Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Black on white hate crime in The Bronx do the race hustlers care?

EXCLUSIVE: MAN BEATEN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT IN BRONX NEIGHBORHOOD



Carolina Leid has the exclusive from Bedford Park.
William King has lived in his Bronx neighborhood for 40 years, and since 1974 he has felt safe - that is until Saturday afternoon when he was brutally beaten in broad daylight. The vicious encounter was caught on home surveillance camera.

"I got a cut above over my eyelid, and the side of my face is numb - I can't open my mouth that well and I had a lump the size of a baseball on the side of my head," says King.

The incident happened near the corner of Briggs Avenue and East 197th Street in Bedford Park - not in the wee hours of the morning, but at 2 in the afternoon on a beautiful, bright and busy day.

One man pounded the 67-year-old, while another acted as a lookout - both were left empty-handed.

"I believe it was a racial attack - they weren't trying to rob me, I had money on me and my wallet and all. They weren't trying to rob me," adds King.

King works as a facility maintenance clerk for a law firm, and teaches Sunday School at Our Lady of Refuge. His neighbors say the video is so hard to watch.

"I'm a believer in God, that he watches over me, but sometimes you have to watch out for the fools, and there are some fools in this neighborhood," says Diana Monroe.

"That's really sad - that's desperation in my opinion," says Elizabeth Sing.

King says that he believes the suspects are animals.

"They're not human - they're not human at all," he says.

If you have any tips on the suspect or the assault, police are urging the public to call Crime Stoppers at 1800 577 TIPS

A special place in Hell is reserved for these two

Parents face murder charges in death of infant in Lakeland


Roy Stephens, left, and Ruby Stephens have been charged with first-degree murder in the death of their 22-day-old infant in Lakeland. POLK COUNTY SHERIFFS OFFICE

Two parents have been charged with first-degree murder in the death of their 22-day-old infant in Lakeland.
Betsey Kee Stephens was found unresponsive in her car seat last week in the parking lot of Golden Corral, 4705 U.S. 98 N., when her parents — Ruby Angeline Stephens, 23, and Roy Allen Stephens, 48 — went inside to eat, police said.
A medical examiner determined the infant died of malnutrition as a result of starvation, and the parents were taken into custody, police said.
Police said the parents, who had driven to Lakeland from their home in Tennyson, Indiana, with their three children to visit family, called 911 from the parking lot about 6:10 p.m. after checking on the infant and getting no response.
A preliminary investigation indicated the girl had died at least 3 1⁄2 hours before the mother called 911, police said.
The girl’s siblings, a 1-year-old boy and 2-year-old girl, are in the custody of the Florida Department of Children and Families but appeared to be in good health, police said.

87% of new Obamacare users given federal aid.

Tax dollars at work: 87% of new Obamacare users given federal aid

BY   

Some 87 percent of people who just signed up for Obamacare are getting financial assistance to lower their premiums, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
That is a jump from 80 percent during the last open enrollment period.
The department did not say how much it was offering to new Obamcare enrollees or what the total bill to taxpayers would be.
RELATED: Doctors demand Feds provide birth control access to all women From HHS:
A report released by the Department of Health and Human Services today provides the first detailed analysis of enrollment in the Marketplaces for the first month of the 2015 open enrollment period. About 87 percent of people who selected health insurance plans through HealthCare.gov for coverage beginning Jan. 1, 2015 were determined eligible for financial assistance to lower their monthly premiums, compared to 80 percent of enrollees who selected plans over a similar period last year. In addition, more than 4 million people in both the state and federal Marketplaces signed up for the first time or reenrolled in coverage for 2015 during the first month of open enrollment. That includes more than 3.4 million people who selected a plan in the 37 states that are using the HealthCare.gov platform for 2015, and more than 600,000 consumers who selected plans in the 14 states that are operating their own Marketplace platform for 2015.
Today’s report includes data through December 15 for the 37 states using the HealthCare.gov platform, and through December 13 for 12 states and the District of Columbia that are using their own Marketplace platforms. Data for California are through December 14. Data for automatic reenrollments are not yet available in the vast majority of states, so today’s report does not fully capture the number of people who selected plans leading up to the deadline for Jan. 1, 2015 coverage. In particular, the automatic reenrollment process for the 37 states using the HealthCare.gov platform began on December 16 and was completed for the vast majority of consumers on December 18.
HHS also released a Weekly Enrollment Snapshot that captures more recent enrollment activity in the 37 states using the HealthCare.gov platform. The Weekly Snapshot shows that from November 15 to December 26, nearly 6.5 million consumers selected a plan or were automatically reenrolled.
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Detailed findings for HealthCare.gov states through December 15:
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More than 3.4 million people selected a plan through December 15 in the 37 states that are using the HealthCare.gov platform for 2015, including Oregon and Nevada. Of those:
87 percent selected a plan with financial assistance compared to 80 percent in the early months of the first open enrollment period.
33 percent were under 35 years of age compared to 29 percent in the early months of the first open enrollment period.
Nearly 1 million consumers selected a plan in the three days leading up to December 15. That is almost one third (28 percent) of total plan selections from November 15 through December 15.
Of the 3.4 million plan selections, 48 percent (1.6 million) reenrolled in a Marketplace plan and 52 percent (1.8 million) signed up for the first time.
The most recent Weekly Enrollment Snapshot with data available through December 26 can be found here.
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Detailed findings for the 14 states using state based Marketplace enrollment platforms:
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More than 600,000 consumers selected plans in the 14 states that are operating their own Marketplace platform for 2015.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.
“We’re pleased that nationwide, millions of people signed up for Marketplace coverage starting January 1. The vast majority were able to lower their costs even further by getting tax credits, making a difference in the bottom lines of so many families,” HHS Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell said. “Interest in the Marketplace has been strong during the first month of open enrollment. We still have a ways to go and a lot of work to do before February 15, but this is an encouraging start.” 

Lightpaper

Is this the end of the bulb? The 'lightpaper' that can turn ANYTHING into a light


  • Team can print sheets of 'paper' infused with tiny LEDs
  • When current runs through the diodes, they light up
  • Can be applied to walls, and even printed onto any shaped object

It could mean the end for lightbulbs - and turn any object in your home into a light.
Researchers have revealed lightpaper, a way to print sheets of 'paper' infused with tiny LEDs.
They say it can be applied to walls, and even printed onto other objects - turning anything into a light. 
Scroll down for video 
 Idaho researchers have revealed lightpaper, a way to print sheets of 'paper' infused with tiny LEDs - and it can even be used to print wallpaper that doubles as a light.
Lightpaper is manufactured by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and printing them out on a conductive layer. It can even be used as wallpaper
Lightpaper is manufactured by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and printing them out on a conductive layer. It can even be used as wallpaper

HOW IT WORKS 

Lightpaper is manufactured by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and printing them out on a conductive layer. 
That object is then sandwiched between two other layers and sealed. 
The tiny diodes are about the size of a red blood cell, and randomly dispersed on the material. 
When current runs through the diodes, they light up. 
The breakthrough has been likened to the emergence of 3D printing, and the firm behind it admits even it isn't sure how it will be used. 
The world's thinnest light, it is printed and flexible, Rohini, the firm behind it says.
'Today's lighting methods require soldering LED to circuit boards - now you can just print light on what you want'.
The firm has shown off wallpaper , car logos and even snowboards with display using the paper built in.
'With Lightpaper it's more of a platform of light that we don't even know how it's going to be used,' Rohinni CMO Nick Smoot told Fastco.
'All we know is that we're trying to unlock the ability to create light.'

Never forget who Al Sharpton is...

Posted By Jean Kaufman On December 30, 2014 
The case of Tawana Brawley [1], which was a cause célèbre in the late 1980s, fused several issues that have come to the fore again lately in various news stories: race mongering, false accusations of sexual assault, and the presence and influence of Al Sharpton.
Tawana Brawley, much like UVA’s Jackie, was a young woman (Brawley was only 15 at the time) who concocted an elaborate lie to get out of a sticky situation. As with Jackie, it’s not at all clear that Brawley originally intended her accusations to go national, and she did not initially name any names. But pretty soon, egged on by police questioning and then by “advisors” including Sharpton, her story became enormously well-known, and alleged perpetrators were identified.
It later came out that Brawley previously had been physically abused by her parents, particularly a stepfather who was a violent man with a criminal past. She was afraid her parents would punish her for skipping school to visit a boyfriend; they had beaten her before under similar circumstances. Thus the ruse was born.
Brawley went a lot further than Jackie ever did. Jackie didn’t rend her garments and smear herself with blood. But Brawley was found in the following condition:
…seemingly unconscious and unresponsive, lying in a garbage bag several feet from an apartment where she had once lived. Her clothing was torn and burned, her body smeared with feces. She was taken to the emergency room, where the words “KKK”, “nigger”, and “bitch” were discovered written on her torso with a black substance described as charcoal.
Initially, Brawley appeared unable or unwilling to talk when questioned by police. It’s possible that she was trying to avoid making a direct accusation towards a specific person. But if that was indeed her original intent, she started doing the opposite when, through writing and gestures, she claimed she’d been “raped repeatedly” by three white men, one of whom was a police officer. But tellingly, she still “provided no names or descriptions of her assailants.”
That was before the racemongers got to her.
The police knew from the start that there were holes in Brawley’s story. For example, a rape kit failed to reveal evidence of rape. She showed no hypothermia or other signs of having been outside and exposed to the elements and freezing temperatures for the amount of time she had claimed. The racial slurs were written upside-down on her body, suggesting that she may have written them herself.
After Al Sharpton and several lawyers started to take charge of the publicity on the case, that’s when her charges got a great deal more specific and became a national scandal:
Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason generated a national media sensation. The three claimed officials all the way up to the state government were trying to cover up defendants in the case because they were white. Specifically, they named Steven Pagones, an Assistant District Attorney in Dutchess County, as one of the rapists, and called him a racist, among other accusations.
A grand jury ended up finding that no crime had occurred. But many members of the black community, whipped up by Sharpton and company, believed that Brawley had gotten a raw deal and that guilty and abusive white men had been let off scot-free. This further fed into their perception that they couldn’t get justice from a skewed and racist legal system. Sound familiar? It should.
As should this sort of thing:
Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams wrote in 1991 that the teenager “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself.”
As for the others, one of the lawyers involved—Alton H. Maddox—”was indefinitely suspended by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn after failing to appear before a disciplinary hearing to answer allegations regarding his conduct in the Brawley case.” The falsely-accused Pagones won a $345,000 defamation judgment against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason, and a $185,000 default judgment against Brawley. But Sharpton himself has never paid a penny; his debt was paid off for him in 2001 by “supporters, including attorney Johnnie Cochran.” Brawley is apparently having her wages garnished; she lives in Virginia [2] and works as a nurse’s aide.
Pagones has said he’d forgive the debt if Brawley admits she lied. But she sticks to her story, as does Maddox (Mason, now a minister, has been quiet). Sharpton? Well, we know about Sharpton, who has gone on to greater fame and White House visits, as well as provoking a number of murders [3].
Brawley and her henchmen are not the only ones who stick to the story. I can’t find a recent poll, but it is likely that a great many people still believe she was raped or at least abused by some powerful men who were guilty of a hate crime. Al Sharpton has steadfastly refused [3] to apologize, and why should he do so? No one is forcing him to, and his presence these days is more ubiquitous than ever, now that he has the apparent approval and blessing of the current president.
There have been huge rewards for Sharpton’s behavior. As Booker T. Washington said in his book My Larger Education [4], written in 1910 (and using the racial nomenclature of his time):
There is another class [5] of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Booker T. Washington [6] has long been a figure of controversy in the African-American world, emblematic of the rift between the incrementalists, who focused on learning skills and “acting as responsible, reliable American citizens” as the path to acceptance, and those in the black community who advocated more confrontational demands:
After 1909, Washington was criticized by the leaders of the new NAACP, especially W. E. B. Du Bois, who demanded a stronger tone of protest for advancement of civil rights needs. Washington replied that confrontation would lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks in society, and that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way to overcome pervasive racism in the long run. At the same time, he secretly funded litigation for civil rights cases, such as challenges to southern constitutions and laws that disfranchised blacks.
To a certain extent that rift still exists today, although for the most part the Du Bois group has won out. Confrontation and demands are not necessarily a bad thing, and without them it’s very possible that the cause of racial equality would not have advanced as far as it has. But that does not invalidate Booker T. Washington’s very insightful words of a century ago. Nor does it mean that the lies and incendiary tactics of Al Sharpton have not done tremendous damage to American society in general and to black people in particular.

Who profits most from the urban underclass?

December 31, 2014
A National Conversation about the American Ghetto

By Michael L. Grable

The Left has long argued ad populum that disproportionately white police forces and disproportionately black prison populations prove American law enforcement institutionally racist.
That's essentially the perception behind, for example, the Left's long campaign against racial profiling as a police engagement technique.
Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument, while the president of the United States, the attorney general of the United States, the mayor of New York, and race-hustling entrepreneurs from Al Sharpton on down to any brother in the street with a bullhorn jumped on the black-while-walking bandwagon.
Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.
Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:
against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The American ghetto has chronic poverty, high unemployment where people can't find meaningful work, and kids shackled to failing public schools ensuring that they won't reach their God-given potential. This creates a permanent underclass in this country and ensures that this group of people will continue to live life at the bottom. That's the kind of conversation that we need to have, as to how these failed liberal government policies have led to the creation and emergence of the welfare state. And that characterizes the American ghetto. Let's have that conversation and get off this nonsense that it's the policing profession that needs to be transformed. There's nothing wrong with the policing of, or institution of, policing in America.
The very civil rights movement with its war on poverty which was to have rectified American racism has, instead, perversely perpetuated it in the creation of a permanent underclass living life at the bottom of an urban ignorance, criminality, and violence which most requires the very policing against which its political beneficiaries now rail. That's a pretty "fundamental transformation" of at least one aspect of America. And it's a transformation of which no American should ever be anything but ashamed.
One can only admire this man's fortitude. It can't be easy for a law enforcement professional of Sheriff Clarke's stature to say what he so forthrightly says on Fox News about the real root cause of crime and violence in America's 21st-century ghettos -- and, thus, about the very real perceptions most responsible for perpetuating whatever racism continues to bedevil America.
Unfortunately, the conversation Sheriff Clarke says we need to have is one we won't be having much before something approaching civil apocalypse occurs. The only reason Sheriff Clarke can himself survive publicly suggesting what, in the mouth of a white police professional of comparable caliber, would be tantamount to racist political heresy is because Sheriff Clarke is himself black.
We don't find ourselves in this welfare-state bind because our leaders (and I use the word lightly) are blind. Instead, it's because they're invested in a false social narrative whose governing dogma precludes any corrective discourse. That's the whole purpose of political correctness: shutting down corrective discourse about false social narratives. And the more tenuous the narrative, the more ferocious the political correctness.
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Virtually all of society's present power centers are existentially invested in a civil-rights myth that Sheriff Clarke's black ghetto is the direct consequence of an unmerited white privilege which only massive government coercion and redistribution can remedy.
This perverse myth germinated in academia, but has since become rooted in politics. Because all politics are cultural and academia is the laboratory of culture, the feedback loop is now virtually unassailable.
At any rate, this paradigm has become the fulcrum of national political prestige and power as well as the lifeblood of national governance. It's at least a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. It buys votes. It keeps bureaucracies busy. It tenures humanities professors. It employs liberal commentators. It keeps the teachers unions agitating and community organizers organizing. The invested forces arrayed against the conversation which Sheriff Clark wants us to have are politically impregnable and implacably willing to extirpate any discourse which threatens their prerogatives.
That the ghetto is itself this paradigm's primary victim is irrelevant. Everyone (except possibly the black underclass itself) already understands who the real victim is, but no meaningful discourse about it can be permitted apart from the voices of a few courageous black leaders in the wilderness. No established power structure in history has ever voluntarily relinquished its power, and the perverse welfare-state system which Johnsonian governance began relentlessly erecting in America midway through the 20th century is no exception.
The dirty little secret is that, if the black underclass hadn't existed, anything like the present national power centers would have had to invent it. And the unflinching political resolve to amnesty, by any means necessary, tens of millions of illegal Latin American peons is nothing more than the means of reinforcing, consolidating, and perpetuating the prerogatives of those same power centers. After all, the best way of maintaining black ghettos is depressing black wages below welfare's unearned purchasing power. And adding millions of Hispanics themselves to the ghetto stew can only pump up the welfare state even more.
Sheriff Clark is reportedly considering running for the Milwaukee mayoralty. Good luck with that, Sheriff; if there's to be any meaningful discourse at all about the real genesis of urban crime and violence, it's going to have to come from the few black leaders like yourself willing to buck the politically-correct tide because coming from anyone else of any public significance practically invites a political bullet in the brain.
With all due respect to Sheriff Clarke, however, perhaps the wider issue about which we most need to have a national conversation is whether we can continue giving the few hundred careerist politicians who comprise our duopolistic national ruling class carte blanch to expropriate $4 trillion from our economy every year and do with it whatever under the corrupted constitutional sun best maintains their own power and prestige.
But that's a conversation we won't be having anytime soon either. 

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Ebola

First Ebola boy likely infected by playing in bat tree


The Ebola victim who is believed to have triggered the current outbreak - a two-year-old boy called Emile Ouamouno from Guinea - may have been infected by playing in a hollow tree housing a colony of bats, say scientists. 
They made the connection on an expedition to the boy's village, Meliandou.
They took samples and chatted to locals to find out more about Ebola's source.
The team's findings are published in EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Ebola trail
Meliandou is a small village of 31 houses.
It sits deep within the Guinean forest region, surrounded by towering reeds and oil palm cultivations - these are believed to have attracted the fruit bats carrying the virus passed on to Emile. 
During their four-week field trip in April 2014, Dr Fabian Leendertz and colleagues found a large tree stump situated about 50m from Emile's home.
Villagers reported that children used to play frequently in the hollow tree.
Emile - who died of Ebola in December 2013 - used to play there, according to his friends.
The villagers said that the tree burned on March 24, 2014 and that once the tree caught fire, there issued a "rain of bats". 
A large number of these insectivorous free-tailed bats - Mops condylurus in Latin - were collected by the villagers for food, but disposed of the next day after a government-led ban on bushmeat consumption was announced. 
While bushmeat is thought to be a possible source of Ebola, the scientists believe it didn't trigger the outbreak. 
Instead, it was Emile's exposure to the bats and their droppings as he played with his friends in the hollowed tree. 
Pest control
The scientists took and tested ash samples from the tree and found DNA traces that were a match for the animals.
While they were unable to test any of the bushmeat that the villagers had disposed of, they captured and tested any living bats they could find in and around Meliandou. 
No Ebola could be detected in any of these hundred or so animals, however. 
But previous tests show this species of bat can carry Ebola.
Dr Leendertz, from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, and his colleagues say this must be a pretty rare occurrence though.
Dr Leendertz said: "That is also obvious when you think about how many tonnes of bat meat is consumed every year.
"If more bats carried the virus, we would see outbreaks all the time."
He says it is vital to find out more about the bats. 
"They have moved into human settlements. They do not just live in the trees but also under the roofs of houses in the villages. 
"The Ebola virus must jump through colonies from bat to bat, so we need to know more."
But culling the animals is not the answer. 
"We need to find ways to live together with the wildlife. These bats catch insects and pests, such as mosquitoes. They can eat about a quarter of their body weight in insects a day.
"Killing them would not be a solution. You would have more malaria."

Obama's golfing from another perspective: Do you remember when the women's movement protested the male dominated golf courses.

While this golf outing may be aa friends get together. How many hours has he spent doing business on the golf course? Remember politics is a business. Have you seen a picture of his golfing group du jour include women? Notice any hypocrisy?

His golfing and the release of his golfing time lead to to wonder if he reads? Well, other than scripture on Sunday as one his flacks recently said,









For Obama, reunion with pals a link to simpler times

Dec 30, 4:39 PM (ET)
By JOSH LEDERMAN

(AP) In this Dec. 29, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama, center, walks...
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HONOLULU (AP) — Since returning to his childhood home this month on vacation, President Barack Obama has spent a good part of most days cloistered with three people whose company puts him at ease. They're not his wife and daughters, who came with him, but a trio of pals whose friendship dates back to Obama's high school days in Hawaii.
The three men — Mike Ramos, Bobby Titcomb and Greg Orme — are among the few people still in Obama's life who knew him long before he was famous. Although their paths have long since diverged, they've made it a point to gather for frequent reunions, in one of Obama's most visible links to the days when his life was much simpler and his problems more mundane.
On this visit alone, Obama has spent more than 22 hours with the group on the lush golf courses that dot the island of Oahu. When it rained, Obama and his pals went bowling, instead. And every year during Obama's trip, they find time for a barbecue at Titcomb's beachside home in Waialua, about an hour outside of Honolulu on Oahu's North Shore.
Although by now an annual tradition, the reunions have increasingly become the focal point of Obama's family vacation in his second term as his teenage daughters spend less and less time at their father's side. Once content to join their parents for outings to the aquarium or to get shave ice, Sasha and Malia are now more independent. Since arriving more than a week ago, Obama has been out in public with one of his daughters only once, briefly, during a hike.
(AP) In this Aug. 14, 2008 file photo, then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen....
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What Obama and his companions talk about during their many hours alone is anyone's guess. But the foursome rarely goes more than a few months without reconvening in one arrangement or another. In August, Obama kicked off his 53rd birthday weekend golfing with the three friends in suburban Maryland before heading to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains.
All four were classmates at Punahou School in Honolulu, which Obama has described as "a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites." In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama recalled a high school career that was, for the most part, ordinary — "marginal report cards and calls to the principal's office; part-time jobs at the burger chain; acne and driving tests and turbulent desire."
"I'd made my share of friends at school, gone on the occasional awkward date," Obama wrote. "And if I sometimes puzzled over the mysterious realignments of status that took place among my classmates, as some rose and others fell depending on the whims of their bodies or the make of their cars, I took comfort in the knowledge that my own position had steadily improved."
Far less is known about Obama's buddies, of course, than about the president himself. All three live mostly private lives when they're not being photographed with the commander in chief.
Ramos, who graduated from Punahou in 1978, bonded with Obama over their mutual affinity for jazz. He's lived in Colorado, but was listed as a North Carolina resident when in 2012 he attended a state dinner at the White House that Obama held for British Prime Minister David Cameron.
(AP) In this Dec. 29, 2014 file photo, President Barack Obama smiles while golfing...
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Titcomb, who golfed another two days with Obama this month before the others got into town, was a year behind Obama at Punahou. Titcomb has worked as a commercial fisherman and an airline employee, according to the school's alumni magazine. In 2011, he pleaded no contest to soliciting a prostitute, but Obama has stayed fiercely loyal to his childhood friend.
Obama played basketball at Punahou with Orme, who the alumni magazine says is now a building contractor. Aging photos show Obama and Orme decked out in 1970s fashion with their dates before attending a high school prom.
Among U.S. presidents, Obama is not alone in carving out time regularly to reconnect with his roots. Franklin D. Roosevelt made frequent trips back to Hyde Park, N.Y., throwing picnics or barbecues for former neighbors and friends, and George H.W. Bush remained pals with men he served with in World War II.
In the second term, presidents have often sought refuge from the pressure by disappearing into nature to fish or hunt, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. But such solitude has become less and less attainable for presidents in modern times.
"Many people call Obama aloof, and he hasn't made a lot of friends in Washington," Brinkley said. "When you're president, everybody wants something from you and only these types of friends are able to simply want your well-being. They have a different level of affection for you than friends you meet later in life."
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Carbon dioxide emissions help tropical rainforests grow faster: Study shows trees absorb more greenhouse gas than expected Story dumped on Dec. 30 to minimize impact.

Carbon dioxide emissions help tropical rainforests grow faster: Study shows trees absorb more greenhouse gas than expected

  • Nasa study shows tropical forests absorb 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 a year
  • Rainforests absorb more than half of CO2 taken up by vegetation globally
  • Scientists previously believed tropical forests emitted carbon dioxide 
  • Researchers claim their findings emphasise the need to protect rainforests from deforestation to help counteract human greenhouse gas emissions

Tropical forests are growing faster than scientists thought due to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A Nasa-led study has found that tropical forests are absorbing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year as they photosynthesise and grow.
And this is far more than is absorbed by the vast areas of boreal forest that encircle the Arctic.
Trees and plants in tropical forests (stock image) are absorbing 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The researchers claim their findings show that rainforests are essential for soaking up excess greenhouse gases, and play a far greater role than had been previously realised
Trees and plants in tropical forests (stock image) are absorbing 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The researchers claim their findings show that rainforests are essential for soaking up excess greenhouse gases, and play a far greater role than had been previously realised
The researchers claim their findings show that rainforests like the Amazon are essential for soaking up excess greenhouse gases, and play a far greater role than had been previously realised.

Dr David Schimel, a researcher at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who led the study, said: 'This is good news, because uptake in boreal forests is already slowing, while tropical forests may continue to take up carbon for many years.'

AMAZON DEFORESTATION FALLS

Deforestation in the world's biggest rainforest, the Amazon, dropped by 18 per cent over the past year.
Brazil said that 4,848 square kilometers (1,870 square miles) of rain forest were destroyed between August 2013 and July 2014 - an area slightly larger than the US state of Rhode Island.
The figures were down from 5,891 square kilometers (2,275 square miles) cut down during the same period a year earlier.
It comes in the wake of the adoption of a controversial bill revising the Forest Code, which was 2012 after more than a decade-long effort by Brazil's powerful agricultural lobby, mostly eased restrictions for landowners with smaller properties, allowing them to clear land closer to riverbanks.
Rain forest clearing is responsible for about 75 percent of Brazil's emissions, as vegetation is burned and felled trees rot.
The Amazon extends over 6.1 million square kilometers (3.8 million square miles), with more than 60 percent within Brazil's borders. 
However, Dr Schimel and his colleagues warn that deforestation in tropical rainforests could exacerbate climate change by leaving more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In total, they estimate that forests and other vegetation absorb around 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 30 per cent of that emitted by humans.
As emissions add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, forests worldwide are using it to grow faster.
However, the rate at which they absorb this has been hard to estimate with many studies producing contradictory results.
As many rainforests consist of mature trees that are often hundreds of years old, they were not thought to absorb much carbon dioxide.
Young fast growing trees tend to absorb more carbon dioxide as they use the carbon as they grow.
Global air flows and data on deforestation also suggested tropical forests were releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb.
But this new study suggests the tropical forests are using far more of the carbon, and so growing far faster than previously believed.
Dr Schimel and his colleagues, whose work is published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, used computer models, satellite images, data from forest plots and photosynthetic experiments to build up a picture of how forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Deforestation and burning releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and were thought to cause tropical forests to release more carbon dioxide than they absorbed. But the new study suggests this is not the case
Deforestation and burning releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and were thought to cause tropical forests to release more carbon dioxide than they absorbed. But the new study suggests this is not the case
Nasa satellites monitor changes in rainforests like the Amazon (pictured from above) to estimate carbon dioxide uptake. In total, experts estimate that forests and other vegetation absorb around 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 30 per cent of that emitted by humans
Nasa satellites monitor changes in rainforests like the Amazon (pictured from above) to estimate carbon dioxide uptake. In total, experts estimate that forests and other vegetation absorb around 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, about 30 per cent of that emitted by humans
He said: 'What we've had up till this paper was a theory of carbon dioxide fertilisation based on phenomena at the microscopic scale and observations at the global scale that appeared to contradict those phenomena.
'Here, at least, is a hypothesis that provides a consistent explanation that includes both how we know photosynthesis works and what's happening at the planetary scale.
'All else being equal, the effect is stronger at higher temperatures, meaning it will be higher in the tropics than in the boreal forests.'
However, he added that changes in water supply to forests due to changing climate and deforestation could alter the amount of carbon dioxide tropical forests are absorbing.
He said: 'The future tropical balance of deforestation and climate sources and regrowth and carbon dioxide sinks will only remain a robust feature of the global carbon cycle if the vast tropical forests are protected from destruction.'
Scientists believed that rainforests were poor at absorbing carbon dioxide despite their rich plant life, but the new study shows that they, in fact, account for more than half of all greenhouse gases absorbed by vegetation
Scientists believed that rainforests were poor at absorbing carbon dioxide despite their rich plant life, but the new study shows that they, in fact, account for more than half of all greenhouse gases absorbed by vegetation