Saturday, May 9, 2009

Y! Alert: The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Gay Marriage Effort Stalls In Heavily Catholic Rhode Island Top
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Gay marriage could soon become the law of the land across New England _ except in the heavily Roman Catholic state of Rhode Island. A string of sudden successes for gay marriage advocates has left Rhode Island a political outlier. Maine became the fourth state in New England to legalize same-sex unions on Wednesday, while New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch is now deciding whether to sign similar legislation. Vermont lawmakers established gay marriage last month, following a path already set by courts in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Yet the movement has stalled in Rhode Island, perhaps even lost ground, after a stalemate at the Statehouse, a loss in the state's top court and continued opposition from religious leaders. "I do not hear voices raised, voices stating absolutely that this just cannot do," said Cassandra Ormiston, 62, a lesbian who could not get divorced in Rhode Island after she and her partner married in Massachusetts. "It is not enough to be patient." Religion remains among the biggest hurdles. A recent survey by Trinity College in Connecticut showed 46 percent of Rhode Islanders identify themselves as Roman Catholic, a larger percentage than any other state. Given its size, the church carries political clout. On the last Inauguration Day, every statewide elected official began the morning with a special Mass at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, celebrated by Bishop Thomas Tobin. Tobin does not hesitate to tussle with politicians, especially on gay marriage. He calls gay unions a perversion of natural law and a violation of an institution that Catholics believe was created by God. Two years ago, he harshly criticized Attorney General Patrick Lynch, a Catholic, for advising state agencies to recognize the marriages of gay couples wed outside Rhode Island. "We don't see it as a civil rights issue," Tobin said in a recent interview, "because there's never a right to do something that's morally wrong." Bills legalizing gay marriage have been introduced in the Statehouse every year since 1997. None has ever been approved by a legislative committee, required before those bills could be aired on the full floor. House Speaker William Murphy and Senate President M. Teresa Paiva-Weed, both Democrats and Catholics, oppose gay marriage. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Rhoda Perry, a Democrat from Providence, does not expect to get a vote this year. She believes legislative leaders are trying to shield fellow lawmakers from a fractious debate. "You know your numbers," Perry said. "So why make anyone even have to vote on something that at least some of their constituents will be upset about if you already know the votes aren't there." Even if a simple majority of lawmakers backed Perry's bill, Republican Gov. Don Carcieri _ another Catholic _ would almost certainly veto it. Overriding a veto requires the support of 60 percent of lawmakers in each chamber. Courts legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but that avenue seems unlikely in Rhode Island. In 2007, Rhode Island's Supreme Court refused to let Ormiston divorce her wife, Margaret Chambers. The couple lived in Rhode Island but married across the border in Massachusetts. In its ruling, the court said it could not grant a divorce because Rhode Island lawmakers have never recognized marriage as anything but a union between a man and a woman. Frustrated with the slow pace in Rhode Island, Ormiston is parting ways with Marriage Equality Rhode Island, which has locally advocated for gay marriage, and starting a new organization, called Equality Rising, to push harder. "It is not enough to wait until we no longer have opposition," she said. It might become slightly easier for those looking to legalize gay marriage in Rhode Island when Carcieri finishes his second and final term as governor in January 2011. Potential candidates including former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, and Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts and Attorney General Patrick Lynch, both Democrats, support gay marriage. General Treasurer Frank Caprio, also a Democrat, said he would not veto a gay marriage bill if he were elected governor. More on Gay Marriage
 
David Wild: sse Top
There are musicians who grab headlines for the controversy they can kick up or the drugs they can do. We love some of these musicians. But then there is another breed of player who rather quietly but consistently make our world a more beautiful and better sounding place, one song at a time. Stephen Bruton -- who died today -- was never much of a household name -- unless your house was in Austin, Texas. Yet somehow along the way his genius as a guitarist, a producer, a singer, a songwriter and a recording artist probably touched many millions of American music lovers. A buddy of T-Bone Burnett going back to their days growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, Bruton played with the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Christine McVie, the Wallflowers, Carly Simon, Sonny Landreth and Peter Case. He produced other great recordings artists like Alejandro Escovedo, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. And after appearing with Kristofferson in A Star Is Born, Bruton also worked in film numerous times. Indeed, he may have been the only man to be seen in both Heaven's Gate and Miss Congeniality. Whether or not you knew his name, he will be missed.
 
James Love: Obama and Free Software Top
One of the more interesting aspects of the modern knowledge society is the free software movement . The most famous and influential leader of this movement is Richard M. Stallman (RMS). Richard recognized the value of a new model for software development and the various risks to that model. He also created a philosophical and ideological framework, and a new set of slogans, legal strategies and ideas to protect and promote the environment that would make free software more common and powerful. If Richard had not began his work in the 1980s, the Internet today would be less open, less innovative, and less useful. In recent years the free software movement has grown in many different dimensions, and become much more diverse in terms of its leadership and approach. Playing an important role are Stallman critics like Eric Raymond or Bruce Perens[2], gifted software development leaders like Linus Torvalds, thousands of independently managed software development communities, corporate supported ventures like OpenOffice, MySql, Redhat or Ubuntu, and a host of influential academics like Eben Moglen or Yoachi Benkler. Today Google Scholar has 53,900 hits for the term "free software."[3] [Clockwise: Obama ( Marc Nozell) and free software leaders Richard Stallman (Leonid Dmitriev), Eben Moglen (Andrew McMillan), Linux Torvalds (t3rmin4t0r), Bruce Perens (Manon Ress) and Michell Baker (Dead Squid). All photos available under licenses from Author, Wikimedia or Flickr] While free software was once considered by some as a fringe movement, it is now mainstream. Fortune 500 companies are embracing free software programs like R to analyse data. Linux, Apache, MySql and PhP (LAMP) servers power much of the Internet. Many cell phones, Kindle 2, and other devices run Linux. There is enormous interest in the development of every aspect of free software tools and applications. Some of the most profitable software companies today are those that are providing services over free software platforms. Free software also is important for empowering and protecting other social movements that routinely rely upon free software for a wide range of services. The "free" part of the free software movement is an important element of this. The ability to innovate, and specifically to create innovations that serve social needs, is well served by platforms, like the Internet, that are based upon openness and freedom. What does all this have to do with Obama? Actually, quite a bit. As important as free software has become economically and socially, it gets almost no respect among U.S. political leaders. People should insist that elected and appointed government officials be more explicit about policies. I would start by asking the Obama Administration to answer the following initial questions: Is free software important? 1. To what extent is free software used today? 2. What are the efficiency benefits of free software, in terms of allowing code to be freely reused and re-purposed? 3. What are the benefits of having software code transparent? 4. What are the benefits of users having the freedom to modify software to meet their needs? 5. Does free software play an important role in avoiding harm from the monopoly control over software products and platforms? 6. How much money do users save by using free software solutions? 7. Does free software make it easier for young people to learn about and contribute to the development of software? Next, I would ask the Obama Administration to address certain policy questions relevant to procurement and government services: 8. Does government procurement policy recognize the benefits of free software solutions? 9. If so, do procurement policies encourage or discourage the supply and use of free software? 10. Does the Obama Administration recognize the strategic importance and value of interoperability and open standards in the software field? 11. Does the Obama Administration recognize the strategic importance of open standards for data formats? 12. Does the Administration have a strategy to support and promote interoperability and open standards, including open data formats? If so, what is this strategy? 13. To what extent can someone who uses free software fully interact with government agencies, such as by editing collaborative documents, using web based services, viewing multimedia content, or using government funded databases? Grant Related Issues: 14. Does the federal Bayh-Dole Act provide the flexibility for the US government to insert appropriate conditions in grants that would increase public access to the software code developed under a government grant? 15. Should federal grants require recipients to publish and share data in open standardized formats? Competition Issues. 16. Is the impact of a merger of the free software sector relevant to a proposed merger? For example, will the Obama Administration examine the impact of the Oracle acquisition of Sun on the future viability of MySQL, Java or OpenOffice? 17. Would an agreement among the owners of the two leading proprietary operating systems to not distribute software on the Linux platform be considered a violation of competition laws? If competition law is not a good tool to address such issues, what is? 18. Would an aggressive effort to break an open standard for data formats be considered a violation of competition law? Patent issues. 19. Should there be a zone of fair use for software patents when used in free software projects? A lot of these issues are technical, but the issues are quite important economically and socially. The trick is to make these geeky issues political enough that politicians engage. --Notes [1]Yoachi Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J (2002); Yoachi Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press 2006). Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday (August, 1999) [2] Eric S Raymond, The cathedral and the bazaar: Musings on Linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary, 2001, O'Reilly & Associates. http://perens.com/policy/open-source/ [3]http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22free+software%22&btnG=Search
 
Swine Flu: Illinois Confirms 421 Cases, 187 In Chicago Top
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- Health officials say they've confirmed 421 cases of swine flu in Illinois, including 187 in Chicago. Saturday's tally from the Illinois Department of Public Health is 28 more than Friday's total. In Chicago, officials have announced the closing of a school on the city's far North Side because of the spread of swine flu. The closing Friday of the Northside Learning Center in the Jefferson Park neighborhood came two days after school officials reopened the Joyce Kilmer Elementary School. That school had been closed for a week because one student there had the flu. School officials said Northside, a special education facility with 288 students, will be closed Monday. Reported absences have been about three times the normal rate for this time of year. --- On the Net: http://www.Ready.Illinois.gov More on Swine Flu
 
John Farr: This Summer's Movies: A Good Reason to Stay Outdoors? Top
This past Sunday, the venerable New York Times issued a special section on upcoming movie releases for the critical summer season. Before laying out what we have to look forward to, the first page featured a series of "Memos to Hollywood" from critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis. I thought Mr. Scott in particular offered up some important, though hardly new, suggestions for the industry: 1) Allow people to see movies how, when and where they want to; 2) Fix our nitwitted, confusing ratings system; 3) Give some edgy young filmmakers the chance to enliven the embarrassingly stale phenomenon known as film comedy; 4) Political correctness is the enemy of art and entertainment- take a stand; aim for some controversy in your films, get people talking; 5) Scorsese and Spielberg- think small again (fat chance); and finally, 6) A depressingly apt and descriptive listing of all the tired formulas still being flogged to the public, accompanied by a heartfelt plea to do something different and better. Ms. Darghis, working as she does for one of the top surviving newspapers in the land, inspired me less than her colleague. Maybe she is meant to speak for the youth, but the youth I meet are brighter than this. For example, she saluted Pixar for making a film with a female protagonist (something on everyone's mind), decried the portrayal of effeminate gays (does Sean Penn count?), and asked for more movies with Rachel McAdams and James Franco (I like Franco, but I'm seeing plenty of him. Does he need a job?). Most annoyingly, she contradicted A.O Scott's first well-made point about the public's desire to consume film how, when and where they choose by taking the urban public to task for not supporting foreign and independent films at their neighborhood arts-house! After all, "DVDs and downloads pale next to the big-screen experience", and companies like New Yorker films are going out of business! This is our fault, Manohla? Hollywood's marketing might, which marginalizes the awareness and distribution of these smaller films, is not the primary culprit? And sorry to break it to you, but more and more people watch a good portion of their movies at home, and very happily too, for reasons of price and convenience. Later I had to wonder if the ensuing irony was evident to anyone at the Times . Moving on from this lead article, I quickly discovered that the rest of the section was dominated by plugs and ads for just the kinds of movies these critics are asking Hollywood to stop making. Among the cinematic treats in store for us this summer: The much anticipated re-make of "The Taking Of Pelham One, Two, Three" for those who found the original classic had too many words and not enough bullets; A drama (yes, drama- and about terminal illness) misleadingly titled "Funny People" starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, logical perhaps in that their latest comedies stopped being funny; A new variation on the plodding "Da Vinci Code" called "Angels and Demons", with Tom Hanks still sporting that silly haircut (only Hollywood so blatantly aims to capitalize on failure); The inevitable sequels... for "Harry Potter" (he must have chest hair by now), "Ice Age", and the eternally witty, effervescent "Night At The Museum"; For those already nostalgic for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua", the high-minded Jerry Bruckheimer brings us a movie called "G Force" starring-you guessed it- a guinea pig; Not to mention a new (airbrushed) Sandra Bullock romantic comedy called "The Proposal", starring a much younger man with nice hair named Ryan Reynolds. Of course, it's not all bad; it never is. To be fair, there are always a few surprise gems buried amidst the muck. Personally, I will be curious to see whether: The classically beautiful (but never effeminate) Johnny Depp can bring off his portrayal of tough, macho gangster John Dillinger in "Public Enemies"; Quentin Tarantino can pull himself out of his recent spate of creative self-indulgence with "Inglorious Bastards", starring Brad Pitt; Meryl Streep's rendition of Julia Child in "Julie and Julia" approaches my own legendary impersonation- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BFGC8l1gA0. Till these breathless moments arrive, Ms. Darghis, I will stay blissfully at home, watching the Criterion release of "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle" on DVD. Who knows? I may even program my very own Bob Mitchum Film Festival. More on Brad Pitt
 
Michelle Kraus: Obama Calls for Credit Card Reform By Memorial Day... Top
No not really! Obama's proposed credit card crack down does not go far enough. It certainly is a first step for a beautiful Saturday morning in May, but his team has got to get much tougher on the financial institutions. The reality is that we are in the midst of an unprecedented bailout for these very same financial institutions. Billions are being allocated to stabilize the banks, while consumers continue to be walloped by increasing interest rates for an existing and new debt -- when it can be found. Credit card interest rate are ballooning to 30% interest. So a lucky consumer can refinance their mortgage for 5% interest or even less, but carry credit card debt for 30% interest. This does not make sense. These lucky ones can live in their home, but struggle to pay their credit card bills. Is the American public being punished for the mortgage bailout by these financial institutions? Interest rates have been indiscriminately raised for consumers over the last year, often even for good clients with little notice or purpose. The Obama Administration must develop sweeping policies and regulations to mandate change within our financial institutions. The legislation proposed, known as the Credit Card Holders' Bill of Rights does not even go into effect, if passed in the Senate, for another 12 months except for notification of interest rate increases. Understandably, the banking lobby is up in arms, and we know we must not let our elected officials in the House and Senate, crumble under these attacks. Again, we are poised at another crossroads. Do we allow many more Americans to be pushed over the edge into unfathomable financial crisis? In many cases the use of credit cards is not a matter of living beyond a person's means; rather it is a necessity while salaries have been slashed or jobs lost. If we can mandate the kind of programs to restructure mortgage debt, we certainly must do better than this. More on Bailout Bandits
 
Cell Phone Ban May Follow Boston Trolley Crash Top
BOSTON — The head of the Boston-area transit authority said Saturday he'll ban all train and bus operators from even carrying cell phones on board after a trolley driver told police he was texting his girlfriend before a collision Friday. About 50 people were hurt in the underground crash in downtown Boston, though none of the injuries was life-threatening. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority already bans operators from using cell phones and recently ran an internal ad campaign featuring a poster of an open cell phone that warned employees not to drive "under the influence." But general manager Daniel Grabauskas said Saturday the temptation obviously was too great for some. "I want to remove any temptation by one or two people stupid enough to think a moment of convenience is worth the lives of the people they're transporting," he said. "I'm not going to wait for someone to die to institute a policy whose time I think has come." Grabauskas said the new ban would apply to anyone working on a train or bus. He said he hopes to have the policy in place within a week. The proposal won quick support from Steve MacDougall, president and business agent of the Boston Carmen's Union, Local 589, which represents most of the MBTA's roughly 6,000 employees MacDougall said it was clear that Friday's accident could have been "far, far worse than it was." He said he expects some resistance to the policy from union members who believe they're being punished for the irresponsibility of one employee. But he said he believes most workers eventually will embrace the change. "When it comes to public safety and operating public transportation vehicles, a line has to be drawn," he said. State Transportation Secretary James Aloisi Jr., chairman of the MBTA Board of Directors, said accidents like Friday's have become too common, citing a train accident last year in California in which 25 people were killed. An engineer involved in that crash was found to have sent and received dozens of text messages, including one sent 22 seconds before the crash. Aloisi said he doesn't know of any policy nationwide as tough as what the MBTA is planning. Friday's accident happened about 7:20 p.m. in a tunnel between the Green Line's Park Street and Government Center stations. A two-car train was stopped at a red signal, waiting to enter Park Station, when it was hit by another two-car train. About 100 people were removed, including some who had to be extracted from the trains, and 49 were taken to area hospitals. The worst injury was a broken wrist suffered by the 24-year-old operator, who officials say admitted to police that he was sending a text message at the time of the crash. The MBTA did not release the man's name, but he was identified as Aiden Quinn, of Attleboro, by a person close to the investigation who was not authorized to release the name and spoke only on condition of anonymity. A telephone listing for Quinn could not immediately be located, and he couldn't be reached for comment. Grabauskas said the trolley operator would be fired, assuming the preliminary findings of the investigation are borne out. Criminal charges against the driver are being considered by the transit police and the local district attorney's office, Grabauskas said. The Green Line remained closed Saturday as a National Transportation Safety Board team investigated the scene. Grabauskas said he hoped the line would be running by day's end Saturday. The current MBTA policy increases penalties for workers each time they're caught using cell phones on board. Under the new one, a worker would be fired the first time he or she carried a cell phone on board. Workers have been allowed to use cell phones off the trains and buses while between trips. Buses are equipped with global positioning systems in case the radios fail, and most trolley riders have cell phones, which could be a backup if a radio malfunctions on a train, Grabauskas said. The MBTA also has a system that allows family members to inform employees of problems at home and the MBTA to send new drivers, without using cell phones. Grabauskas said Friday's accident leaves no doubt the change is needed. "There's no rationale, no excuse for this," he said.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)