Le Show; 2015-02-01

From deep inside your radio, ladies and gentlemen, if it weren't for irony, there'd be nothing to love. You remember a couple of weeks ago, everybody was, everybody except a high level representative of the United States government. We're sorry about that. That was a marching in Paris for free speech, you know, because of the whole Charlie Hebdo thing. Well, now it's later. The French government announced this week a plan to hold internet companies accountable for any extremist messages they may host. It's extremist hosting. French President François Hollande wants to introduce a law that would make Google and Facebook accomplices in crimes of hate speech, if users post content that the government deems extremist. We must act at the European and international level to define a legal framework so that internet platforms which manage social media be considered responsible and that sanctions be taken, said Hollande, but he said it in French. Canada has introduced some new draconian, don't be talking extreme laws as well this week, but Canada didn't have a free speech march.

The French interior minister is going to discuss the proposal with the heads of Google Microsoft. There's still a Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter. The president will present a draft law next month. There's a reaction, of course, to the recent terror attacks in France. We thought they were being so mature for a while, but no. The bullish rhetoric employed by French politicians says Bloomberg News has raised fears of a European Patriot Act. See, they're learning from us. It remains to be seen exactly how the boundaries of what constitutes an extremist message will be set, and to what extent the web companies will be involved. And while you're looking for irony, you don't have to go to France. How about the most transparent administration in history? Despite the $65 billion we've spent to build Afghanistan's army and police forces, and we were given regular updates on how that was going, no more. The information is now considered classified.

The military commands, you may have seen this in the New York Times, the military commands explanation for making the changes that such information could endanger American and Afghan lives. There aren't that many American lives left there, or will there be? Even though the data has been released every quarter over the past six years by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Afghan officials themselves don't consider the information secret. So if there's a leak in order to look, or if there's a look in order to leak, if I date about the Afghan forces removes one of the most crucial measures for assessing the accomplishments of the international coalition. Not a bug, but a feature. We got plenty of bugs on, hello, welcome to the show. This is the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan.

It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan.

It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. It's the first time I've ever seen a war in Afghanistan. From San Francisco, California, the new home of the homeless, people from San Francisco were telling me for years.

Hey, Santa Monica's got nothing on us. Well, turns out they were right. I'm Harry Scherer, welcome you to this edition of the show. And now, ladies and gentlemen, news of the Olympic movement. Produced by Jim Ebersol, Jr. Well, the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, is fighting back against inaccuracies in the world's media. The January 27th edition of the Boston Globe had a strong rebuke from the communications director of the IOC. On its letters page, Mark Adams wrote the letter in response to an editorial that called the IOC, quote, chronically corrupt. Adams listed a number of the IOC's practice, including redistributing 90% of its revenues, voting for a compliance director and opening its books to an international auditing firm. These inaccurate descriptions of the IOC often go unchallenged, Adam said,

Increasingly, we've decided to challenge such views head on with the facts. Perhaps one reason for the letter is the Boston's bid opposition to the Olympics has received more attention. The newspaper has repeatedly been critical of the Olympic bid. To be sure we would take the same action, whether such a claim was repeated in Boston, Rome, Berlin, or Hamburg, or anywhere in the world's media, Adam said. Rome, Hamburg, and Berlin may be bidding for 2024. It is important for the reputation of the Olympic movement. He said that we counter these opinions with the real story. Like the salaries of the members of the Olympic Committee, you think? The IOC did shoot down a suggestion by a Saudi Arabian official this week that the ultra-conservative nation could seek to co-host the Olympics with neighboring Bahrain by having male and female athletes compete. In separate countries, Prince Fahad bin Jawali al-Saud, a consultant to the President of the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee, told a French Olympic website that a resolution passed by the IOC could open the door for a possible joint bid with men's events on Saudi territory and women's competitions in Bahrain.

But the IOC President Thomas Bach quickly dismissed the idea and a statement to the AP saying Saudi Arabia would be an ineligible bid for the Olympics unless it complies with rules barring discrimination against women in sports. Saudi women are largely unable to access sports because they're our ally and they like freedom. I'm sorry, including in public schools where physical education is not on the curriculum for girls. The Saudis sent a male only team to last year's Asian Asian Games in South Korea. Rio Olympic organizers said this week they have no plan B for the 2016 game sailing competitions despite the recent admission by the state's top environmental official. It will be impossible to meet pledges to clean up the raw sewage and trash filled waters with the sailing events to be held.

Maria Andrade, spokesman of the Rio Organizing Committee, insisted the sailing competition will be held in the Bay under the best possible Olympic conditions. Brazil's most respected health research institutes have late last year and have found a drug-resistant super bacteria on a beach near where the sailing competitions will get underway. But there is no plan B. There'll be a heck of an inoculation program though for the sailors. Rio has not yet awarded all 4th of all the projects needed to host the Olympics in 2016, said the Olympic Public Authority. 14 or 25% of the projects have not yet been awarded bids and therefore like a budget or delivery deadline according to the responsibility matrix for the 2016 games. The new update puts the number of projects considered necessary for the Olympics up to 56 from 52 and only six have been completed because the Olympics is a movement and we all need one every day! Ladies and gentlemen, this is your brain on the war on drugs.

If you thought that the NSA, maybe the CIA, maybe the FBI, maybe Google, maybe Facebook, Apple are the only people really following you, tracking you, using your data. Think again, the US government is tracking the movement of vehicles around the country in a clandestine intelligence gathering program that's been condemned as a further official exercise to build a database on people's lives according to the Guardian newspaper. And it's your old friends at the Drug Enforcement Administration. They're monitoring license plates on a massive scale. This information comes from the American Civil Liberties Union which filed a Freedom of Information Act request from the DEA. The advocacy groups said the DEA records obtained from the Justice Department were heavily redacted and incomplete. Hey, that would be a good new job for high school career counselors. Documentary doctor, these records do however offer documentation of this program as a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements around the country, said the ACLU official.

If license plate readers continued to proliferate without restriction and the DEA held license plate reader data for extended periods, the agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people's lives, said the ACLU, especially if combined with other surveillance data. Data mining, the information the DEA has begun to use at that technique, even though it's an unproven law enforcement technique according to the organization, the ACLU, the Wall Street Journal, signing official documents and anonymous officials reported the program built a national database to track vehicles in real time and stored hundreds of millions of records about motorists. The primary goal was to seize cars, cash, and other assets to combat drug trafficking. You know who gets those cars, cash, and assets, local police departments? How they keep their budgets? Nice. The database did expand to motor vehicles associated with other potential crimes, according to the journal.

Officials have publicly acknowledged they track vehicles near the Mexican border to combat drug trafficking, but the database has expansion throughout the United States, as one DEA email put it, throughout the United States, where he's at least one senator, Patrick Lay, he said the fact that this intrusive technology is potentially being used to expand the reach of the government's asset forfeiture efforts is of even greater concern, he said to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. He called for additional accountability. How about some? The spokesman with the Justice Department, which includes the DEA, said the program complies with federal law. That may be the problem. Quote, it is not new that the DEA uses the license plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow of drugs, said the spokesman for the DOJ. It's not new. Relax. It's been going on for seven months. The government run national license plate tracking program in fact dates from 2008. Information had trickled out over the years, but far too little was known before the ACLU filed its Freedom of Information Act request, those meddling tricksters at the ACLU.

So, maybe what we should do, ladies and gentlemen, you know, the police still have to see our license plates, but if we could use the same technology that they use on those things that you have to verify that a human read these letters and numbers on the internet before you can access something, you know, those capture devices, if we could print our license plates and those on the machines couldn't read them, it's win-win. This is your brain on the war on drugs. And now, the apologies of the week. First apologize to this week. Justin Bieber. I was on Ellen, and it was a lot of fun. She's amazing. It was her birthday. Happy birthday, Ellen. But I was really nervous, and I think I was nervous because I'm just, I was afraid of what people are thinking about me right now. It's been a minute since I've been on a public appearance, and I didn't want to come off arrogant or conceited.

Basically, I've been acting the past year, year and a half. And I was, I'm not what was pretending to be. And why I say pretending is often, we pretend to be something we're not as a cover-up of what we're truly feeling inside. And there was a lot of feelings going on in there. Just being young and growing up in this business is hard. It's growing up in general's heart. But yeah, I just felt awkward up there. I felt like people were judging me. And I really want people to know how much I care, how much I care about people. And how I'm not that person to say, I don't give a fuck. You know, I'm not that kid. I'm a person who genuinely cares. And although what's happened in the past has happened. I just want to make the best impression on people, and be kind, and loving, and gentle, and soft. And although people can call me a softie, some of my mom raised me.

And I think he cares too much. Officials for Google have apologized after the translation services offered on the search engine giant reportedly suggested a series of anti-gay slurs in response to searches on the words gay and homosexual. The three shots of attempts to translate terms for gay from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English have appeared in a number of media outlets. The more eyebrow-raising suggestions for homosexual homosexual include poof, faggot, and another spelling of the same word. Meanwhile, the representative for Google apologized, noting, quote, as soon as we were informed that some of our translations for certain terms were serving inappropriate results, we immediately began working to fix the issue. As spokesperson added, our systems produce translations automatically based on existing translations on the web. So we appreciate when users point out issues such as this. Unquote. It's the advantage of not having humans do it, isn't it? Over 51,000 people had signed a petition online asking for the offending translations to be amended.

Mr. Vermont Governor Howard Dean issued a Mayacalpa to military veterans for his comments related to the controversial new movie American sniper. Quote, this is something which I've almost never done in politics. I'll apologize to the veterans I haven't seen the movie and I think it was wrong. He told MSNBC's Chris Matthews, quote, I talked to a lot of people about it. I make no apologies to all the thousands of right-wing nut jobs who've been twittering me with nasty language, but I do apologize to the veterans. I think this movie was much more nuanced than I thought he added. I have a lot of respect for the people who serve this country and I apologize. Unquote. Dean allegedly faced criticism from conservatives after he said there might be an intersection between people seeing the new movie and members of the Tea Party. He said that on a program on the HBO cable network by a guy named Marr. Seth Rogan responded to the outrage and incited by a series of tweets he wrote regarding the film American sniper, another American sniper apology.

In a statement of the AP he said he wasn't his intent to offend anyone or to say anything with political implications. Why would you think that? Just because he did the movie about the North Korean guy. He tweeted that American sniper quote kind of reminds me of the movie that's showing in the third act of inglorious bastards. That's a fake propaganda movie about a skilled Nazi sniper that features in the revenge fantasy of that name. Online outlets including Fox News and the Daily Caller concluded that Rogan's intent was to liken Clint Eastwood's fact-based drama about the late Navy seal to Nazi propaganda. Then Rogan went back to Twitter to clarify that he actually liked Eastwood's film and he wasn't comparing the two at all. Conservative blogs. We're not appeased nor were celebrities like Dean Cain and Kid Rock. Oh no. Kid Rock was upset. Rogan reiterated Thursday that the movie only reminded him of the other because they both involved plots about the most lethal of snipers.

He went on to explain he would never compare the film to Nazi propaganda. And that he has nothing against Kyle or veterans in general. My grandfather was a veteran. Rogan said my camera about the movie was not meant to have any political implications. He said he also apologized for any offense his tweets might have caused. He hopes this clears things up. And it got his name out. In the media, Democratic-Made Inflammatory remarks during a hearing on legislation related to driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants in New Mexico. In New Mexico, apologize this week minority caucus chair Patricia Roybal Caballero of Albuquerque apologize for comments she made a day earlier in the committee meeting. She'd compared the proposed legislation to the Holocaust during her apology. She said her party is committed to the issues. I regret my reference to the Holocaust made yesterday. I apologize to anyone who was hurt by my comments. I assure that House Democrats are focused on addressing the economy education and poverty. She had told the committee that they bill limiting driver's licenses reminded her of the Holocaust where Jewish Germans were forced to carry identification.

The committee chairman said he didn't hear the apology, but he said to a blog that she owes him a personal apology. That's this week's Holocaust analogy apology. A Church of England vicar is apologized after being criticized for posting a link to an internet article blaming Israel for the September 11 terror attacks. The Reverend Stephen Sizer used Facebook to promote the article entitled, quote, 9-11 Israel did it, unquote, and reportedly wrote, Is this anti-Semitic? Unquote. Dr. Sizer's victor at Christ Church in Surrey. He initially refused to apologize for the post, but he appeared to change his position after an investigation into the matter was launched by the diocese of Guildford where he is licensed. He's now issued a statement through the diocese expressing regret and admitting the chairing the article was, quote, ill-considered and misguided. He added he's immediately suspended his use of all social media and blogs at the request of the diocese. Dr. Sizer is a prominent campaigner against Israeli policy in Palestine, but he insisted that even though he strongly disagreed with many of the things others said,

he was there as an ambassador for reconciliation. I very much regret and apologize for the distress caused by the sharing on Facebook of a link to an article about 9-11 from Wiki Spooks. It was particularly insensitive in that last week coincided with Holocaust Memorial Day, he wrote. I removed the link as soon as I received adverse feedback. I have never believed Israel or any other country was complicit in the terrorist at Trostitiv 9-11. My sharing of this material was ill-considered and misguided, unquote. Dr. Sizer has previously been accused of linking to extremist content and a form of complaint was made by the board of deputies of British Jews two years ago. Less than six months ago, he infuriated that board by taking part in a conference in Iran which was dubbed an anti-Semitic hate fest. NFL Players Association President Eric Winston apologized for a verbal shot he took at the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Godell. Earlier in the day, Winston was quoted in a column on CSN New England saying that a two-year-old could do the job of the NFL Commissioner. I want to apologize to Roger for being unprofessional, he says.

I am disappointed that my comment was taken out of context and inserted into a column without any knowledge that the conversation was on the record. I am disappointed this reporter chose to burn me, but this is an important lesson I will learn going forward. This is my fault and again, I apologize, unquote. It doesn't mention that Roger Godell leads a nonprofit organization, the NFL. Last reportedly had a salary of $44 million a year. Two-year-old can't do that. Days after the surfacing of a leaked internal review, the head of human resources at the Dallas School District is resigning. One day after Carmen Darvel was allowed to issue an apology allowed by her superintendent that was today's after publication of a leaked preliminary internal audit, accusing Darvel of misconduct and violations of state law, specifically making racial slurs via her internal messaging system that preliminary audit also accused her bullying, workplace aggression threats of violence, retaliation, and conflicts of interest. Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who co-starred in 12 years of slave, has issued a humiliating apology for using the word colored to refer to non-white actors on a PBS talk show in which he was discussing the fact that all of this year's Oscar nominations went to white actors.

Cumberbatch, who has previously spoken about slavers in his ancestry, was taking a part in the discussion about the lack of opportunities for non-white actors when he used the term. Quote, I take as far as colored actors go. It really gets different in the UK, and a lot of my friends have had more opportunities here in America than in the UK, and that's something that needs to change, unquote. Hundreds of critical comments on Twitter and social media resulted in a false apology issued through news agencies. Cumberbatch described himself as, quote, an idiot for using outmoded terminology. The most shaming aspect of this for me is that I was talking about racial inequality in the performing arts in the UK, and the need for rapid improvements in our industry when I use the term. I feel the complete fool I am, and while I'm sorry to have offended people and to learn from my mistakes in such a public manner, please be assured I have.

I apologize again to anyone who may offend it for this softness use of inappropriate language, about an issue which affects friends of mine, about which I care deeply. I feel the complete fool. All right, so he's proud of how complete a fool he is. A bank known as BB&T, which is something bank and trust, in the Carolinas, apologizes weak for a processing problem that caused some customer accounts to show incorrect balances or zero funds. The Winston-Salem-based bank, third largest by market share and Charlotte said on its Facebook page that it fixed the problem, corrected account balances, and refunded overdraft fees. BB&T wholeheartedly apologizes and thanks our clients for their continued patience, unquote. Yeah, bank apologizes. And speaking of organizations apologizing, the woman in Spokane, Washington whose billing account was renamed with a profanity after a run-in with a Comcast customer service representative, says she's pretty satisfied with attempts by Comcast to make good.

Lisa Brown's story went viral after news hit that the billing name on her family Comcast account was changed from that of her husband, Ricardo Brown, not the guy who used to play at Pepperdine, to A-hole Brown. That came after a protracted call with Comcast in which Lisa said she was trying to scale back their service to save money. They were instead passed to a customer's retention specialist who tried to keep their business and then came the renamed to Bill. Comcast is trying to take over the world, so maybe an apology would be well timed at this point. Brown said she spoke with Charlie Heron, Comcast's senior vice president for customer experience who expressed sincere apologies to the couple. Heron himself issued a statement on the Comcast website saying the person who changed the billing account name has been let go, ouch, customer experience, any vice president for customer experience. To me, that's like when I was someplace where they were having one of those horrible sports day morale builders for the staff of the organization that was housed in this building, it occurred to me that the only organizations that have morale building exercises are ones with really low morale.

The type of organization that is, one of the biggest individuals ever chaired should address it in February when everything is properly handled. Thank you for this time. He's become a full-world man. Smokey Sunday, he's been mobilized since dawn. Now his crouching arm alone is a third world man.

Soon you'll throw down your disguise. We'll see behind those bars. Buying, buying, when the sidewalks are safe. I saw the fireworks. I believed that I was dreaming. Feel the neighbors without screaming as a third world man. We'll see behind those bars.

Buying, buying, when the sidewalks are safe. Soon you'll throw down your disguise. We'll see behind those bars. Buying, buying, when the sidewalks are safe. When he's crying, I just seen that run around.

Buying, buying, when the sidewalks are safe. He's become a full-world man. We'll see behind those bars.

He's become a full-world man. He's become a full-world man. From San Francisco, this is Lesho and ladies and gentlemen who really are the third world men who are the barbarians. Well, we here in the United States, twice this week, executed mentally impaired prisoners.

Supreme Court rulings that say, don't do that. Texas executed an intellectually disabled prisoner. This week Robert Ladd died by lethal injection under Texas's unique and widely ridiculed definition of intellectual disability according to the Guardian. He was deemed capable of being executed because he did not match the degree of mental impairment depicted in a character in a John Steinbeck novel. Who says fiction isn't relevant anymore? In a final statement, Ladd addressed the sister of his victim by name telling her he was really, really sorry. A revenge death won't get you anything. He said then he told the warden, let's ride. As the drug took effect, he said, stings my arm, man. The death of Ladd exposed a flaw and the normally stringent safeguards imposed by the federal courts on the death penalty states. All of the states are generally allowed to set their own standards.

The Supreme Court has ruled twice on the issue of disability of the intellect, setting the parameters of humane and civilized conduct in a ruling in 2002 and again last year. The Supreme Court banned executions of people with mental retardation on the grounds that that was a form of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. It also said the death penalty states had to conform to standards set by medical science and not impose their own arbitrary definitions of mental disability. Yet two prisoners who were categorically found to be mentally impaired by numerous medical experts were put to death, the first was in Georgia. On Tuesday, Texas put Ladd asleep by lethal injection to sleep, having deemed him not sufficiently mentally impaired according to its criterion for the condition. What is known as the Bersenio factors, the state sets out the profile of an individual who ordinary Texans would agree was intellectually disabled. Pointing to Lenny, the lumbering and childlike character of Mison Men, identifying him as the legal yardstick. Who are the barbarians?

One of the ones who don't read novels, obviously. And now, ladies and gentlemen, use of our friend, the Adam. Add to the Adam, you enjoying San Francisco in the wintertime? It's too warm and sunny here. It's weird. It is weird. Analysts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week completed a safety review that gives Yucca Mountain generally positive marks. But stop short of recommending it be granted a license to operate as nuclear waste site. Let it be a gas station? I don't know. In the final pieces of a five-volume safety report, the agency staff, it has reasonable assurance that the proposed repository could meet safety requirements to handle thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel insert them into rust-resistant canisters and inject them into the mountains 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Not a sure thing. What are they at? You would do. All of a sudden Vegas, I say Vegas. That's right. The report comes in the heels of an NRC volume in October that concluded a combination of Yucca Mountain's natural geology plus titanium tunnel drip shields with reasonable expectation. That's 50-50. A little bit more. Could satisfy safety rules to keep the nuclear waste entombed and away from groundwater for up to a million years? I should do it. It was not an unqualified testimony, only after reviewing an 8600-page Department of Energy application for the site. The NRC said it would propose conditions on any license. Some of them would be very significant, potentially, including flight restrictions over the site and requirements that certain waste canisters be qualified for repository operations. And the NRC staff report issued last month pointed out that the government doesn't have full control of the area where the repository sits and lacks the necessary water rights to occupy the site. So the agency staff is not recommending issuance of a construction authorization at this time, effectively tossing the whole Yucca Mountain question back to Congress.

I'll know what to do. They don't need to clean them up. The audit report released Wednesday by the Inspector General Gregory Friedman found serious weaknesses in the Department of Energy's efforts to deal with the old facilities, some of which have been out of operation for decades that are loaded with radioactive and hazardous materials, and are gradually falling apart. The schedule for turning the facilities over to the Environmental Management Program for cleanup is getting stretched into late according to the report, noting many of the dirty and degraded facilities won't be designated for cleanup until 20 or 25, or possibly even a decade later. It takes a long time to decay. A former Uranium Enrichment Facility, dating back to the Manhattan Project, is on the site.

The reports of the National Nuclear Safety Administration did semi-independent part of the DOE that oversees the nuclear weapons complex had characterized that site as the worst of the worst, even though 24 million has already been spent to reduce risks of the big building. It would have been worse than the worst of the worst before. The water from leaking roofs, there's a risk of explosion for materials housed at the 530,000 square foot building. It was a full amount of energy delivered to the National Nuclear Safety Administration in the past 20 or 25,000, and it took more than two decades of work, according to the latest projections from the Department of Energy. New estimates added 23 years to the Environmental Management Program at Savannah River and the Life Cycle Cost Estimates is written between 91,109,000,000 dollars, according to the Department of Energy, and they should know.

Information on the delay was presented to the citizens' advisory board at Savannah River. The chairman said the scheduled delay puts workers and the environment at a greater risk from potential threats of nuclear materials at the site. It seems every year we push the dates back farther and farther, all that does is keep the risks in place longer and longer," she said. Reduced federal funding levels for Savannah River have contributed to the changes, said a spokesman for the DOE branch down there, the Environmental Management budget, allows for less work to be completed each year, he said. The life cycle estimate analyzes several cleanup programs, including spent nuclear fuel processing, solid and liquid waste disposition, and soil and groundwater remediation. It considers assumptions that would affect cleanup, such as shipments from Savannah River to a permanent federal nuclear waste repository beginning in 2055. Just as soon as they build one.

Fiji closed an unfortunate chapter this week with a compensation payout to soldiers exposed to radiation during British nuclear tests in the Pacific more than 56 years ago, according to the Prime Minister, that payments came after decades of campaigning by veterans and their children for recognition of the serious health problems they suffered. More than 70 Fijians were stationed on Curitimati, then known as Christmas Island, during the tests in 57 and 58. The British government has refused to pay any compensation, but the Fiji and Prime Minister, Inc. by Nima Rana, said the Pacific nation could wait no longer. We're bringing justice to a brave and proud group of Fijians to whom a great injustice was done. Fiji is not prepared to wait for Britain to do the right thing. They've received $4,700 from a compensation pool. Well, it's a little bit of the right thing. Yeah. Powerful bill-issored, backing hurricane-strength winds that hit the northeast US this week dropping as much as two feet of snow, in some areas forced the pilgrim nuclear power station offline after the distribution lines taking its electricity failed.

At least it isn't like the water being too hot to cool in the summertime. No, it's not like that at all. According to a spokesperson with ENTERGY, pilgrim's owner, the plan shut down at around 4 a.m. the morning of January 27 after the two lines became inoperable due to an offsite issue. The plan was already operating at reduced output because of storm-related constraints on the grid. Several hours after the shutdown, the plan reported a failure of the high-pressure coolant injection system due to an unknown equipment malfunction. Reactor control was transitioned to the safety relief valves. ENTERGY said it might be several days before the plan could restart. This particular plan is on the NRC's list of the worst of the worst. You should send it to Guantanamo. Yeah, send a nuclear plan to Guantanamo. Oh, what a good idea. The United States looks set to succeed in watering down a proposal for tougher legal standards aimed at boosting global nuclear safety. According to senior diplomats, wrangling will come to a head at a 77-nation meeting in Vienna next month that threatens to expose divisions over required safety standards in the

cost of meeting them four years after FOOC. Switzerland put forward a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety, arguing stricter standards could help avoid a repeat of FOOC. The Russia and the United States have opposed such a change, according to diplomats, it would increase industry costs. Existing nuclear plants, especially older ones, would have to be refitted. The US industry, say critics, have already spent billions on improving nuclear safety since FOOC. A compromised proposal obtained by Reuters earlier this month shows member countries are likely to issue a declaration statement echoing the amendment proposal, which had broad European backing rather than actually change the treaty, so it would be… Nice words. But it's a convention. Yeah, we ignore the convention against torture. Hey, hey, stay with the subject. New nuclear plants should be designed and constructed with the objective of preventing accidents

and minimizing off-site contamination in case of accidents. That would be the wording of the statement, reasonably achievable safety improvements identified at plants during safety assessment, should be oriented to these objectives and be implemented in a timely manner. Well, you wouldn't want to be unreasonable about safety, would you? No, you wouldn't. Even an amended convention would only leave scope for punishment in the form of peer reviews. Oh, those risks are hurting. Yeah. And officials from the NRC tried to reassure residents that in 60 years, there will be a company to pay for the cleanup of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Through his Watson and official with the NRC, said, ENTERGY, regardless of its financial future, is still responsible for Yankee's cleanup and dismantling. This was at a community meeting. The cleanup of the 43-year-old nuclear energy station isn't happening any time soon. ENTERGY has opted to put the plant into cold storage, along with the meats and the… Yeah.

The waffles. And wait for its decommissioning trust fund to grow. Company has up to 60 years to get that task done under federal law. The Vermont Yankee, in 2002, it inherited the plant's decommissioning trust fund, established by the plant's rate payers, but since ENTERGY bought the plant, there have been no contributions to the fund from the new owner. That the magic of compound interest work. That's right. And fears the playing outdoors will risk radiation exposure and other lifestyle changes brought on by the nuke crisis at FUK are being blamed for a rise in obesity among youngsters in Fukushima prefecture. And education ministry survey calculated the percentage of children on a perfectual basis whose body weight is at least 20% heavier than normal. 15% of nine-year-olds in FUK were 20% or more heavier than normal, much higher than the national average. I had a fat… No! Don't even say that.

Clean, cheap, safe, too fat to meet her. Our friend, the atom. I've been leaving on my things, so in the morning, when the morning bird sings, there's still dinner on my dinner. Jacket of the dinner bell rings. Expand it into the promise. I'll give it to you forever. Waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing. Dinner bell dinner bell ring. I've been leaving on my things, so in the morning, when the morning bird sings, there's still dinner on my dinner. Jacket of the dinner bell rings. Expand it into the promise. a cup of chatted corn, cake and cream, cauliflower, because I'm waiting for the dinner bell to be about thing. Dinner bell, dinner bell ring.

Showed up, I skipped the full time. For I'm the first number two, I'm the only one in the industry. Dinner bell, dinner bell ring. I don't know whether I'd rather be having a ball of dinner, I don't know whether I'd rather be having an egg. I don't know if I'd rather be having a ball of bacon or whether I'd rather be having a basket of garlic or iron, whether I'd rather be having some buyer saving my appetite because I'm waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing. Dinner bell, dinner bell ring. I've been leaving all my things. So in the morning, when the morning V critical scene there's still dinner on my dinner, Jack, up till the dinner bell, does the bell thing? Dinner bell, dinner bell, do the bell thing. I'm waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing. Dinner bell, dinner bell, ding ding ding Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's big news about our species, our little little species, a 60, sorry, 55,000-year-old incomplete skull found in Israel may belong to a human group

that interbred with Neanderthals, according to Nature magazine, discovered deep in a cave at Monaut, by amateur, speleologists, the partial cranium fills a major gap in the fossil record of homo sapiens journey from Africa to Europe, the skull of a human being that was living next to the Neanderthals as Israel, Herse Kovits, the leader of the study, potentially he is the one that could have interbred with the Neanderthals, says Herse Kovits, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, genome studies of Neanderthals and human sapiens suggest the two species interbred somewhere in the Middle East between 50 and 60,000 years ago, but no remains of anatomically modern humans had been discovered in the Middle East from that crucial period. The manaut people are leading candidate for the humans that bred with Neanderthals, the Southern Levant is the only place where anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals were living side by side for thousands and thousands of years,

Herse Kovits says, before you judge too harshly, we know nothing from unearthed bones about the shape of soft parts of Neanderthals, such as eyes, ears and lips, but what we do know is that they had a brain cage slightly larger than those of modern humans, and so most likely the brain itself slightly larger than modern humans. We know about the projecting midface, the low-flat elongated skull. They also had considerably more robust, stronger build, barrel-shaped ribcage, larger round fingertips and large kneecaps. They sound bigger, stronger, maybe even smarter than us. How did they die out? We must have been a meaner. Anyway, the idea of interbreeding with Neanderthals, not as goofy as it once might have sounded, perhaps.

So strong, so tall, so neanderthal, you may be pre-human, but you make me feel like a human, don't know when you came from, and though it's not from here, you're not like the others, that's why I want you new. We were meant for each other, but she's

completely like a glove, the end is so long, the end is so long. I'm the idiot, you're this event, you win the Oscar in this man's event, to bring your phone, want my neanderthal, larger kneecaps round your fingertips, just what a taste your unknowable lips about to fall from by the end is so long. Feel like Larry Hagman, no way my girl's a girl magnet, don't know where you came

from, and though it's not from here, you're not like the others, that's why I want you here, we were meant for each other, but she's completely like a glove, the end is so long. A study led by atmospheric scientists, physicist as a matter of fact, at the University of Toronto, finds that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy

atmosphere, which scientists have debated for decades, instead strong storms will become weaker, sounds like the economy, the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged. Circulation the atmosphere is like a heat engine, says the research associated UT's Physics Department lead author of the study, published this week in science. The researchers borrowed techniques from oceanography and looked at observations and climate simulation, their approach allowed them to test global warming scenarios to measure the output of atmospheric circulation under warming conditions. They concluded the increase in water vapor was making the process less efficient by evaporating water into air that's already not saturated with water vapor, they showed this inefficiencies limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in uniform manner, put more simply powerful storms are strengthened at the expense of weaker storms, said the researcher, we believe atmospheric circulation will adapt to this less efficient form of heat transfer and we will see either fewer storms overall or at least a weakening of the most common weaker storms.

And Iceland rising, Earth's crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island's great ice caps, according to a University of Arizona lead team, publishing in geophysical research letters. It's the first to show the current fast uplift of the Icelandic crust is a result of accelerated melting of the island's glaciers, coinciding with the onset of warming that began about 30 years ago. It's coinciding, you know, our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps, said one of the authors. Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases, Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass lost, lost, says the researcher. And green sea turtles may stop basking on beaches around the world within a century due to rising sea temperatures and new study indicates basking on sun-warmed beaches helps the threatened turtles regulate their body temperatures, may aid their immune systems and digestion.

Yeah, turtles have digestion. By analyzing six years of turtle surveys and 24 years of satellite data, Duke and NOAA researchers have found the turtles bask more often each year when sea surface temperatures drop. If the climate continues to warm, this behavior may cease globally by 2102. So go watch your basking turtles, now news of the warm ladies and gentlemen, a copyrighted feature of this broadcast. Okay. .

. . . . Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's going to conclude this week's edition of the show the program it turns next week at the same time where we're with these same stations over in the next week's edition of the show. .

At two different locations live and archive, whenever you want it, Harry Shearer.com and KCSN.org, available for your smartphone through Stitcher.com, available Stitcher, I said Stitcher.com, and available as a free podcast from www.no.org, SideShow Network, SoundCloud, tunein.com, and iTunes. Yeah, I mentioned iTunes last because the company only made $12 billion in the fourth quarter of last year. They don't need the help. And it would be just like making $12 billion in a quarter. If you do good, it wouldn't be that. Would you already thank you very much, uh-huh? That's a bit of a show.

Shout-out to the San Diego Pittsburgh Chicago in exile in Hawaii, Dess. Thanks, as always, to Pam Hallstead and thanks to Jenny Lawson at www.no.no.org for help with today's broadcast. The email address for this program. Playlist of the music here on. And yes, say it with me now. Cars, I talk to you. It's available at Harry Shearer.com. In the store, where would you think? And me? If you're on Twitter, I'm the Harry Shearer. If you're not, I ain't. I'm Steve from Century of Progress Productions and originates through the facilities of www.no.no.org in Flagship Station of the Changes Easy Radio Network. So long from the Golden Gates.