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Sunday, January 27, 2013
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APNewsBreak: Harkin won't seek 6th Senate term
CUMMING, Iowa (AP) ? U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin said Saturday he will not seek a sixth term in 2014, a decision that eases some of the burden the national Republican Party faces in retaking the Senate.
Harkin, chairman of an influential Senate committee, announced his decision during an interview with The Associated Press, saying the move could surprise some.
The 73-year-old cited his age ? he would be 81 at the end of a sixth term ? as a factor in the decision, saying it was time to pass the torch he has held for nearly 30 years, freeing a new generation of Iowa Democrats to seek higher office.
"I just think it's time for me to step aside," Harkin told the AP.
Harkin, first elected in 1984, ranks seventh in seniority and fourth among majority Democrats. He is chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and chairman of the largest appropriations subcommittee.
Harkin has long aligned with the Senate's more liberal members, and his signature legislative accomplishment is the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. He also served as a key salesman of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul to the wary left.
"I'm not saying that giving this up and walking away is easy. It's very tough," Harkin said at his rural Iowa home south of Des Moines. "But I'm not quitting today. I'm not passing the torch sitting down."
Harkin's news defied outward signals. Besides being beloved in his party, Harkin has $2.7 million in his campaign war chest, second most among members nearing the end of their terms, and was planning a fundraiser in Washington, D.C., next month featuring pop star Lady Gaga.
Obama released a statement saying Harkin will be missed and thanking the senator for his service. "During his tenure, he has fought passionately to improve quality of life for Americans with disabilities and their families, to reform our education system and ensure that every American has access to affordable health care," Obama said.
Although members of his family have been diagnosed with cancer, Harkin said his health is good ? and reported a recent positive colonoscopy. But he said "you never know," and that he wanted to travel and spend his retirement with his wife, Ruth, "before it's too late."
He also nodded to his political longevity: "The effect of that cascades down and it opens a lot of doors of opportunity" for future candidates.
But by opening a door in Iowa, Harkin has created a potential headache for his party nationally.
Democrats likely would have had the edge in 2014 with the seat, considering Harkin's fundraising prowess and healthy approval. A poll by the Des Moines Register last fall showed a majority of Iowans approved of his job performance.
Democrats hold a 55-45 advantage in the Senate, requiring Republicans to gain six seats to win back the chamber. But Democrats have more seats to defend in 2014 ? 20 compared with only 13 for Republicans. Historically, the president's party loses seats in the midterm elections after his re-election.
In GOP-leaning West Virginia, five-term Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller recently announced he would not seek re-election. And on Friday, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican, announced that he wouldn't seek a third term.
Democratic incumbents also face tough re-election races in Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina and Alaska ? all carried by Republican Mitt Romney in November's presidential election.
Harkin's move opens a rare open Senate seat Iowa. Harkin, Iowa's junior senator, is outranked by Sen. Charles Grassley, who has held the state's other seat since 1980.
Attention will turn to U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, a fourth-term Democrat from Waterloo who has long been mentioned as a possible Harkin successor. Braley, who was traveling in Iowa, did not immediately return requests by the AP for comments beyond an emailed statement calling Harkin a "mentor" and "progressive force" who leaves "a legacy few will ever match."
Harkin held open the possibility of endorsing a Democrat before the primary if the candidate "is a pragmatic progressive."
Although no Republicans have stepped forward, Harkin's news gives the GOP's private huddles new life.
"There are lots of conversations, but it's very early still," said Nick Ryan, an Iowa Republican campaign fundraiser.
U.S. Rep. Tom Latham of Clive is a seasoned Republican congressman, a veteran House Appropriations Committee member and a robust fundraiser who has won 10 consecutive terms. Aides to Latham declined to comment beyond a statement saying the congressman "respects Sen. Harkin's decision (and) looks forward to continuing to work with him."
Since November, Harkin has stepped up his role as one of the Senate's leading liberal populists.
He was a vocal opponent late last year of Obama's concession to lift the income threshold for higher taxes to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. Harkin instead supported raising taxes on all earners making more than $250,000 a year.
He also endorsed Obama's call for banning assault rifles and larger ammunition magazines after the Connecticut school shooting.
Despite Harkin's strong political position, he has faced questions about his and his wife's role in developing a namesake policy institute at Iowa State University, Harkin's alma mater. The Harkins and their supporters have been pushing for the institute to house papers highlighting his signature achievements, including the ADA and shaping farm policy as the former chairman of the Agriculture Committee.
Harkin has avoided questions about fundraising for the institute after disclosure reports showed some of its largest donors are firms that have benefited from his policies.
Harkin dismissed that those questions had any bearing on his decision.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-harkin-wont-seek-6th-senate-term-221752247--politics.html
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White House, senators launching immigration push
FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama gestures speaks during his final news conference of his first term in the East Room of the White House in Washington. President Barack Obama's fledgling second term agenda so far reads like a progressive wish list. In less than a week, he's vowed to tackle climate change, expand gay rights and protect government entitlements. His administration lifted a ban on women in combat and expanded opportunities for disabled students. Proposals for stricter gun laws have already been unveiled and plans for comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, are coming soon. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama gestures speaks during his final news conference of his first term in the East Room of the White House in Washington. President Barack Obama's fledgling second term agenda so far reads like a progressive wish list. In less than a week, he's vowed to tackle climate change, expand gay rights and protect government entitlements. His administration lifted a ban on women in combat and expanded opportunities for disabled students. Proposals for stricter gun laws have already been unveiled and plans for comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, are coming soon. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
White House press secretary Jay Carney gesture as he speaks during his daily news briefing at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama will launch a campaign next week aimed at overhauling the nation's flawed immigration system and creating legal status for millions, as a bipartisan Senate group nears agreement on achieving the same goals.
The proposals from Obama and lawmakers will mark the start of what is expected to be a contentious and emotional process with deep political implications. Latino voters overwhelmingly backed Obama in the 2012 election, leaving Republicans grappling for a way to regain their standing with an increasingly powerful pool of voters.
The president will press his case for immigration changes during a trip to Las Vegas Tuesday. The Senate working group is also aiming to outline its proposals next week, according to a Senate aide.
Administration officials say Obama's second-term immigration push will be a continuation of the principles he outlined during his first four years in office but failed to act on. He is expected to revive his little-noticed 2011 immigration "blueprint," which calls for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that includes paying fines and back taxes; increased border security; mandatory penalties for businesses that employ unauthorized immigrants; and improvements to the legal immigration system, including giving green cards to high-skilled workers and lifting caps on legal immigration for the immediate family members of U.S. citizens.
"What has been absent in the time since he put those principles forward has been a willingness by Republicans, generally speaking, to move forward with comprehensive immigration reform," White House press secretary Jay Carney said. "What he hopes is that that dynamic has changed."
The political dynamic does appear to have shifted following the November election. Despite making little progress on immigration in his first term, Obama won more than 70 percent of the Latino vote, in part because of the conservative positions on immigration that Republican nominee Mitt Romney staked out during the GOP primary. Latino voters accounted for 10 percent of the electorate in November.
The president met privately Friday morning with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss his next steps on immigration. Among those in the meeting was Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who said Obama told lawmakers "immigration reform is his number one legislative priority."
That could bump back the president's efforts to seek legislation enacting stricter gun laws, another issue he has vowed to make a top second term priority.
The Senate immigration group is also pressing for quick action, aiming to draft a bill by March and pass legislation in their chamber by August, said the aide, who requested anonymity in order to discuss private deliberations. The Republican-controlled House would also need to pass the legislation before it went to the White House for the president's signature.
Senate lawmakers working on the immigration effort include Democrats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey; and Republicans John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida, according to Senate aides.
Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Republicans Jeff Flake of Arizona and Mike Lee of Utah have also been involved. It's not clear whether all those involved will sign on to the principles the group hopes to roll out next week.
Those principles are expected to include a process toward legalizing the status of unauthorized immigrants already in the country; border security; verification measures for employers hiring workers and ways for more temporary workers to be admitted into the country.
It's unclear whether the group will back the pathway to full citizenship that the president is seeking. Schumer and Graham have previously supported requiring illegal immigrants to admit they broke the law, perform community service, pay fines and back taxes, pass background checks and learn English before going to the back of the line of immigrants already in the system in order to legalize their immigration status.
Several of the senators negotiating the immigration principles are veterans of the failed comprehensive immigration reform effort under then-President George W. Bush. That process collapsed in 2007 when it came up well-short of the needed votes in the Senate, a bitter outcome for Bush and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Democrats' leader on the legislation.
Some Republicans still lament that result as a missed opportunity for the party that could have set the GOP on a different path to reach more Latino voters.
Rubio is a relative newcomer to Senate negotiations on the issue, but he's seen as a rising star in his party and a potential 2016 presidential candidate. As a charismatic young Hispanic leader his proposals on immigration have attracted wide notice in recent weeks. And as a conservative favorite, unlike McCain or Graham, his stamp of approval could be critical to drawing in other conservative lawmakers.
A Republican aide said that Rubio has made clear in his interactions with the Senate group that he couldn't sign on to proposals that deviated from the principles he himself has been laying out in recent media interviews, including border security first, a guest-worker program, more visas for high-tech workers and enforcement in the workplace.
As for the illegal immigrants already in the country, Rubio would have them pay a fine and back taxes, show they have not committed crimes, prove they've been in the country for some time and speak some English and apply for permanent residency. Ultimately citizenship too could be in reach but only after a process that doesn't nudge aside immigrants already in line, and Rubio hasn't provided details on how long it all might take.
___
Associated Press writer Luis Alonso Lugo contributed to this report.
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AP Interview: CERN chief firmer on 'God particle'
Director General of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, gestures as he speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Director General of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, gestures as he speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Director General of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, gestures as he speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Participants leave the Congress Center the last day of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Keystone/Laurent Gillieron)
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) ? The world should know with certainty by the middle of this year whether a subatomic particle discovered by scientists is a long-sought Higgs boson, the head of the world's largest atom smasher said Saturday.
Rolf Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said he is confident that "towards the middle of the year, we will be there." By then, he said reams of data from the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border near Geneva should have been assessed.
The timing could also help Scottish physicist Peter Higgs win a Noble Prize, Heuer said in an interview with The Associated Press in the Swiss resort of Davos.
CERN's atom smasher helped scientists declare in July their discovery of a new subatomic particle that Heuer calls "very, very like" a Higgs boson, that promises a new realm of understanding the universe.
The machine, which has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, is being put to rest early this year. The data from it, however, takes longer to analyze.
"Suppose the Higgs boson is a special snowflake. So you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields," Heuer said by way of analogy. "That is very difficult. You need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time."
He said the standard model of particle physics describes only 5 percent of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
To explain how subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, were themselves formed, Higgs and others in the 1960s envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
The idea was that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. But a big question remains: Is this new particle a variation of the Higgs boson, or the same as the Higgs boson that was predicted?
The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started.
"Now, if there is a deviation in one of the properties of this Higgs boson, that means we open a new window, for example, hopefully into the part of the dark universe, the 95 percent of the unknown universe," said Heuer.
"If you find the deviation," he added, "that means if it is not the ? but a ? Higgs boson, then we might find a fantastic window into the dark universe so we would make another giant leap from the visible to the dark."
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Sunday, January 20, 2013
Diane Turton, REALTORS? Agents Receive 5 Star Award ...
Diane Turton, REALTORS? recently announced that Nita Rose, Frank Fontana, and Allen Rusca have been selected to receive the prestigious ?2013 Five Star Real Estate Agent? Award by New Jersey Monthly Magazine. According to the company, the Five Star Real Estate Agent program is designed to identify and showcase local real estate agents that score [...]
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Source: http://bloomington-real-estate.com/blog/diane-turton-realtors%C2%AE-agents-receive-5-star-award/
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UN clinches global deal on cutting mercury emissions
GENEVA (Reuters) - More than 140 countries have agreed on the first global treaty to cut mercury pollution through a blacklist of household items and new controls on power plants and small-scale mines, the United Nations said on Saturday.
The legally-binding agreement aims to phase out many products that use the toxic liquid metal such as batteries, thermometers and some fluorescent lamps, through banning global import and exports by 2020.
The treaty will require countries with coal-fired power plants such as India and China to install filters and scrubbers on new plants and to commit to reducing emissions from existing operations to prevent mercury from coal reaching the atmosphere.
"We have closed a chapter on a journey that has taken four years of often intense but ultimately successful negotiations and opened a new chapter towards a sustainable future," said Fernando Lugris, chair of the negotiations.
The deal also includes measures to reduce mercury use in small-scale gold mining, although stopped short of an all-out ban. Gold prices near $1,700 a tonne have spurred the use of mercury as a catalyst to separate gold from its ore.
Emissions of mercury from artisanal and small-scale gold mines, which are usually unofficial and often illegal, more than doubled to 727 tonnes in 2010 from 2005 levels, overtaking coal-fired power plants as the main source of pollution from the metal.
The Minamata Convention on Mercury - named after the Japanese city where people were poisoned in the mid-20th century from industrial discharges of mercury - needs ratification from 50 countries and is expected to be formalised later this year.
The treaty requires governments to draw up national rules to comply and could take between three to five years to take effect.
As mercury, also known as quicksilver, is released to the air or washed into rivers and oceans, it spreads worldwide, and builds up in humans mostly through consumption of fish. The brains of foetuses and infants are particularly vulnerable to damage from mercury.
Officials said the financing required to bring in cleaner technology for industry and help developing countries come up with local solutions was one of the major sticking points of the six-day negotiations.
"Financing was agreed very early this morning and it was one of the most difficult aspects," said Lugris.
Japan, Norway and Switzerland have made initial pledges totalling $3 million in financing and an interim financial arrangement will be discussed in April by the Global Environment Facility, said Tim Kasten, head of the chemicals branch of UNEP.
Countries failed to agree on including vaccines where mercury is sometimes used as a preservative.
SOFT LANGUAGE?
While negotiators celebrated the deal reached after all-night talks in the fifth and final round of talks, the response from some non-governmental organisations (NGO) was more muted.
"The treaty will not bring immediate reductions of mercury emissions. It will need to be improved and strengthened, to make all fish safe to eat," said David Lennett from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
NGO IPEN, which aims to reduce the health risk of chemicals, described the language of the treaty as "soft" and "somewhat voluntary in nature" and said it was unlikely to result in a global reduction of mercury releases.
"Countries that do not want to do this can escape quite easily," said IPEN's Joe DiGangi.
In one notable climbdown, countries abandoned their goal of setting concrete targets for pollution levels from coal-fired power plants and cement factories, but negotiators said they would defer these discussions to a later meeting.
For mining, the treaty requires action from governments to reduce mercury use where artisanal and small-scale gold mining is "more than insignificant" but has no list of countries.
Alternatives to mercury in small mines are available, such as magnetic sluices, but developing countries have complained about the cost of implementation.
Many developing countries including Brazil and Mali strongly resisted attempts to limit imports of mercury, according to IPEN, because of the economic importance of small mines.
"The supply is still available, the practice of artisanal mining is still polluting and we are left with a mess at the end and there is no funding to clean it up," said DiGangi.
Artisanal and small gold mines now account for around 35 percent of global mercury pollution, according to a study by the U.N. Environment Programme published last week.
Other NGOs welcomed the number of products included in the treaty.
"The list of products was much longer than we expected," said Elena Lymberidi-Settimo, a coordinator at Zero Mercury Working Group. "The treaty sends the right market signal and will eventually lead to less exposure worldwide."
Many nations have already tightened laws - the United States barred exports of mercury from January 1, 2013. The European Union, until 2008 the main global exporter, barred exports of the liquid metal in 2011.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/un-clinches-global-deal-cutting-mercury-emissions-085933454.html
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