Charlene Obernauer: Hate the Fare Hike? Act Now to Stop Another in 2015

Transit riders are feeling the pinch of the recent MTA fare hike and are looking for someone to blame. Some are pointing their fingers at MTA executives for their $250,000+ salaries; others are blaming transit workers, who earn an honest living of around $60,000 a year. Riders' anxiety is understandable, as fare hikes cost $200 every year and there's no end in sight.

Since the recession hit, the MTA raised the fares four times. The first was in 2008 to match the rate of inflation with a 3.9 percent hike. The MTA has been taking out loans for years to pay for expansion projects and other capital investments. But just like a credit card bill, debt eventually needs to be paid off. And in the MTA's case, their debt service has a balloon-type borrowing program that goes up every year. The big banks -- you know, the folks who caused the recession -- got bailed out by the Federal Government with 0 percent interest loans.

But the MTA is busting its budget to pay off their debt, which is about 17 percent of its general operating expenses, with interest rates at about 4.5 percent. As the MTA's debt continues to increase, so do the fares, with the last two hikes coming in at three times the rate of inflation. If the big banks can get zero interest loans from the Federal Government, can't the publicly subsidized MTA get a better deal?

All across the country, cities and transit authorities are suing big banks because of their manipulation of LIBOR, or the London interbank rate, which has been the standard for determining lending rates for millions of loans. The MTA could do the same, renegotiate a better interest rate, and stop allocating so much of its budget every year to paying off their debt.

Meanwhile, transit advocates are calling on the state and city to fork up more money for public transit, as they've been systematically defunding the MTA since the mid-1990s. Despite recent fare hikes, Governor Andrew Cuomo's 2013 budget diverted $20 million from the MTA, and New York City is allocating just $160 million per year towards the MTA's budget--which is less than Mayor Koch allocated in the late '80s. A fair investment from both the city and state would significantly lessen the rider's burden of rising transit costs.

Finally, the Transportation Infrastructure Bond Act, which would repair existing road and bridge infrastructure and invest $770 million in the MTA's five-year capital plan, has been introduced in the New York State Assembly. Not only could the bill create good jobs, but it would be a boost to the economy.

None of these solutions are going to be easy wins, and none of them are going to be complete fixes. But we can't scapegoat the honest salaries and earned benefits of hardworking people. And we can't let the right-wing use these recent fare hikes as an opportunity to privatize public transit, which will just lead to more fare hikes and service cuts. Instead, let's focus our energy on advocating for an affordable and equitable mass transit system, because if we want to prevent fare hikes in 2015, we need to start now.

?

Follow Charlene Obernauer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/charlene_amber

"; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlene-obernauer/mta-fare-hike_b_2804027.html

bks new dark knight rises trailer khloe and lamar oklahoma city thunder sunoco titanic ii babe ruth

St. Mark's finishes winter sports season on a high note

by susan on March 6, 2013

Above: St. Mark?s boys hockey celebrated a big win over Groton to cap off their season
(contributed photo)

St. Mark?s wrapped up its winter sports season last month with five wins over rival Groton. The school sent along this recap of the victories:

On February 23, St. Mark?s traveled to Groton to play six games, and the Lions defeated the Zebras in five of them. During the winter season, St. Mark?s went 8-6-1 against Groton.

Varsity boys? basketball defeated Groton 54-40 on Saturday, finishing the year with a record of 11-9, for the 16th consecutive winning season for the program. The St. Mark?s Varsity girls? basketball team also won against Groton by a score of 52-41, earning their first ISL win of the season. JV girls? basketball dominated their hosts 31-12, while JV boys? basketball suffered the only loss of the afternoon: a close 32-39 thriller. Varsity girls? ice hockey also was victorious, shutting out Groton 3-0.

The most exciting win came fromVarsity boys? ice hockey, scoring two goals in the final minute of play to take home a 4-3 win. The Lions defeated Groton in an earlier game this season. Earlier in the month, 3rds boys? basketball, JV girls? hockey, and 3rds girls? squash all registered victories over Groton to cap their respective winning campaigns.

Highlights:

• 3rds boys? basketball, win over Groton
• Varsity girls? hockey, 3-0 win over Groton
• JV girls? hockey, 4-2 win over Brooks
• Varsity boys? hockey, 4-1 win over St. George?s; 4-3 win over Groton
• JV boys? hockey, 4-2 win over Tabor
• Varsity girls? basketball, 52-41 win over Groton
• JV girls? basketball, win over Groton
• Varsity boys? basketball, win over Groton
• JV boys? basketball, 53-50 win over Brooks
• JV girls? squash, 5-2 win over Pomfret

Source: http://www.mysouthborough.com/2013/03/06/st-marks-finishes-winter-sports-season-on-a-high-note/

st. bonaventure ira glass march madness swain match day nene dark shadows trailer

Slickdeals' best in tech for March 6th: Canon EOS Rebel T4i and 3TB Seagate external hard drive

Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this round-up, we'll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You'll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won't stick around long.

If you've been looking to splurge for a DSLR, today's list may have something for you. A Canon EOS Rebel T4i tops today's roundup and a 3TB Seagate Expansion hard drive tags along to store all of those upcoming snapshots. Take the leap past the break to see the rest, but if you hold out too long, these discounts could disappear.

Filed under: Desktops, Cameras, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio/Video, Storage

Comments

Source: Slickdeals

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/slickdeals-best-in-tech-for-march-6th/

libya engadget twin towers gizmodo cnet iPhone 5 9-11

Frito-Lay loses suit over bowl-shaped tortilla chips

The Associated Press , Staff ? ? ? 9 hrs.

ST. LOUIS-- A jury has sided with a St. Louis company in its battle with Frito-Lay over bowl-shaped tortilla chips.

Frito-Lay sued St. Louis-based Ralcorp Holdings in February 2012 in U.S. District Court in Dallas, claiming Ralcorp and its Medallion Foods subsidiary infringed on intellectual property rights by making Bowlz corn chips, a product similar to Frito-Lay's Tostitos Scoops! chips.

Frito-Lay was seeking $4.5 million in damages.

But on Friday, the jury sided with Ralcorp and Medallion and gave Frito-Lay no money.

A spokseman for Plano, Texas-based Frito-Lay says the company is disappointed in the ruling and considering whether to appeal.

Ralcorp predominantly makes food sold under store brand names. It is now part of ConAgra Foods Inc. The Omaha, Neb., company completed its $5 billion purchase in January.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/frito-lay-loses-suit-over-bowl-shaped-tortilla-chips-1C8692740

christopher plummer viola davis school shooting in ohio shooting at chardon high school sasha baron cohen stacy keibler stacy keibler

Woolly rhino reveals Arctic Britain

6 March 2013 Last updated at 02:04 By Michelle Warwicker BBC Nature

Scientists studying an exceptionally well-preserved woolly rhinoceros have revealed details of what Britain's environment was like 42,000 years ago.

The beast's remains were discovered in Staffordshire in 2002, buried alongside other preserved organisms such as beetles and non-biting midges.

The research team used these climate-sensitive insects to calculate that summer temperatures in Britain would have averaged just 10C, and dropped to -22C in winter.

The results are published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

The discovery of the preserved woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) skeleton in a quarry at Whitemoor Haye was "the most significant fossil find of a large mammal in Britain for over 100 years," said team leader Professor Danielle Schreve from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"Woolly rhino bones and teeth are not uncommon in Britain but they are frequently heavily gnawed by predators, especially spotted hyenas."

Alongside the woolly rhinoceros skeleton, palaeontologists uncovered remains of other mammals, such as mammoths and reindeer, as well as well-preserved insects.

The research team, comprising scientists from the UK and and Netherlands, analysed these fossils for clues about what the environment in Britain was like at the time of the organisms' death.

Britain's Arctic tundra

Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the rhinoceros and other organisms lived during the middle part of the last Ice Age, known as the Devensian glaciation in Britain.

But the presence of preserved beetles and midges at the site were "particularly important" for the teams' investigation. Prof Schreve explained, "they're very sensitive to changes in climate, so they can give us direct insight into prevailing temperatures at the time."

According to the study: "the beetle remains are strongly indicative of severely cold and continental climates akin to Asia today."

Many of the fossilised insects no longer exist in Britain, with some now found only northern Siberia or the high plateaux of central Asia.

According to Prof Schreve, the climatic conditions in Britain 42,000 years ago were "slightly warmer... compared to the earlier and late parts of the Devensian, with summer temperatures around 8-11C but winter temperatures down as low as -16 to -22C".

During this era, Britain would have looked more like an Arctic tundra landscape, where grass and herbs sustained large grazing animals such as woolly mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses.

Predators including wolves and hyenas also roamed freely.

Untimely death

The quality of the woolly rhinoceros specimen investigated for the study, complete with plant remains still in its teeth, indicates that it was buried very rapidly after it died.

The teams' analysis showed that the individual was "at his peak" when he met his death.

"There is no evidence of disease or that he was hunted so that's why we think it was an accidental death," said Prof Schreve.

Researchers concluded that the animal may have met its demise after becoming stuck in quicksand while feeding at the edge of a water channel, or that it was cut off on part of a floodplain and drowned.

Woolly rhinoceros' stocky body, thick, woolly coat and short tail and ears helped them thrive in cold, dry conditions.

However, this dense body shape may have led to the beasts' eventual extinction: it would have been almost impossible for the animals to cope in the deep snow that arrived as the climate became warmer and wetter.

Join BBC Nature on Facebook and Twitter @BBCNature.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/21660528

cleveland plain dealer john scott barry sanders barry sanders jimmie johnson juan pablo montoya crash chardon high school shooting

New evidence that comets could have seeded life on Earth

Mar. 5, 2013 ? t's among the most ancient of questions: What are the origins of life on Earth?

A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides -- linked pairs of amino acids -- that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

"It is fascinating to consider that the most basic biochemical building blocks that led to life on Earth may well have had an extraterrestrial origin," said UC Berkeley chemist Richard Mathies, coauthor of a paper published online last week and scheduled for the March 10 print issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

While scientists have discovered basic organic molecules, such as amino acids, in numerous meteorites that have fallen to Earth, they have been unable to find the more complex molecular structures that are prerequisites for our planet's biology. As a result, scientists have always assumed that the really complicated chemistry of life must have originated in Earth's early oceans.

In an ultra-high vacuum chamber chilled to 10 degrees above absolute zero (10 Kelvin), Seol Kim and Ralf Kaiser of the Hawaiian team simulated an icy snowball in space including carbon dioxide, ammonia and various hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane and propane. When zapped with high-energy electrons to simulate the cosmic rays in space, the chemicals reacted to form complex, organic compounds, specifically dipeptides, essential to life.

At UC Berkeley, Mathies and Amanda Stockton then analyzed the organic residues through the Mars Organic Analyzer, an instrument that Mathies designed for ultrasensitive detection and identification of small organic molecules in the solar system. The analysis revealed the presence of complex molecules -- nine different amino acids and at least two dipeptides -- capable of catalyzing biological evolution on earth.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Mathies Royalty Fund at UC Berkeley.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. R. I. Kaiser, A. M. Stockton, Y. S. Kim, E. C. Jensen, R. A. Mathies. ON THE FORMATION OF DIPEPTIDES IN INTERSTELLAR MODEL ICES. The Astrophysical Journal, 2013; 765 (2): 111 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/765/2/111

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/K5cJrx_Y3No/130305131412.htm

chicago bears tony romo kennedy center honors boxing day george h w bush Belk Led Zeppelin

John Feffer: The Squats of Berlin

It was breathtaking. We emerged from the forest on the outskirts of Moscow and saw, looming above the tall grass, an enormous ruined palace.

It was 1985, and I was studying Russian at the Pushkin Institute. We heard a rumor about a grand edifice, the unfinished palace of Catherine the Great, that was moldering not far from where we were staying in Moscow. We took the subway to the end of the line, tramped through a forest and a field until we came upon the ruins of the great hall. The walls were still standing, and we walked the length of the building, avoiding the shrubs and underbrush and hoping to come across a small piece of history in a broken chair or scrap of wallpaper. We didn't know that the Russian empress capriciously ordered her Tsaritsyno dismantled in 1785, when everything was done except for the interior decorations. The ruins, minus any of the accouterments, lay around for the next 200 years.

Enough of Tsaritsyno remained in the mid-1980s that you could more or less understand the scale and grandeur of the undertaking. But what was truly amazing was to happen upon this complex as if discovering the ruins of a long-forgotten Mayan temple in the jungles of Guatemala. There were no signs, no paths, no kiosks hawking souvenirs. It had simply become part of the landscape.

I experienced this same feeling in March 1990 when I encountered Tacheles in East Berlin. Originally a department store built in 1907-8 in the Jewish quarter of Berlin, the enormous five-story shopping arcade stretched from Friedrichstrasse to Oranienburger Strasse. Its tenure as a commercial space lasted only a few years prior to World War I. After that, it was a showroom for an electrical company, a central office for the Nazi SS, and a prison. During the communist period, the official trade union took over the structure, but the building gradually fell into disrepair.

In 1990, this glorious ruin was a perfect place to squat. There was a culture of squatting in East Berlin even during the communist era. Given the shortage of official university housing, students would frequently take over abandoned flats, mirroring the squat culture on the other side of the Wall in Kreuzberg. The Germans used the word instandbesetzen, a combination of renovating and occupying. When the Wall fell, squat culture expanded exponentially as people from East and West took over abandoned properties in East Berlin. In 1990, for instance, I spent an evening at one of the squat caf?s in Prenzlauer Berg where I ate Indian food and listened to the Talking Heads, while cigarette smoke and political conversation swirled around me.

Tacheles -- the squatters renamed the old department store after the Yiddish word for "straight talk" -- was a much bigger undertaking. When I walked down Oranienberger Strasse and came upon this enormous structure -- only a month after the first squatters took up residence to prevent impending demolition -- I was amazed at all the activity going on inside. Artists were setting up studios. A movie theater was being restarted. There were cafes, performance spaces, and what seemed like unlimited room to create an alternative society.

And now in 2013, I returned to Berlin only a few months after the end of Tacheles. For 22 years, the punks and anarchists and hippies and artists and squatters of all types had hung on, sometimes quarreling, often creating art and music, always partying. But the writing -- as opposed to the graffiti -- was on the wall for squatting culture in Berlin. In 2009, police kicked out the anarcho-punk residents of the last open squat in the city at Brunnenstrasse 183. Tacheles hung on for a few more years before the owner HSH Nordbank finally evicted the remaining artists in September 2012. According to news reports, "Before police arrived, two black-clad artists played a funeral march but bailiffs were able to clear the building without resistance." It was a quiet end for what had been a bold and loud experiment.

Other squats have survived in different forms. In Prenzlauer Berg, I met several former squatters who now had titles to their apartments. In the same area, I happened on Adventure Playground, an innovative playground that started in April 1990. The wild area features an open fire, a forge, and a sand pit where children build their own structures (and destroy them). Through this remarkable oasis in the middle of the city, the spirit of pushing boundaries is being instilled in the next generation.

Then there's the House of Democracy and Human Rights. In 1989, the East German political opposition demanded and received a piece of prime real estate at Friedrichstrasse 165, a former Party building. After the opposition did so poorly in East Germany's first and only free elections in March 1990 -- which was dominated by the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats -- they fell further to the margins and lost control of their iconic location.

I was delighted, however, to visit the new location of the rechristened House of Democracy and Human Rights. In 1990, I could skip from one office to the next, interviewing most of the inhabitants in one day. In 2013, I was astounded by the number of organizations in the three linked buildings, so many that it would take several weeks of interviews to visit them all.

So, one door closes, and another one opens. The creative chaos of Tacheles has departed the shell of its building on Oranienberger Strasse, but its soul lives on in a 3-D version on line.

And that unfinished palace of Catherine the Great? It's now finally finished, thanks to a controversial renovation project by the city of Moscow. I haven't been back to Tsaritsyno since 1985. I'm sure that it's a very beautiful complex of buildings, even if it lacks precise historical fidelity.

But there's nothing like the feeling of urban discovery, when you stumble upon an awe-inspiring structure that makes you feel, if only for a few moments, as if you just discovered a lost city, a vanished civilization.

Photos of Tacheles today can be seen here.

?

Follow John Feffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnfeffer

"; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/the-squats-of-berlin_b_2772197.html

beyonce and jay z baby droid 4 tom brady sister dad shoots daughters laptop brandon jennings the vow review luol deng