David F. Carr” - Salesforce.com, Radian6 Deal Validates Social Media Monitoring

Competitors say there is growing interest in technology that lets sales, service, and marketing professionals monitor and respond to social media comments.

David F. Carr

April 1, 2011

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229400721&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Salesforce.com's announcement Wednesday that it is acquiring social media monitoring specialist Radian6 is an endorsement of the growth and importance of the social media monitoring market, according to companies that will be competing with the new powerhouse.

Visible Technologies CEO Kelly Pennock backed this theory in a blog post the day of the Salesforce announcement and followed up Thursday with his own news of having secured an additional $6 million in funding.

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Christopher Martin” - Low-Carbon World Needs $500 Billion a Year to Slow Warming, WEF Says

istopher Martin

April 1, 2011

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-01/low-carbon-world-needs-500-billion-a-year-to-slow-warming-wef-says.html

Preventing the worst effects of global warming without harming economic growth requires doubling annual investments in renewable and low-carbon energy to $500 billion a year by 2020, according to the World Economic Forum.

Government policies must expand development of clean energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines to limit a global temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels, a goal that environmental groups and scientists say is needed to halt the adverse impact of a warming planet.

Clean energy investment last year surged 30 percent to a record $243 billion, the WEF said today in a report based on data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That’s less than half of what is needed to prevent catastrophic warming that would melt polar ice caps and raise sea levels, it said.

“In this era of fiscal austerity, policy makers need to ensure that the supports they put in place drive sustained long- term growth,” co-authors Anuradha Gurung and Max von Bismarck said in the report.

Government stimulus commitments of $194 billion worldwide since 2009 have spurred private investment and driven down costs, especially in China, which invested $47.3 billion in the sector. The U.S. accounted for $20.7 billion of global clean energy spending.

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Fukushima FAR WORSE than predicted: Arnie Gundersen, nuke engineer, explains

Update on Fukushima: Discussion of High Level Radiation Releases and the Previous "Worse Case Senario" Planned for by The Indust from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Untitled from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

"Danny Schechter (progressiveradionetwork.com Host- Friday @ 1pm (est)" - The Martin Luther King Legacy and The Global Economic Crisis: Can One Influence the Other?

By Danny Schechter

Author, The Crime of our Time

Before he went over that mountain top in that week in an April like this one back in l968, Martin Luther King Jr, said he had already seen the other side, as he spent his last days on earth fighting for the garbage men of Memphis while speaking out about the twin evils of war and poverty.

A few days earlier, a great black American essayist and historian, Manning Marable, died suddenly just before his new and definitive book on Malcolm X came out showing how America’s best known Muslim martyr had moved from a focus on the domestic politics of racial confrontation to the international politics of global revolution.

(Among his findings; The US government spied on Malcolm as he globe-trotted linking up with like minded activists. This was offered up as a new revelation I had to smile since I did an investigative report for Ramparts Magazine in 1967 on how the CIA was trying to discredit him in Africa.)

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"Bradley Keoun & Craig Torres" - Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak

By Bradley Keoun and Craig Torres - Apr 1, 2011   Bloomberg News.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-01/foreign-banks-tapped-fed-s-lifeline-most-as-bernanke-kept-borrowers-secret.html

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.

The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record. The disclosures may stoke a reexamination of the risks posed to U.S. taxpayers by the central bank’s role in global financial markets.

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"Julie Deardorff" - Do synthetic food colors cause hyperactivity?

Critics blame the additives for triggering behavioral problems in youngsters

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-01/health/ct-met-food-dyes-20110101_1_food-dyes-food-colors-food-ingredients

Julie Deardorff, Chicago Tribune

Food coloring is the reason glace cherries are red rather than beige and that children's tongues sometimes appear freakishly blue. But man-made dyes may do more than make processed food look vibrant and whimsical. Some blame the additives for triggering behavioral problems in youngsters.

Acting on research published in the Lancet, the European Parliament last year began requiring products containing synthetic food colors to carry warning labels saying that "consumption may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children."

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"SD" - Whale and Dolphin Death Toll During Deepwater Disaster May Have Been Greatly Underestimated

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110330094006.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2011) — The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

"The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest," said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia."This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill."

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"Chris Hedges" - This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Published on Monday, April 4, 2011 by TruthDig.com

http://www.truthdig.com/

by Chris Hedges

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

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"Chris Ketcham" - Intellectual Prostitution and the Myth of Objectivity

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/intellectual_prostitution_and_the_myth_of_objectivity_20110403/

Posted on Apr 3, 2011

By Christopher Ketcham

In this rotten business of freelance magazine writing there’s almost no assignment in which the issue of objectivity fails to rise up like the miasma it is. Any writer who puts his mind on the matter knows that no human being is objective, which is the reason writers sit down at the page in the first place. The writer, an inherently subjective force, will not be divorced from the writing, though God knows there are quacks in the news business who are trying. Computers might achieve this end. Also, certain types of house cats are objective: They know exactly what the truth is, and it is them.

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Mitchell J. Rabin (progressiveradionetwork.com Host - Monday 6pm (est)

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on Progressive Radio Network Mondays, 6pm EST

To Listen, Tune in Every Monday at 6PM EST at www.abetterworld.net
Past shows can also be found there too.

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