Slatest
An unidentified woman from Galveston, Texas, was walking along one of the city’s beaches when she discovered a bag filled with 16 bricks of cocaine worth an estimated $2.1 million. The woman used her cell phone to call the police, who took the cocaine into custody. “There were barnacles growing on the bag so you know it was probably in the water a long time,” police spokesman Jeff Heyse said. The woman discovered the 37 pounds of cocaine on May 22, but police kept her find quiet until now as they hoped to find the owner. The move is not unusual in these cases. “Unfortunately there was nothing in the bag that would lead them anywhere,” Heyse said of the doomed investigation. Had the 37 pounds of cocaine made it into the country with its owners, it probably would have amounted to 100 pounds of street product, as the pure cocaine is typically mixed with baby formula or other flavorless materials. “Although the amount found was large, it amounts to a fraction of the cocaine brought into the United States,” Heyse told the Houston Chronicle. “Heyse recalled an entire ship loaded with cocaine being seized several years ago.”
Source: The Houston Chronicle
BP officials, who announced earlier this week that their tab for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was already pushing $1 billion, will cover the cost of construction for six sand barriers off the Louisiana coast. The sandbanks, which will cost an estimated $360 million, will join natural offshore islands to form a 50-mile barrier. The hope is that the barrier will catch the oil before it can reach the fragile wetlands farther inland. It’s unclear whether BP offered to pay for the construction or was asked to pay. In a statement, BP confirmed that it was “committed to implementing the most effective measures to protect the coastline of Louisiana,” according to the BBC. But in an emotional press conference, ”Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced the White House had ordered BP to pay for the construction of the sand barriers.” During the conference, Jindal had harsh words for both BP and Washington. “Mr. Jindal has strongly criticized the Obama administation and BP over the past few days for being too slow to respond to the crisis,” the BBC reported. “Every day they wait, every day they make us wait, we’re losing our battle to protect our coast,” he said. BP may be committed to protecting Louisiana’s delicate coastline, but how does it feel about Florida? Reports suggest that the oil slick is only nine miles from reaching the white sand beaches of Pensacola and tar balls, globes of decayed oil, have washed up along other states’ coastlines.
Source: BBC
Federal officials, including, according to a spokesperson, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, will not allow BP to detonate a nuclear bomb at the site of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which is probably a good thing since all of the other attempts to close the well have resulted in disaster. The idea has been gaining momentum and does have precedent: “Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow,” the New York Times reported. “Why not try it here?” The idea has gained support from news organizations—CNN’s John Roberts mentioned it recently—and energy experts alike. Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert often credited with idea of peak oil, told Bloomberg last week that a nuke is our only option. “Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil.” One federal official just dismissed the idea as “crazy.” The consequences from radiation and the violation of arms treaties signed by the United States would not be worth the small chance of success, officials argued. “In theory, the nuclear option seems attractive because the extreme heat might create a tough seal,” the New York Times reported. “An exploding atomic bomb generates temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and, detonated underground, can turn acres of porous rock into a glassy plug, much like a huge stopped in a leaky bottle.” More traditional explosives might destroy the site of the leak and kill any hope of stopping the leak from above.
Source: The New York Times
President Obama has plans to meet Thursday with Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, in their first face-to-face since he called the new immigration law “misguided.” The new law, which allows police officers to check the residency of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, has been the subject of much debate since it passed several weeks ago. Critics fear it will promote racial profiling, but Brewer said it would not target a specific race. “It wouldn’t matter if you are Latino or Hispanic or Norwegian,” she said. “If you didn’t have proof of citizenship and the police officer had reasonable suspicion, he would ask and verify your citizenship. I mean, that’s the way that it is. That’s what the federal law says. And that’s what the law in Arizona says.” Attorney General Eric Holder has met with police chiefs from Arizona to discuss the new law, but he has not decided yet whether the federal government will challenge it. If it does, Brewer made it clear that she’s not worried. “We’ll meet you in court,” she said. “I have a pretty good record of winning in court.”
Source: CNN
TheNew Yorker‘s “20 Under 40″ list of promising young fiction writers will officially be announced in next week’s issue, but, like an overeager child at Christmas, the New York Times has spoiled the anticipation. Now we’ll do the same. ”They are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37,” the Times reported. In case you need some help with the foreign names, the list includes 10 men and 10 women from places as diverse as Miami, Peru, Chicago, and Ethiopia. It will be interesting to see what this group of young stars accomplished over the coming years. The last time The New Yorker put together this list, in 1999, it included David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Junot Díaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri, who all went on to produce wonderfully successful creative works. “Beyond their age, the writers on the list have nothing in common,” said David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. “If they had too much in common, it would be really boring.”
Source: The New York Times
During a speech at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Mich., former President George W. Bush said that if he had to, he would do it all over again. He was talking about waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks. During the Bush administration, water-boarding was considered a harsh interrogation technique. Today, under President Obama, it is considered torture. In a now classic assignment for Vanity Fair, contributing editor, and Slate contributor, Christopher Hitchens agreed to undergo a water-boarding session, concluding that it should definitely be considered torture. “You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it ‘simulates’ the feeling of drowning,” Hitchens wrote in “Believe Me, It’s Torture.” ”This is not the case,” he continued. “You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.” (You can also watch a video of Hitchens being water-boarded on YouTube.) ”Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is the most senior al-Qaida operative in U.S. custody,” the Associated Press reported. “In his speech, Bush defended the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. He said ousting Saddam Hussein ‘was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him.’ ”
Source: The Associated Press
President Obama signed a memo expanding the rights of same-sex federal workers on Wednesday evening. “While this memorandum is an important step on the path to equality, my administration continues to be prevented by existing Federal law from providing same-sex domestic partners with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples,” he said. Last year, Obama ordered basic rights extended to same-sex couples including visitation and dependent-care rights. At that time, he asked federal agencies to determine what additional benefits he could provide without Congress acting, and the new rights ordered on Wednesday were a result of that review. “They include child-care services and subsidies; more flexibility to use family leave to attend to the needs of domestic partners and their children; relocation benefits; giving domestic partners the same status as ‘family members’ when federal appointments are made; and access to credit union and other memberships when those are provided to federal workers,” the Associated Press summarized. The New York Times called the new package of benefits “modest,” but they’re certainly a step forward for gay rights. In the memo, Obama regretted that it wasn’t within his power to extend full health care benefits, which is the ultimate goal of most gay activists, though he did call on Congress to act. “The limitations of these new benefits however serve as a glaring reminder that the Defense of Marriage Act ultimately stands in the way of providing true equality to LGBT Americans,” president of the Human Rights Campaign Joe Solmonese wrote in a statement, according to the Advocate, a gay-news Web site.
Source: The Associated Press
In a huge win for the chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., the area teachers’ union ratified 1,412-425 a new contract that places educators on a small but growing list of regions where pay is determined by results in the classroom and not seniority. Michelle Rhee, an early proponent of performance-based pay, has battled for years to get the new contract passed. In that time, she has seen some of her ideas adopted by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan in their “Race to the Top” program. The new contract, once passed by the D.C. Council (passage is expected to happen quickly), will give Rhee more power to remove poor educators while also boosting the average salary of a D.C. teacher to about $81,000 over the next five years. “A voluntary performance pay program to begin this fall could add $20,000 to $30,000 to D.C. teachers’ salaries, based on significant improvement in student test scores and other yet-to-be specified criteria,” the Washington Post reported. “It allows principals to use job performance, instead of seniority, as the chief determinant when reducing staff because of declining enrollment or program changes.” The increased pay will be financed by private foundations. “I am very pleased with the contract,” Rhee said. “It strikes a great balance between making teachers understand that we very much value and support the work they do every day and on the administrative side giving us the tools we need to staff the school effectively.”
Source: The Washington Post
A Tuesday Washington Post trend piece chronicles the rise of online dating assistants—ghostwriters who help the busy (or socially inept) navigate the wilds of Internet romance by doing the writing for them. Writers get paid when clients get dates, but that doesn’t mean that the services come cheap: “for $600, Virtual Dating Assistants [a company] guarantees clients two dates a month,” the Post says, “the ‘executive service’ package promises five dates a month for $1,200.” The Post claims that there are dozens of companies across the country that get paid to write profiles and fish for dates, and cites one man who started his company after outsourcing Internet romance to his secretary. “Just from a cost-benefit analysis,” the Don Juan remarked, ”me spending all this time on doing things that are purely almost secretarial doesn’t make any sense for me.” (Others say the service protects them from the pain of rejection.) While companies say that they accurately represent their clients, they’ve faced a barrage of attacks from bloggers who accuse them of lying, or treating love like a form of online shopping.
Source: The Washington Post
In a move that could give Slate‘sBarack Obama Facebook feed a run for its money, George W. Bush has put privacy concerns aside and joined the unavoidable social networking site. W. isn’t accepting friend requests, but by Wednesday afternoon, nearly 29,000 people had “liked” the 43rd president. At Salon, Alex Pareene rounds up his favorite comments from the ex-president’s Facebook wall, which already seems to have brought supporters out in full force. “Your administration was the 8 year bright spot between the years of the White House being treated like the local Hooters and now 4 long years of the Karl Marx/Saul Alinsky Black Panther Rally Hoe Down HQ,” one commenter writes. Another offers W. a bit of gratitude, and tips on budgeting: “I hope Laura took your credit card. You spent money like a female in a shoe store with unlimited credit LOL but you NEVER disrespected our Military or Country or Flag.” Finally, ”please don’t have your farm pre-emptively attack my farm on Farmville. Sincerely, The Ghost of Saddam.”
Source: Salon
