Obama warns mayors not to waste stimulus money

WASHINGTON – Invoking his own name-and-shame policy, President Barack Obama warned the nation's mayors on Friday that he will "call them out" if they waste the money from his massive economic stimulus plan.

"The American people are watching," Obama told a gathering of mayors at the White House. "They need this plan to work. They expect to see the money that they've earned — they've worked so hard to earn — spent in its intended purposes without waste, without inefficiency, without fraud."

In the days since the White House and Congress came to terms on the $787 billion economic package, the political focus has shifted to how it will work. Obama has staked his reputation not just on the promise of 3.5 million jobs saved or created, but also on a pledge to let the public see where the money goes.

His budget chief this week released a 25,000-word document that details exactly how Cabinet and executive agencies, states and local organizations must report spending.

All About Global Warming

Global warming is the term used to describe a gradual increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, a change that is believed to be permanently changing the Earth’s climate forever.

While many view the effects of global warming to be more substantial and more rapidly occurring than others do, the scientific consensus on climatic changes related to global warming is that the average temperature of the Earth has risen between 0.4 and 0.8 °C over the past 100 years. The increased volumes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing, agriculture, and other human activities, are believed to be the primary sources of the global warming that has occurred over the past 50 years.

Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate carrying out global warming research have recently predicted that average global temperatures could increase between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by the year 2100. Changes resulting from global warming may include rising sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps, as well as an increase in occurrence and severity of storms and other severe weather events.

How Renewable Energy and Storage Solutions Stack Up

Renewable energy, such as from photovoltaic electricity and ethanol, today supplies less than 7 percent of U.S. consumption. If we leave aside hydroelectric power, it is under 4.5 percent. Globally, renewables provide only about 3.5 percent of electricity and even less of transportation fuels.

But increasing that fraction for the U.S.—as seems necessary for managing greenhouse gases, trade deficits and dependence on foreign suppliers—has at least three tricky components. The obvious one is how to capture the energy of wind, sun and crops economically. After that, the energy has to be moved from where it is easily gathered, such as the sunny American Southwest or the windy High Plains, to the places it can be used. And the third is to convert it into convenient forms. Most prominently in the last category, electricity for transportation has to be loaded into cars and trucks, either through batteries or perhaps as hydrogen.

In some ways, the field is galloping ahead. A recent study sponsored by the United Nations found that global investment in renewable energy in 2007 was $148.4 billion, up 60 percent from 2006. But new wind turbines and solar cells are joining an infrastructure with coal-fired power plants that seem to run more hours every year and that are multiplying as well.

And although solar energy and especially wind have declined steeply in price over the past few years, they are competitive only when given subsidies or mandates. U.S. residential customers pay an average of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for power from a mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric sources, but renewables are far pricier. Of course, all forms of energy get a carrot-and-stick treatment from governments, whether to provide work for coal miners or to prove that splitting the atom is useful for something besides bombs. But in many places, renewables get something even better: quotas. And rising prices for traditional fuels could help, raising the market to reach the renewables’ costs.

Advances in Monitoring Nuclear Weapon Testing

As this article goes to press, Iran’s nuclear program is rapidly expanding its capacity to enrich uranium. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, last November have once more raised the specter of a nuclear weapons exchange between India and Pakistan—a “regional war” that could kill tens of millions of both countries’ citizens and lead to severe change in global climate. North Korea, having joined the nuclear club with its first successful explosive test of a fission weapon on October 9, 2006, has reportedly separated enough weapons-grade uranium to build at least half a dozen atomic bombs. Eight countries have openly tested nuclear weapons, and Israel is presumed to have them as well. The possibility that terrorists could get their hands on such weapons is the worst nightmare of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its counterparts around the world.

Yet there are hopeful signs for reducing nuclear tensions as well. By the end of 2008, 180 countries had signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which forbids all nuclear explosions, including the explosive testing of nuclear weapons. That treaty, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 1996 and promptly signed by President Bill Clinton and many other world leaders, aims to restrict the further development of nuclear weapons by countries that have them and to prevent countries that do not possess them from building them with any confidence that the devices will work on the battlefield.

Even though the CTBT has not yet come into force, every nation that signed it—including the U.S. and Russia—has maintained a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing at least since the U.N. voted to adopt it. (The three nations that have tested nuclear weapons since 1996—India, North Korea and Pakistan—have not signed the treaty. In the U.S. this moratorium on testing has continued despite serious opposition to the treaty itself. In 1999 the U.S. Senate declined to give its constitutional “advice and consent” to the ratification of the agreement, and soon after t

Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity

In the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.

• Quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal.
• This nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to Einstein's special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.

Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition "locality."

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics

Peres taps Netanyahu to form Israel's new government

JERUSALEM: President Shimon Peres invited Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the conservative Likud Party, to form the next Israeli government Friday following inconclusive elections 10 days ago.

Almost immediately, Netanyahu appealed to adversaries to overcome their differences and form a government of national unity to meet "huge challenges" including what he termed Iran's development of nuclear weapons and its sponsorship of "terrorism" in Lebanon and Gaza.

Netanyahu will have six weeks for try to put together a government.