had entered the campaign with an aura of inevitability that disintegrated torturously with every primary loss and superdelegate defection. As journalist John Heileman summed it up at the end, “Her legacy has been tarnished, her status degraded, and her reputation diminished.”
Eight years later, Clinton is back on top. Analysts have chalked up her rise to grit, political acumen and the backing of the Democratic establishment. But as elemental to her resurgence as any other factor is Clinton’s exemplary approach to failure. For many a politician, a high-stakes rout can be career-ending. Clinton’s dexterity in defeat holds lessons for anyone faced with coming back from a harsh setback — that is to say, for all of us.
A Hillary Clinton primer on the art of losing would have several tenets. First, nurse your bruises in private; jettison any public evidence of the emotional detritus of defeat, including frustration, embarrassment and bitterness. En route to her 2008 concession, Clinton’s most severe stumble was a shocking third-place finish in the Iowa caucus. After letting a tear roll down her cheek during a public appearance at a New Hampshire diner, Clinton regained her composure and was focused, substantive and even witty at a debate. She expounded on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and managed a chuckle when Obama called her “likable enough.” Anyone who has to address a crowd right after hearing bad news would do well to channel Clinton’s poise in that debate.
Her feelings remained firmly in check six months later when nary a smirk, never mind a tear, crossed her face in a soaring concession speech to supporters. Whatever family, friends and staff did to get her past campaign heartbreak was neither seen nor heard. Although leaders are expected to get emotional when reacting to tragedies, they cannot be seen to grieve over blows to their own ambitions. Her equanimity in those early post-concession days convinced Team Obama that she could handle the emotional jujitsu of helping propel his campaign. When the person who is fired, passed over or rejected keeps cool, she avoids overlaying extra guilt and awkwardness on an already fraught dynamic and makes it easier for the winner to pull her back into the fold.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-nossel-hillary-clinton-loser-20160617-snap-story.html
Sanders lists his demands and declines to praise Clinton — but how much leverage does he have left?
Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign ended with what had become his standard pitch in recent months as his odds of defeating Hillary Clinton dimmed: a long list of demands for the Democratic Party, a host of thinly veiled insults against party leaders and no recognition for the woman who outdistanced him in the popular vote and delegates en route to clinching the presidential nomination.
Sanders never mentioned Clinton’s historic accomplishment except by inference when he said that his campaign henceforth would be about “defeating Donald Trump.” He never actually said that Clinton had defeated him, or even that he was bowing out of the race, despite the fact that there are no more primaries to contest.
The absence of typical political grace by the defeated candidate was reminiscent of another insurgent inveighing against the establishment: Democrat Jerry Brown never got around to endorsing Bill Clinton in 1992 after the future president became his party’s nominee.
But if Sanders’ pitch Thursday night was consistent with his entire pursuit, it also came after his power seemed to have ebbed.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-bernie-sanders-analysis-20160617-snap-story.html
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