Judge blocks Arkansas' tough new abortion law

U.S. District Court via AP file

U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright said Friday, May 17, that Arkansas' law probably wouldn't pass constitutional muster.

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

A federal judge barred Arkansas from implementing one of the nation's most restrictive abortion laws Friday, calling it "more than likely unconstitutional."

The law, which the Legislature enacted over Gov. Mike Beebe's veto in March, makes abortions illegal after only 12 weeks of pregnancy. It's scheduled to take effect in August.

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At a hearing Friday in Little Rock, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright granted a temporary injunction sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights, which argued that doctors who provide abortions would suffer "irreparable harm."

Wright said the 12-week standard criminalizes some abortions before the generally accepted medical standard of viability for a fetus, which is 24 weeks.

"The Supreme Court has consistently used viability as a standard with respect to any law that regulates abortion," Wright said. "This act defines viability as something viability is not."

Wright didn't rule on the constitutionality of the new law itself, dubbed the Arkansas Human Heartbeat Protection Act (.pdf).

But in a clear signal of how she was leaning, she said the 12-week standard criminalizes some abortions before the generally accepted medical standard of viability for a fetus, which is 24 to 28 weeks, while "the Supreme Court has consistently used viability as a standard with respect to any law that regulates abortion."

"This act defines viability as something viability is not," she said.

Josh Mesker, a spokesman for the nonprofit Arkansas Family Council, told NBC News the ruling was "disappointing, but it's not unexpected."

Mesker said the ultimate aim is to get the law before the U.S. Supreme Court, where "we expect to prevail" in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized most abortions across the U.S.

"It's not outside the realm of possibility for the current Supreme Court to readdress Roe v. Wade in a way that leans toward our position," he said.

Talcott Camp, deputy director of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, ridiculed the law as "an extreme example of how lawmakers around the country are trying to limit a woman's ability to make the best decision for herself and her family."

"These laws are designed with one purpose ? to eliminate all access to abortion care," Camp said in a statement.

That was a reference to similar anti-abortion measures recently approved in North Dakota, Kansas and Mississippi. The North Dakota law, which was also passed in March, is the toughest in the U.S., banning abortions after only six weeks.

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In the Arkansas case, the ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are representing Tom Tvedten, medical director of Little Rock Family Planning Services, which provides abortions, and Louis J. Edwards, a gynecologist at the clinic.

In the suit, filed last month against the State Medical Board, they argue that the new law "presents physicians in Arkansas with an untenable choice: to face license revocation for continuing to provide abortion care in accordance with their best medical judgment, or to stop providing the critical care their patients seek."

Wright rejected the state's motion to dismiss the case Wednesday, citing Supreme Court rulings that Roe v. Wade drew a line saying abortions generally could be banned only upon a fetus' "attainment of viability."

Anticipating just this sort of legal wrangling, Beebe, a Democrat, vetoed the measure in March, saying that defending a "blatantly unconstitutional" law would be crushingly expensive for the state.

Related:

Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell convicted of first-degree murder

'Fundamental culture change' on abortion: Conservatives make gains on restrictions

This story was originally published on Fri May 17, 2013 3:04 PM EDT

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Social Analytics Startup Awe.sm Hires Former CBSi And AOL Exec Fred McIntyre As CEO

Social analytics startup Awe.sm has been growing quickly and getting a lot of interest from brands that want to use its platform for measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. With that in mind, the company has hired a new CEO, industry veteran Fred McIntyre.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/k3no7p9g2xw/

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OpenSky Small Business Award Nominees - Business Insider

See more Small Business, Big Ideas >>

OpenSky, a startup known as "the social network of shopping," recently put out a call for small businesses that deserve to expand.?

The Breakthrough Award will be given to the small business with the most votes.?OpenSky shared the 16 small businesses that have risen to the top in voting.?

The winner of the contest will receive a plethora of web and e-commerce tools to expand and improve business.?

The finalists are diverse and offer products ranging from donuts to bow-ties. ??

Impressed with one of these ideas? You can vote here. The winner will be announced June 20.?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/opensky-small-business-award-nominees-2013-5

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iPhone 5S component leaks show updated vibrator assembly and more

Some parts have been posted online that purport to belong to the iPhone 5S, or whatever Apple calls their next generation phone. While the iPhone 5 might continue the tradition of keeping the previous year's form factor, that doesn't mean the internals can't change. If these parts are genuine, they show updates to the vibrator assembly, earpiece and speaker brackets, and more. Here's the image from BGR:

Taking a look at the images, major updates could be made to the vibrator assembly, earpiece and loud speaker brackets, the SIM tray, and more. The photo above is a photo of the vibrator assembly and component cable running to it which purportedly will surface in the iPhone 5S. The photo pictured below shows the current vibrator component cable and motor that is found in the iPhone 5.

Apple made the switch from a rotational vibrator motor in the iPhone 4S back to a linear motor in the iPhone 5 which was an odd choice. Rotational motors are typically a lot smoother and have less problems. The vibrator motor in the GSM variant of the iPhone 4 had a linear motor and typically saw more issues than the rotational variant found in the CDMA 4 and the iPhone 4S. This switch back was probably made in the iPhone 5 in order to conserve on space.

It looks as if the next generation iPhone will still feature a linear vibrational motor but with an overhaul and better design. This isn't surprising as the iPhone 5 has suffered vibrator issues. In my experience with AnoStyle and according to iMore's sources within Apple, the current vibrator assembly in the iPhone 5 can be sketchy at best when it comes to performance. If the cable isn't secured just right with the contacts laying on top of it, it produces a weak and/or sporadic vibration pattern. Securing the assembly to the actual cable would make sense and most likely solve a lot of the issues users are experiencing with the iPhone 5.

The other changes such as the loud speaker and earpiece brackets aren't surprising as shields and brackets typically do see revisions every year to some extent. Currently the iPhone 5 earpiece speaker is attached to the display assembly. While there haven't been many issues reported to iMore, it does take up quite a bit of space and could be changed to make room to accommodate other revised components.

The SIM tray doesn't appear to take a different sized SIM card but is shallower which could indicate that the contacts on the board have moved slightly, which isn't all that surprising with revised components and internal hardware. You can hit the link below to view all the components BGR managed to snag photos of.

Overall, it appears that Apple is minimizing the amount of space component cables need to occupy. The WiFi flex has shrunk as well as many of the other brackets and components. This begs the question, what is Apple making space for?

Source: BGR

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/ndsRETodalQ/story01.htm

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IRS commissioner ousted over tea party targeting

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hurrying to check a growing controversy, President Barack Obama ousted the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service late Wednesday amid an outcry over revelations that the agency had improperly targeted tea party groups for scrutiny when they filed for tax-exempt status.

Obama said Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had asked for and accepted Steven T. Miller's resignation. Obama made no public criticism of Miller but spoke of inexcusable "misconduct" by IRS employees and said new leadership at the agency was critical.

"Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," Obama said in a televised statement from the White House. "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives."

Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating potential civil rights violations at the IRS, Attorney General Eric Holder said earlier Wednesday. Other potential crimes include making false statements to authorities and violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some partisan political activities, Holder said.

Miller, a 25-year IRS veteran, took over the agency in November, when the five-year term of Commissioner Douglas Shulman ended.

In an email to employees, Miller said, "This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation's tax agency. I believe the Service will benefit from having a new acting commissioner in place during this challenging period."

At the time when tea party groups were targeted, Miller was a deputy commissioner who oversaw the division that dealt with tax-exempt organizations.

An inspector general's report does not indicate that Miller knew conservative groups were being targeted until after the practice ended. But documents show that Miller repeatedly failed to tell Congress that tea party groups were being targeted, even after he had been briefed on the matter.

The IRS said Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra, sometimes burdensome scrutiny.

At least twice after the briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without revealing that tea party groups had been targeted. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee but again was not forthcoming on the issue ? despite being asked about it.

Miller was scheduled to testify Friday at a Ways and Means hearing. It was not immediately clear whether he would still testify.

Holder announced Tuesday that the Justice department had opened a criminal investigation, joining three committees in Congress that are looking into the matter.

"I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this," Holder told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing Wednesday. "This will not be about parties, this will not be about ideological persuasions. Anybody who has broken the law will be held accountable."

But, Holder said, it will take time to determine if there was criminal wrongdoing.

Legal experts, however, said it could be difficult to prove that IRS officials or employees knowingly violated the civil rights of conservative groups. If there is a violation, the experts said, investigators can sometimes prove more easily that officials made false statements or obstructed justice in some other way.

"I think it's doubtful that any of these knuckleheads who engaged in the conduct that gave rise to this controversy knowingly believed that they were violating the law," said David H. Laufman, a former Justice Department lawyer. "But that remains to be seen. That's what investigations are for."

"It's more likely than not that," he said, "the conduct at issue here may constitute violations of IRS rules or standards or protocols or procedures but may fall short of what is necessary to constitute a criminal offense."

Even if IRS agents broke criminal laws in targeting conservative groups, investigators may have to prove they knowingly did it, a high standard, said Brian Galle, a former Justice Department lawyer who teaches law at Boston College.

"If the reason they were pursuing them was in order to punish them for their political activity, there might be a First Amendment concern there," Galle said. "On the other hand, if the reason that they were looking for tea party groups is because there had been press reports about this new group, the tea party, who was aimed primarily at getting more conservative people elected to office, then they were just responding to the evidence. It really depends on what their motives were."

Wednesday's hearing was the first of several in Congress that will focus on the issue.

The House Oversight Committee announced Wednesday that it would hold a hearing May 22, featuring Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS division that oversees tax exempt organizations, and former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, whose five-year term ended in November.

The Senate Finance Committee announced a hearing for next Tuesday.

At Wednesday's hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Lerner misled him and his staff when they asked her about complaints from conservative groups that they were being harassed by the IRS.

"I know for a fact, Lois Lerner lied to me, she lied to our personal staff, she lied to committee staff, she lied in correspondence," Jordan said.

Lerner learned about the targeting on June 29, 2011, according to a report Tuesday by the inspector general.

The report said ineffective management at the IRS allowed agents to improperly target tea party and other conservative groups for more than 18 months.

The report said that while their applications for tax exempt status languished, tea party groups were asked a host of inappropriate questions, including: Who are your donors? What are the political affiliations of officers? What issues are important to the organization, and what are your positions on those issues? Will any officers in the group run for public office? Where do you work?

The IRS started targeting groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriots" or "9/12 Project" in their applications for tax exempt status in March 2010, the inspector general's report said. By August 2010, it was part of the written criteria used to flag groups for additional scrutiny.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said Wednesday that no union employees had been disciplined, as far as she knew. She noted that the IG's report said agents were not motivated by political bias.

Kelley told The Associated Press that low-level workers could not have specifically targeted conservative groups for long without the approval of supervisors. However, she noted, there are many levels of supervisors at the IRS.

"No processes or procedures or anything like that would ever be done just by front-line employees without any management involvement," Kelley said. "That's just not how it operates."

___

Associated Press reporter Andrew Miga contributed to this report.

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/irs-commissioner-ousted-over-tea-230621441.html

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Warming in central China greater than most climate models indicated

May 15, 2013 ? Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age, UCLA researchers report -- an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.

The findings, published today in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers develop more accurate models of past climate change and better predict such changes in the future.

"Previously, we could only infer temperature on land through changes in climate archives like tree rings or pollen over time," said lead author Robert Eagle, a UCLA researcher in the department of Earth and space sciences. "This is the first time that temperature has been determined accurately on land at the time of the last ice age."

To make their temperature measurements, the scientists used a technique known as clumped isotope thermometry, which detects subtle atomic differences in calcium carbonate, a compound commonly found in rocks, snail shells and wind-blown dust deposits known as loess. The method is the most accurate land-based temperature-determination tool available today.

"We can now tell what temperatures were on land 20,000 years ago with more accuracy than was ever previously possible," said senior author Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Tripati and Eagle chose to study the Loess Plateau in central China, a 250,000-square-mile agricultural region some 500 miles southwest of Beijing, because of its wide expanses of loess, the silty sediments that give the area its name and which contain deposits from the last ice age.

"We can calculate temperatures and reconstruct the chemistry of rainwater from the past ice age, then compare this to the present day climate in specific regions," Eagle said. "We can then use this information to validate current climate models and study atmospheric processes."

The researchers collected two unique ice age sample types from the Loess Plateau region: fossilized land-snail shells and soil deposits. While snails calcify quickly over just a few years, soil carbonates grow over longer time periods, ranging from a few hundred to thousands of years. Eagle and Tripati used clumped isotope thermometry to determine the temperature at which these samples formed roughly 20,000 years ago.

"One of the most important aspects of the study was showing that we could get the same result from such different types of carbonates," said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. "Even though these materials integrate over very different time frames, they gave us the same result."

Comparing the findings with climate models

When Eagle and Tripati matched their findings against climate models predicting the change in temperature in central China from the previous ice age to the present, they found that those models that took into account atmospheric processes tended to be more accurate.

"The climate models that did the best job of resolving temperature changes in this region were the ones that accurately depicted very large-scale atmospheric processes, such as patterns of winds in the atmosphere, the position of the jet stream and various atmospheric fronts," Tripati said. "The models that didn't resolve these atmospheric phenomena tended to do a poorer job of predicting temperature.

"It's so important to have models that accurately depict regional climates on land for the study of past and future climate change. We were surprised at how poorly most climate models predicted temperature change in central China and also surprised at how sensitive this region has been to changes in climate forcing."

Since the last ice age, numerous factors have influenced changes in global wind and precipitation patterns in Earth's atmosphere. Atmospheric processes move in relation to a standing, stationary wave, which is an oscillating reference point that wraps around our planet like an invisible piece of string. The position of that wave around our planet has changed over time. Contributing factors have been a rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, changes in incoming solar radiation and changes in the amount of ice covering Earth's surface.

For example, ice sheets can deflect the stationary waves so that winds and precipitation patterns fall more frequently in certain locations on the planet. But as ice has melted over the last 20,000 years, the stationary waves have shifted, influencing the circulation of the atmosphere.

"Clumped isotope thermometry has allowed us to say with more confidence how temperatures have warmed in central China, and how the chemistry of rainfall has changed. The climate models that did the best job of simulating temperature changes seemed to also be the ones to give the best depiction of changes in water cycling in this region," Tripati said. "Our results suggest that in this region, temperature, water cycling and winds are very sensitive to changing climate forcing. Rises in greenhouse gas levels, melting ice sheets and changes in solar radiation can all affect not only temperature but precipitation and winds as well."

"We have not dissected out the specific role of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in this study, but they are certainly a contributing factor to temperature change and ice-sheet extent," Eagle said.

The climate model developed by researchers at France's Institut Pierre Simon Laplace des sciences de l'Environnement Global (the IPSL model) closely matched the data for this region in this study, but it has traditionally been one of the less frequently used climate models for predicting future climate change.

"That is quite extraordinary," said Eagle, "because while more commonly used models have simulated a very small amount of temperature change in the region, that prediction was not validated by our data."

Types of sediment similar to that found in central China exist in the Midwestern U.S., ranging from Mississippi to Nebraska, and they are currently being studied by scientists at UCLA.

"One of the things we're doing is measuring samples from the loess deposits in the Midwestern U.S. to see how climate has changed in these regions," Tripati said. "These deposits were also formed at the time of the last ice age and contain similar types of snail and soil carbonates that we analyzed in central China. It will be interesting to repeat a similar investigation in this region."

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (EAR-0949191).

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/boyFgpajC-Q/130515094929.htm

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Making gold green: New non-toxic method for mining gold

May 14, 2013 ? Northwestern University scientists have struck gold in the laboratory. They have discovered an inexpensive and environmentally benign method that uses simple cornstarch -- instead of cyanide -- to isolate gold from raw materials in a selective manner.

This green method extracts gold from crude sources and leaves behind other metals that are often found mixed together with the crude gold. The new process also can be used to extract gold from consumer electronic waste.

Current methods for gold recovery involve the use of highly poisonous cyanides, often leading to contamination of the environment. Nearly all gold-mining companies use this toxic gold leaching process to sequester the precious metal.

"The elimination of cyanide from the gold industry is of the utmost importance environmentally," said Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "We have replaced nasty reagents with a cheap, biologically friendly material derived from starch."

Sir Fraser's team discovered the process by accident, using simple test tube chemistry. A series of rigorous follow-up investigations provided evidence for the competitive strength of the new procedure.

The findings will be published May 14 in the online journal Nature Communications.

Zhichang Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Stoddart's lab and first author of the paper, took two test tubes containing aqueous solutions -- one of the starch-derived alpha-cyclodextrin, the other of a dissolved gold (Au) salt (called aurate) -- and mixed them together in a beaker at room temperature.

Liu was trying to make an extended, three-dimensional cubic structure, which could be used to store gases and small molecules. Unexpectedly, he obtained needles, which formed rapidly upon mixing the two solutions.

"Initially, I was disappointed when my experiment didn't produce cubes, but when I saw the needles, I got excited," Liu said. "I wanted to learn more about the composition of these needles."

"Nature decided otherwise," said Stoddart, a senior author of the paper. "The needles, composed of straw-like bundles of supramolecular wires, emerged from the mixed solutions in less than a minute."

After discovering the needles, Liu screened six different complexes -- cyclodextrins composed of rings of six (alpha), seven (beta) and eight (gamma) glucose units, each combined with aqueous solutions of potassium tetrabromoaurate (KAuBr4) or potassium tetrachloroaurate (KAuCl4).

He found that it was alpha-cyclodextrin, a cyclic starch fragment composed of six glucose units, that isolates gold best of all.

"Alpha-cyclodextrin is the gold medal winner," Stoddart said. "Zhichang stumbled on a piece of magic for isolating gold from anything in a green way."

Alkali metal salt waste from this new method is relatively environmentally benign, Stoddart said, while waste from conventional methods includes toxic cyanide salts and gases. The Northwestern procedure is also more efficient than current commercial processes.

The supramolecular nanowires, each 1.3 nanometers in diameter, assemble spontaneously in a straw-like manner. In each wire, the gold ion is held together in the middle of four bromine atoms, while the potassium ion is surrounded by six water molecules; these ions are sandwiched in an alternating fashion by alpha-cyclodextrin rings. Around 4,000 wires are bundled parallel to each other and form individual needles that are visible under an electron microscope.

"There is a lot of chemistry packed into these nanowires," Stoddart said. "The elegance of the composition of single nanowires was revealed by atomic force microscopy, which throws light on the stacking of the individual donut-shaped alpha-cyclodextrin rings."

The atomic detail of the single supramolecular wires and their relative disposition within the needles was uncovered by single crystal X-ray crystallography.

The research -- a prime example of serendipity at work, brought to fruition by contemporary fundamental science -- is poised to find technological application. This basic science has been forged by the team into a practical labscale process for the isolation of gold from scrap alloys.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/rs8GZyfArww/130514112856.htm

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