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Monday, December 13, 2010

Turnout Appears Light in Myanmar - New York Times

The process was expected to cement military rule behind a civilian facade but also to open the door slightly to possible shifts in the dynamics of power.

“It was an empty room,” said one voter who emerged from a polling place where he said he had spoiled his ballot in protest.

Though the new Constitution guarantees the military a leading role in the state apparatus, this will be the first civilian government in the country, formerly called Burma, since a military coup in 1962. With votes being tabulated locally, it was not known how soon the results would be announced.

In the last election, in 1990, the party headed by the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won a decisive victory, but the generals annulled the result.

The appearance of electoral legitimacy and civilian institutions may make it easier for Myanmar’s neighbors to embrace what has been a pariah state, but it is unlikely by itself to ease a policy of isolation and economic sanctions among Western nations.

Speaking in Mumbai on Sunday, President Barack Obama of the United States said that the voting was “neither free nor fair” and failed to meet internationally accepted standards associated with legitimate elections.

He said the elections “demonstrate again the regime’s continued preference for repression and restriction over inclusion and transparency.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said a few months ago that Washington would try a new policy of engagement, also condemned the election, saying its flaws “once again expose the abuses of the military junta.”

In an hour’s tour of Yangon on Sunday morning, there was very little sign on the streets or at polling places of a police or military presence.

Half a dozen voting centers appeared almost empty, and a resident of the country’s second city, Mandalay, said that voting had been light there as well.

“I have several reasons not to vote, but I will tell you just one,” said Soe Naing Oo, a resident of Magway, a town several hours’ drive north of Yangon. “Auntie Suu told us not to vote.”

He was referring to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party, the National League for Democracy, was not contesting what it called a sham election and had called for a boycott.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, now 65, has been held under house arrest for most of the past 20 years. Her latest term of detention ends one week after the election, and the junta has hinted that she could be released. It has often made similar hints in the past, and there was no way to know what restrictions might be imposed if she were set free.

Some analysts hold out hope that the election could bring incremental change to Myanmar. In September, Kurt M. Campbell, the United States’ assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, said that it appeared that the vote would lack international legitimacy but that it might create “new players, new power relationships, new structures inside the country” that would bear watching.

There were widespread reports of irregularities like marking ballots for voters, advertising the military-backed party at a polling place, and ballot boxes that had been stuffed or tampered with.

There were reports that members of some enterprises and offices had been told they would lose their jobs if they did not vote.

Voters were electing a 665-member, two-chamber national Parliament and 14 regional Parliaments. A total of 25 percent of those seats will be reserved for the military, and several senior military officials resigned to run as civilians. Military officers are to head the top ministries of interior, defense and border affairs, and the commander in chief of the armed forces will have power to take control of the country in times of emergency.

Seth Mydans contributed reporting from Bangkok.


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A 25th-anniversary celebration is in the pipeline for Mario - USA Today

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Dot Earth: Scientists Join Forces in a Hostile Climate - New York Times

They’re not going to take it.

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In the face of probes by a state attorney general, hints of hostile congressional hearings and assaults from critics in the blogosphere, hundreds of members of the American Geophysical Union are forming a rapid-response team aiming to challenge disinformation and misinformation deployed in the policy wars over global warming. The news was first reported by Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Times (a former colleague).

I sent a query about the plan to some of the scientists involved in the effort. The first response is from Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of earth science and international affairs at Princeton University and former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. Oppenheimer stressed that the “rapid response” effort will be focused on science, not on policy options (a wise delineation):

What’s true is that A.G.U. asked members who among them would volunteer for various outreach activities. This would be about science, of course. Whether it’s 700, I do not know. I only know that I volunteered, and by the way, am on the outreach committee for A.G.U. right now.

There’s plenty of worry about Issa, Barton, Inhofe, et al, but it may be that with the legislation dead for now, these fellows will turn their efforts elsewhere. But it doesn’t hurt to be ready and, in any event, the scientific ideas need to be explained and defended.

In my view, lots of people, particularly the philanthropic community, erred seriously in deciding that the scientific case was firm enough in the public’s and leaders’ minds so that they didn’t need to worry about it. The fact is the science is organic, and so is its opposition. It’s always a weak underbelly because the average person or political leader or business leader doesn’t have a firm grasp on it (in the case of the first category, why should they?) and the science is always evolving, so it’s always easy to generate confusion (see Merchants of Doubt). It will happen again. So what’s needed now is a serious effort to understand how expert information is taken up by the public (and key opinion leaders) and how to best inform them. The professional societies, the National Academies, the [nonprofit groups], the philanthropy community, and individual natural and social scientists all need to do more. Regardless of the particulars of the ultimate policy response, clearer, more reliable, trusted sources of organized information is needed.

I’m on the board of Climate Central, one such effort. We need many in different niches.

In recent weeks I’d been in touch with two of the organizers, John Abraham of St. Thomas University, and Scott Mandia of Stonybrook University, as they pondered various responses to the rightward shift in politics and the intensifying challenges to the vast body of science pointing to a human-heated planet.

Both have already jumped to the public debate, so they know what they’re facing.

Abraham is perhaps best known for posting a long rebuttal to the arguments of Christopher Monckton, a flamboyant critic of climate alarm whose pedigree, style and assertions would make him a great character for a climate-focused variant of the film “Thank You for Smoking.”

Here’s Mandia’s explanation for his activism:

The science of climate change and even the scientists themselves are under attack from a well-orchestrated and well-oiled misinformation campaign.  The best defense against this anti-science offensive is to make sure that the correct message reaches a wide audience.  Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future explain that scientists have failed to get their message across for a variety of reasons but mostly because we are not engaging the public on their turf.  After reading that book, I became a climate change evangelist with my Global Warming: Man or Myth? Website, this blog, and more recently a Facebook Fan Group called Global Warming Fact of the Day.  I have two small children and I do not like the future that I see for them or for their children in a human-driven warmer world. [Read the rest.]

In an appearance last week at Purdue University I was on a panel with Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado and Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology exploring the heated state of the debate over climate science and policy. Three questions were posed, one being: “Moving forward, is there a better role for climate scientists in political and policy debates, and if so, what would it look like?”

My answer was that it’s important first to specify the question at hand. There’s a big difference, for instance, between, “Are humans warming the world?” and “How fast should emissions of greenhouse gases be cut?” One is science, the other (because of the word “should”) is policy.

Scientists are wise to explain and defend their science, and if this effort by the geophysical union focuses on that, so much the better. The group has made other moves in this direction, including the creation of a blog network, the AGU Blogosphere.

They can feel free to get into the policy debate, as well, but there it’s vital (to my mind as a 25-year observer of fights over climate policy) to distinguish when one’s wearing the scientist hat and the citizen hat (as parent, homeowner, taxpayer).

This came up when I taught a graduate seminar at Bard College on communication and environmental policy in 2007, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rolled out its fourth report.

I divided the class into two groups. One had to defend the presentation style of Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the climate panel’s science report team. Solomon rebuffed reporters trying to get her to interpret the findings and said her job was to lay out the science, not discuss how to respond. The other group defended James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who has become a passionate advocate for a quick end to coal combustion.

When not playing their roles, the students nearly unanimously supported Hansen, but after the debate, in which the pitfalls of both advocacy and silence were revealed, they ended up split and somewhat confused.

They should have been. As I said at Purdue, there’s no simple answer for a scientist — particularly a young one — when his or her work becomes deeply consequential.

Richard Somerville, a climate scientist at the University of California, San Diego, provided his explanation for his advocacy here. Jim Hansen did so recently, as well. But they’re both near the end of long successful careers.

If a scientist wants to join the policy fray and retain credibility, a vital step is to distinguish between assertions supported by data and those framed by personal values.

Nobody explained this better than Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford University, who passed away this year after decades of work on climate science, communication and policy.

In a 2006 e-mail message, part of a trove I call my personal “Schneidergate” files, this is how Schneider made the point:

To be risk averse is good policy in my VALUE SYSTEM — and we always must admit that how to take risks — with climate damages or costs of mitigation/adaptation — is not science but world views and risk aversion philosophy.

There’ll be more from my Schneider files on uncertainty and climate down the line.


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Don't Drink and Facebook: New Plugin Mitigates the Fallout - Mashable

Raise your hand if you made a mistake this weekend. Maybe sent a scathing Facebook message to an ex who broke your heart? Told everyone — via Twitter — how much you hate your boss? Uploaded something scandalous to YouTube? Well, it’s too bad we waited until Sunday afternoon to tell you about the Social Media Sobriety Test, now isn’t it?

This week, web security company Webroot released a new FirefoxFirefoxFirefox plugin called “The Social Media Sobriety Test” with the tagline, “Nothing good happens online after 1 a.m.”

The deal is simple, download the plugin and customize the settings for a variety of social media sites — from FacebookFacebookFacebook to MySpaceMySpaceMySpace to TumblrTumblrTumblr (for the bloggers among us) to e-mail accounts like Gmailgmailgmail or Hotmail.

Set your hours of intoxication, and if you try to sign on to one of those sites during those times, you’ll be asked to pass a test. I tried it out — about five minutes ago and fully sober — and failed said test, however. You try typing the alphabet backwards. It’s not as easy as it looks.

We would like to say that a tool such as this is merely a fun diversion, but judging from the neverending supply of material on Texts From Last Night, it’s probably rather necessary.

NB: This plugin doesn’t work on mobile devices, which means that when one is out and about — AndroidAndroidAndroid or iPhone in hand — one’s only protection is one’s own common sense. Good luck with that.

Photo courtesy of FlickrFlickrFlickr, Egan Snow


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Oakland residents awaken to broken windows, debris - The Associated Press

Oakland residents awaken to broken windows, debris(AP) – 4 hours ago

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Looking out her front window in a usually quiet residential neighborhood in this city, Deanna Goldstein's knees began to shake.

More than 100 protesters were hemmed in by police in riot gear. A trash can was blazing on the street.

"I came home early from downtown to get away from the craziness, but the craziness came to me," she said.

In the past, the violent protests over a white transit officer's slaying of an unarmed black man trashed downtown Oakland businesses. But after Johannes Mehserle on Friday received the minimum two-year sentence for slaying Oscar Grant, angry demonstrators marched into residential areas near Lake Merritt for the first time, putting innocent people in harm's way.

Police arrested 152 protesters, including seven juveniles, on suspicion of crimes including vandalism, unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace.

Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said 56 of those arrested were from outside the city. Investigators will be reviewing video and photographs of protesters damaging property to help prosecutors file charges, he said.

Residents who woke up to broken car windows and littered streets were left asking why protesters chose their neighborhood and how it became engulfed in violence.

Nai Saelee, 28, said she was shocked to see that her neighborhood, made up of mostly one- and two-story homes and low-rise apartment complexes, was affected.

The school teacher was kept from getting to her house by a police cordon, and later found the front windshield of her car damaged.

"I'm glad I wasn't here," she said outside her home Saturday, as Oakland City trash collectors made there way through the area picking up debris.

The arrests began around 8 p.m. on Friday after officers were pelted with rocks and bottles. One officer had his gun taken from him in a fight and another was hit by a car and suffered what police described as a non-life-threatening injury, Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said.

He said the violence was confined to a "small number of people" and most protesters remained peaceful. There were no additional reports of unrest overnight.

"People do not have a right to tear this city up," Batts said in a statement. "Oakland already has a lot of pain, and it's not fair. This city has been torn up too many times."

The Mehserle case drew comparisons to the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, which inflamed a racial divide and led to rioting.

The shooting of Grant by Mehserle on a train station platform on New Year's Day 2009 was captured on cell phone video taken by bystanders and widely broadcast on television and the Internet.

Police arrested more than 100 people during protests in January following the incident in which windows of downtown Oakland businesses were smashed, trash cans and cars were set on fire and police were pelted with bottles.

A jury in July convicted Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter, prompting another round of protests that resulted in arrests and looting and trashing of stores along the city's wide downtown streets.

Prosecutors had sought a second-degree murder conviction against Mehserle, who has contended he mistakenly shot Grant with his gun, instead of his Taser.

Grant's uncle, Cephus Johnson, said he was heartened to see what he characterized as mostly peaceful protests for his nephew.

"What I was told was that it was really more positive than negative," he said. "It brings smiles not just to my face but the (entire) family's face to know that this is a movement that people are committed to."

Associated Press writer Terence Chea contributed to this report. Thanawala reported from San Francisco.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


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