Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Illegal Immigrants’

9 Interesting Links From January 2nd

January 2nd, 2010 Greg Smith No comments
  • Why didn’t I use pervious concrete for my driveway? – Fresh Dirt – Sunset.com – Pervious concrete is basically concrete without the sand. And the absence of sand creates a lot of void space. 15-30%. That is enough, according to the Pacific Southwest Concrete Alliance, for 3-8 gallons of water per minute to pass through each square foot. That is equal, says the Alliance, to 6,000 to 17,000 inches of rain per day. Even an El Nino won't produce more than that.
  • No right to bear unlicensed machine guns, federal court says / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com – “Whatever the individual right to keep and bear arms might entail, it does not authorize an unlicensed individual to possess unregistered machine guns for personal use,” said the three-judge panel of the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals.
  • No right to bear unlicensed machine guns, federal court says / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com – “Whatever the individual right to keep and bear arms might entail, it does not authorize an unlicensed individual to possess unregistered machine guns for personal use,” said the three-judge panel of the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals.
  • Southwest bags more fliers by not imposing fees – The Denver Post – While the airline cut capacity by 5 percent in 2009, it added service to four new airports — New York LaGuardia, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Milwaukee. At the same time, he said the airline has gained a 1 percent market share and even has offered all employees raises during one of the worst financial slumps in airline history.
  • The President on Preliminary Findings Regarding the Attempted Terrorist Attack | The White House – I wanted to speak to the American people again today because some of this preliminary information that has surfaced in the last 24 hours raises some serious concerns. It's been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas incident warned U.S. officials in Africa about his son's extremist views. It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community, but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list.
  • Retirees Flock to Mexico for the Sun and the Health Care | PBS NewsHour | Dec. 28, 2009 | PBS – Thousands of Americans are coming to places like Puerto Vallarta, not to dip their toes in the warm Pacific, sip a margarita, or browse a crafts fair. No, they are coming for health care, in many cases, care they could never afford to acquire in the United States.
  • New equation for comfort – The Denver Post – The Apex boot essentially is a snowboarding boot inserted into a lightweight carbon fiber frame. The external carbon fiber structure provides the lateral stiffness and forward lean required to make skis perform, but can be removed easily for walking.
  • Italian town where a White Christmas is a police matter | World news | The Guardian – Some 3,000 people have marched through the town in protest at the operation, which the Vatican called "sad and distressing". But it has been endorsed by Silvio Berlusconi's government. Visiting nearby Brescia, where he announced the opening of a detention camp for suspected illegal immigrants – a so-called centre for identification and expulsion – Berlusconi's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the League, complimented Coccaglio's mayor.
  • N.M. teacher claims lottery prize 2 hours before it expires – Lottery News – With only two hours to spare, an Albuquerque teacher claimed a $10,000 Powerball prize scheduled to expire today at 4:30 p.m.
    • Categories: News And Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    10 Interesting Links From August 4th

    August 4th, 2009 Greg Smith No comments
    • Relaxation Drink Has Some Calling it Liquid Pot – There's a new drink being sold in Arizona — but why are people comparing it to pot? It's called Drank, and it's a 16-ounce soda drink that tastes sort of like grape soda. It's the opposite of an energy drink. Drank calls itself an extreme relaxation product, so much so, that some have dubbed it "weed in a can."
    • Panel backs NASA bid for bigger shuttle budget | Reuters – The United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020, members of a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. human space program said on Tuesday.
    • www.KOB.com – GE to close ABQ plant – A longtime Albuquerque manufacturer has announced that it will be closing its doors by the third quarter of 2010. General Electric has been manufacturing equipment for jet engines at its South Valley plant on Woodward since the late 1960s. GE spokesman Rick Kennedy says that GE is experiencing a volume decline for the equipment made in Albuquerque.
    • Will Apple CEO Steve Jobs Headline CES 2010? – Digits – WSJ – Shapiro is chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, the same group that puts on the Consumer Electronics Show each January for the last three decades. Apple plans to attend the show’s 2010 version, marking the first time in memory the Cupertino, Calif., consumer-electronics giant will be there.
    • Chandler not saying much after crime sweep – Chandler officials and resident activists are saying little about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Southeast Valley "crime suppression operation" in their city last week. The reaction is in stark contrast to protests in other communities after Arpaio conducted similar sweeps targeting illegal immigrants. Some hint that silence is a ploy to withhold the limelight they say the sheriff seems to crave.
    • A Century Plant Stalk – Quite a few century plants have shot up a nice stalks all around town. They occasionally get over 40' in height. We picked up this little one off the side of the road. Wendy has a plan to dry the stalk out and mount it beside our porch. It is impressive both how quickly these stalks go up and their strength.
    • Building Rome in a Day – In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.
    • The Word of Mouth KFC challenge | Life and style | guardian.co.uk – Lacking KFC's mighty pressure fryers and mindful of the need to cook the chicken right through, we were happy to follow the suggestions of double cooking. Most recommended some time in the oven after frying, but we thought we'd experiment with poaching beforehand and, as many of our posters suggested an overnight marinade in milk, we decided to use the marinade as the poaching liquid. It's worth noting for future recipes that chicken marinaded and poached in milk has an unbelievably suave flavour and texture, and that the poaching liquid thickens to create the most soothing cream of chicken soup I've ever achieved.
    • BBC NEWS | UK | ‘No doubt’ sunbeds cause cancer – There is no doubt using a sunbed or sunlamp will raise the risk of skin cancer, say international experts. Previously, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) assessed sunbeds and sunlamps as "probably carcinogenic to humans". But it now says their use is definitively "carcinogenic to humans".
    • Investment firm buys old Motorola site in Chandler – The prime 152-acre Motorola site on Price Road in Chandler has sold for $18.5 million in cash, and it is poised to provide the area with worldwide recognition, city officials say. There is interest from renewable energy companies, including solar, as well as firms in semiconductors and nanotechnology.
    Categories: News And Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    10 Interesting Links From March 28th

    March 29th, 2009 Greg Smith No comments
    • Critics oppose Border Patrol herbicide plan – The Border Patrol plans to poison vegetation along more than a mile of the Rio Grande riverbank in Texas to eliminate the dense foliage used as hiding places by illegal immigrants and smugglers.

      The Houston Chronicle reports opponents of the action compare it to the Vietnam War-era Agent Orange chemical program and say it could have harmful long-term effects.

    • We Put Pepsi’s New Aquafina Product To The Test – I’m concerned that Pepsi decided to promote its new “eco-friendly” product by proactively shipping, via Fedex overnight, 5 lb boxes of the water to press around the country. And then sending a second batch either in error or to reinforce the message. That’s not very eco-friendly (if anyone knows the carbon cost of sending these boxes, let me know, then multiply it by hundreds or thousands of press). It all seems a little wasteful.
    • China tells U.S. to drop Cold War mindset on military | Reuters – hina on Thursday slammed a Pentagon report on its growing military might, saying criticism of China's lack of transparency betrayed Washington's "Cold War" mindset and risked damaging ties.

      China had complained to Washington about the annual report, which was released on Wednesday, because it distorted the truth and amounted to meddling in China's affairs, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a scheduled news conference.

    • Aided by Safety Nets, Europe Resists Stimulus Push – NYTimes.com – The Europeans say they have no need for further stimulus right now because their social safety nets, derided in good times by free market disciples as sclerotic impediments to growth, are automatically providing the spending programs that the United States Congress has to legislate.

      Europe’s extensive job protections and unemployment benefits are “bad in the upswing, because firms don’t dare to hire people, because then they are glued to them,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich. “In the downswing, it’s good if the people are glued to the companies. They keep their jobs. They keep their income. They keep consuming.”

    • Toy story: The Lego renaissance | Life and style | The Guardian – Never mind the recession – Lego is now so popular that there are 62 little coloured blocks for every person on the planet. Yet only five years ago this family business was on the brink of ruin. Jon Henley reports from the Danish town where it all began.
    • Canon PowerShot SX 1 IS Review: 17. Conclusion: Digital Photography Review – But cameras don't exist only on spec sheets or web pages. Once in hand, the SX1 IS cannot deliver on the promise of the CMOS sensor (which Canon is known for in their EOS range of DSLR cameras). Image quality, while not terrible is actually slightly worse then the much cheaper SX10 IS, and high ISO noise performance is firmly in compact territory. As much as it tries to be DSLR junior, as soon as you see the images you know that it is not. Even though there is RAW mode to give you control over image processing, it offers no more dynamic range, just control over white balance and the amount of noise reduction and sharpening.
    • Pizza-making machine has chefs in a spin | Oddly Enough | Reuters – A vending machine that bakes fresh pizza in minutes for a few euros has got Italian chefs in a whirl before it hits the streets in the coming weeks.

      The bright-red "Let's Pizza" machine uses infra-red rays and technology developed at the University of Bologna to knead flour and water into dough, spread it with tomato sauce and a choice of topping, and cook it — all in less than three minutes.

    • Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists – Crime, UK – The Independent – He said the "Channel project" had intervened in the cases of at least 200 children who were thought to be at risk of extremism, since it began 18 months ago. The number has leapt from 10 children identified by June 2008.

      Two hundred schoolchildren in Britain, some as young as 13, have been identified as potential terrorists by a police scheme that aims to spot youngsters who are "vulnerable" to Islamic radicalisation. The programme, run by the Association of Chief Police Officers, asks teachers, parents and other community figures to be vigilant for signs that may indicate an attraction to extreme views or susceptibility to being "groomed" by radicalisers. Sir Norman, whose force covers the area in which all four 7 July 2005 bombers grew up, said: "What will often manifest itself is what might be regarded as racism and the adoption of bad attitudes towards 'the West'.

    • Fancy shelling out £5,000 for a 400-year-old stale egg? | Mail Online – Its mother has long since departed the scene. As, indeed, has its entire species.

      But this giant egg is a great survivor. It was laid around 400 years ago by one of the great elephant birds of Madagascar.

    • Elephant Bird – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The elephant birds, which were giant ratites native to Madagascar, have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, governor of Madagascar recorded frequent sightings of elephant birds. Aepyornis was the world's largest bird, believed to have been over 3 metres (10 ft) tall and weighing close to half a ton (400 kilograms (880 lb)).[2] Remains of Aepyornis adults and eggs have been found; in some cases the eggs have a circumference of over 1 metre (3 ft) and a length up to 34 centimetres (13 in).[3] The egg volume is about 160 times greater than a chicken egg.
    Categories: News And Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Movie Style Freeway Shooting

    November 5th, 2003 Greg Smith 2 comments
    This looks like it came from a move, but it happened on I-10 in Arizona. Very near where I use to live.“This appears to be a load of undocumented aliens that was being hijacked or kidnapped from another group of smugglers,” Pinal County Sheriff Roger Vanderpool said. “It was clearly retaliation and to send a message.” The smugglers who were attacked near Casa Grande had kidnapped the immigrants from the assailants in southern Pinal County, he said. The suspected shooters later caught up to the other group about 8:30 a.m. as the smugglers headed toward Phoenix in a two-vehicle convoy. They opened fire from a van, killing four and injuring five others. The two vehicles carried 24 people.” It left the freeway in a bottleneck for 9 hours. It all has to do with the trafficking of Illegal immigrants. 

    Categories: Arizona, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,