Senator Paul stirs business ire over blocking of tax treaties

By Patrick Temple-West

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Rand Paul is coming under pressure from some multi-national businesses to drop his opposition to tax treaties between the United States and other nations.

Citing privacy concerns about Americans' tax data, Paul, a Republican and libertarian, has single-handedly blocked Senate action on treaties with Hungary, Switzerland and Luxembourg that have been signed by authorities on both sides, but have been awaiting Senate review since 2011.

At least six other tax treaties or treaty updates -- with Chile, Spain, Poland, Japan, Norway and Britain -- may soon be added to the Senate's queue for confirmation votes.

Major U.S. businesses such as IBM Corp and Fluor Corp are lobbying for Senate action on tax treaties, according to Senate lobbying disclosure documents.

"How many treaties will be held hostage?" asked Cathy Schultz, a lobbyist for the National Foreign Trade Council, a Washington, D.C.-based group that represents companies such as Caterpillar Inc and Pfizer Inc.

Paul has said he is concerned that recent treaties would give foreign governments too much access to U.S. citizens' tax information, a stance that has some support among like-minded conservative libertarians.

"Rand Paul is not a typical senator who may bend over to business lobbyists," said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

"I am very concerned about this increasingly aggressive international exchange of information," Edwards said.

NO APPROVALS SINCE 2010

No new tax treaties or treaty updates have been approved since 2010, when Paul was elected as the junior senator from Kentucky on a wave of support for Tea Party-aligned Republicans.

Paul recently declined to answer questions from a reporter in a Capitol hallway about the "hold" he has placed on the treaties. Under Senate rules, one senator can prevent a motion from reaching a vote on the Senate floor.

Paul's staff did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

"There's never really been an objection of this sort and a hold that's gone on this long," said Nancy McLernon, president of the Organization for International Investment, which lobbies in Washington on behalf of foreign companies.

In an effort to sway the senator, McLernon said her group would be lobbying both parties to draw attention to the tax treaties. "Let's stop with the self-inflicted wounds," she said.

The United States has tax treaties with more than 60 countries, ranging from China to Kyrgyzstan.

The agreements previously have routinely won Senate approval with little controversy and accomplished their main purpose of preventing double-taxation of income and profits.

In recent years, tax treaties have begun to play an increasing role in efforts by the United States and major European Union countries to crack down on tax avoidance.

The U.S. Treasury in 2012 began signing new tax pacts with countries as part of implementation of the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a 2010 anti-tax-evasion law.

The law, known as FATCA, which takes effect in January 2014, will require foreign financial institutions to disclose to the United States information about Americans' accounts worth more than $50,000.

SWISS A DRIVING FORCE

Switzerland, a long-time bastion of banking secrecy, is under international pressure to change its ways, and FATCA has been a driving force in that. The United States and Switzerland in February signed a FATCA implementation agreement that would make more information available to U.S. authorities about the financial interests of Americans in Switzerland.

But the taxpayer information exchange cannot go into force without Senate approval of the U.S.-Swiss tax treaty.

The Senate's delayed action on tax treaties could convince other countries to stop negotiating with the United States on tax matters, said John Harrington, a former Treasury tax official who is now a partner at law firm SNR Denton.

Paul, seen as a possible 2016 presidential contender, has taken a position that sets up a clash of traditional Republican interest groups: big business and libertarian ideologues.

In this sense, Paul is in the forefront of the party's search for a new identity since Republicans lost the presidential race last year, as well as numerous seats in the House of Representatives.

Looking toward a possible 2016 White House bid, Paul told reporters earlier this month that he will visit early-voting states this year and make a final decision next year.

New Republicans such as Paul are shifting the party away from its business-first agenda, said Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action, a conservative group.

"The party is not being reflexively pro-business," he said.

(Reporting by Patrick Temple-West; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Leslie Adler)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senator-paul-stirs-business-ire-over-blocking-tax-165604737.html

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Today on New Scientist: 29 April 2013

Eye-tracking gadget knows just what you're longing for
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Prague gas explosion highlights ageing pipeline danger
An explosion in central Prague that injured up to 40 people illustrates the risk of leaks from 100-year-old infrastructure in countries around the world

Sharp-eyed bug hunter discovers tiny Tinkerbell fly
A wasp that's even smaller than its fairy-tale Peter Pan namesake has been found among the leaf litter of a Costa Rican forest

Deep life: Strange creatures living far below our feet
From Methuselah microbes to animals that eschew oxygen, strange underground organisms are redefining what life means ? and where it will end

Gene sequencing helps identify drug-resistant malaria
Three sub-populations of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum have been identified in Cambodia ? this should make it easier to track resistance

Bringing major corporations to book for their crimes
Two new books tell the complex, fascinating and sometimes frustrating tale of attempts to hold multinationals to account for environmental and social crimes

Psychiatry needs its Higgs boson moment
Fighting the scourge of mental illness means giving psychiatry the kind of boost that physics got from the Higgs hunt, says Nick Craddock

Plants help slow warming ? but there's a trade-off
Chemicals pumped out by plants promote cloud formation, increasing Earth's ability to reflect sunlight, though the effect is reduced if the world cools

Happiness tracking software could gauge mood in photos
Ever wanted to organise your photos by how happy they are? You may soon get your wish, with a new system that tracks facial emotions in group photos

Threatwatch: Did Syria use chemical weapons or not?
The US is saying it has evidence of chemical weapon use in Syria ? but things still don't quite add up

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Schumer sees deal this week on immigration

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A raucous public debate over the nation's flawed immigration system is set to begin in earnest this week as senators finalize a bipartisan bill to secure the border, allow tens of thousands of foreign workers into the country and grant eventual citizenship to the estimated 11 million people living here illegally.

Already negotiators are cautioning of struggles ahead for an issue that's defied resolution for years. An immigration deal came close on the Senate floor in 2007 but collapsed amid interest group bickering and an angry public backlash.

"There will be a great deal of unhappiness about this proposal because everybody didn't get what they wanted," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a leader of the eight senators negotiating the legislation, said Sunday. "There are entrenched positions on both sides of this issue."

"There's a long road," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., appearing alongside McCain on CBS' "Face the Nation." ''There are people on both sides who are against this bill, and they will be able to shoot at it."

Schumer, McCain and their "Gang of Eight" already missed a self-imposed deadline to have their bill ready in March, but Schumer said he hopes that this week, it will happen.

"All of us have said that there will be no agreement until the eight of us agree to a big, specific bill, but hopefully we can get that done by the end of the week," said Schumer.

Schumer, McCain and other negotiators are trying to avoid mistakes of the past.

A painstaking deal reached a week ago knit together traditional enemies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, in an accord over a new low-skilled worker program. The proposal would allow up to 200,000 workers a year into the county to fill jobs in construction, hospitality, nursing homes and other areas where employers say they have a difficult time hiring Americans.

The negotiators also have pledged to move the bill through the Senate Judiciary Committee and onto the floor according to what's known in Senate jargon as "regular order," trying to head off complaints from conservatives that the legislation is being rammed through.

A deal on immigration is a top second-term priority for President Barack Obama, and his senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday that the bill being developed in the Senate is consistent with Obama's approach ? even though the Senate plan would tie border security to a path to citizenship in a manner Obama administration officials have criticized.

Pfeiffer didn't answer directly when asked on "Fox News Sunday" whether Obama would sign legislation making a path to citizenship contingent on first securing the border. But he suggested Obama was supportive of the Senate plan.

"What has been talked about in the Gang of Eight proposal is 100 percent consistent with what the president is doing so we feel very good about it," Pfeiffer said. "And they are looking at it in the right way."

Sticking points remain. There's still disagreement over plans for a new program to bring in agriculture workers, who weren't included in the deal struck between the chamber and AFL-CIO. The agriculture industry is at odds with United Farm Workers over wages.

But overall, all involved are optimistic that the time is ripe to make the biggest changes to the nation's immigration laws in more than a quarter-century. For many Republicans, their loss in the November presidential election, when Latino and Asians voters backed Obama in big numbers, resonates as evidence that they must confront the immigration issue.

"The politics of self-deportation are behind us," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., referring to GOP candidate Mitt Romney's suggestion in the presidential campaign. "It was an impractical solution. Quite frankly it's offensive. Every corner of the Republican Party, from libertarians to the (Republican National Committee), House Republicans and the rank-and-file Republican Party member, is now understanding there has to be an earned pathway to citizenship."

Graham and McCain also had praise for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a member of the negotiating team who's acted as a bridge to conservatives but also has kept advocates and other lawmakers guessing about whether he'll ultimately support the bill.

"Marco Rubio has been a game changer in my party. He will be there only if the Democrats will embrace a guest worker program and a merit-based immigration system to replace the broken one," Graham said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

After consideration by the Judiciary Committee, floor action could start in the Senate in May, Schumer said.

Meanwhile two lawmakers involved in writing a bipartisan immigration bill in the House, Reps. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., sounded optimistic that they, too, would have a deal soon that could be reconciled with the Senate agreement.

"I am very, very optimistic that the House of Representatives is going to have a plan that is going to be able to go to a conference with the Senate in which we're going to be able to resolve this," Gutierrez said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union".

___

Follow Erica Werner on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericawerner

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-07-Immigration/id-528dac88d3de461f997733e56ee6fc0e

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AP Interview: Dempsey on Afghan security handoff

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) ? The top U.S. military officer said Sunday he believes parts of Afghanistan will be contested by the Taliban after international forces complete their planned withdrawal by the end of 2014, and that could be the case for years to come.

U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey also told The Associated Press in an interview that Afghans will take the security lead throughout the country before summer, as agreed in January by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and President Barack Obama.

Wrapping up a visit to Afghanistan, Dempsey said that he was cautious about the final stage of handing off security responsibility to Afghan forces and optimistic about the chances it ultimately will prove successful.

Afghan forces have been increasingly taking the lead in combat operations as international forces move to complete their withdrawal by the end of 2014.

There are about 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan now, including 66,000 from the United States. The U.S. troop total is scheduled to drop to about 32,000 by early next year, with the bulk of the decline occurring during the winter months.

While there has been no final decision on the size of the post-2014 force, U.S. and NATO leaders say they are considering a range of between 8,000 and 12,000 ? most of them trainers and advisers.

Asked if he believes that some parts of Afghanistan will be contested by the Taliban in 2015, Dempsey said, "Yes, of course there will be. And if we were having this conversation 10 years from now, I suspect there would (still) be contested areas because the history of Afghanistan suggests that there will always be contested areas."

Dempsey, who held talks with U.S. commanders and Afghan security officials, said he was not bothered by the prospect of the U.S. and NATO relinquishing the lead combat role this year while the Taliban continues to hold sway in some less populated areas.

The war is now in its 12th year.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-dempsey-afghan-security-handoff-130326974--politics.html

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Despite threats, risks temper Korea war tensions

TOKYO (AP) ? As tensions rise on the Korean Peninsula, one thing remains certain: All sides have good reason to avoid an all-out war. The last one, six decades ago, killed an estimated 4 million people.

A war would be suicidal for North Korea, which cannot expect to defeat the United States and successfully overrun South Korea. War would be horrific for the other side as well. South Korea could suffer staggering casualties. The U.S. would face a destabilized major ally, possible but unlikely nuclear or chemical weapons attacks on its forward-positioned bases, and dramatically increased tensions with North Korea's neighbor and Korean War ally, China.

Here's a look at the precarious balance of power that has kept the Korean Peninsula so close to conflict since the three-year war ended in 1953, and some of the strategic calculus behind why, despite the shrill rhetoric and seemingly reckless saber-rattling, leaders on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone have carefully avoided going back over the brink.

___

THE SEA OF FIRE

Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea has an ace in the hole. Most experts believe its claims to have enough conventional firepower from its artillery units to devastate the greater Seoul area, South Korea's bustling capital of 24 million. Such an attack would cause severe casualties ? often estimated in the hundreds of thousands ? in a very short period of time.

Many of these artillery batteries are already in place, dug in and very effectively camouflaged, which means that U.S. and South Korean forces cannot count on being able to take them out before they strike. Experts believe about 60 percent of North Korea's military assets are positioned relatively close to the Demilitarized Zone separating the countries.

North Korea's most threatening weapons are its 170 mm Koksan artillery guns, which are 14 meters long and can shoot conventional mortar ammunition 40 kilometers (25 miles). That's not quite enough to reach Seoul, which is 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the DMZ. But if they use rocket-assisted projectiles, the range increases to about 60 kilometers (37 miles). Chemical weapons fired from these guns could cause even greater mayhem.

North Korea experts Victor Cha and David Kang posted on the website of Foreign Policy magazine late last month that the North can fire 500,000 rounds of artillery on Seoul in the first hour of a conflict.

Even so, not everyone believes North Korea could make good on its "sea of fire" threats. Security expert Roger Cavazos, a former U.S. Army officer, wrote in a report for the Nautilus Institute last year that, among other things, North Korea's big guns have a high rate of firing duds, pose more of a threat to Seoul's less populated outer suburbs, and would be vulnerable to counterattack as soon as they start firing and reveal their location.

"North Korea occasionally threatens to "turn Seoul into a Sea of Fire," he wrote. "But can North Korea really do this? ... The short answer is they can't; but they can kill many tens of thousands of people, start a larger war and cause a tremendous amount of damage before ultimately losing their regime."

___

FIRST STRIKES, PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES

This is what both sides say concerns them the most.

North Korea says it is developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles as a deterrent to keep the United States or South Korea from attacking it first. The reasoning is that Washington will not launch a pre-emptive strike if North Korea has a good chance of getting off an immediate ? and devastating ? response of its own.

Along with its artillery aimed at Seoul and other targets in South Korea, North Korea is developing the capacity to deploy missiles that are mobile, thus easier to move or hide. North Korea already has Rodong missiles that have ? on paper at least ? a range of about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles), enough to reach several U.S. military bases in Japan. Along with 28,000 troops in South Korea, the U.S. has 50,000 troops based in Japan.

North Korea is not believed to be capable of making a nuclear weapon small enough to fit on a long-range missile capable of hitting the United States. But physicist David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, believes it may be capable of mounting nuclear warheads on Rodongs. In any case, Pyongyang is continuing to pursue advancements, apparently out of the belief that it needs nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the U.S. to have a credible deterrent.

The United States rejects the North's claim that such a deterrent is necessary, saying it does not intend to launch pre-emptive strikes against North Korea. At the same time, Washington has made it clear that it could.

During ongoing Foal Eagle military maneuvers in South Korea, two U.S. B-2 strategic stealth bombers, flying from their base in Missouri, conducted a mock bombing run on a South Korean range. The B-2 is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, precision bombs that could take out specific targets such as North Korean government buildings, and massive conventional bombs designed to penetrate deep into the ground to destroy North Korean tunnels and dug-in military positions. One big problem, however, is determining where the targets are.

Amid heightened tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program in 1994, President Bill Clinton reportedly considered a pre-emptive strike, but decided the risks were too high.

___

CHINA'S DILEMMA

Without China, North Korea wouldn't exist. The Chinese fought alongside the North Koreans in the Korean War and have propped up Pyongyang with economic aid ever since.

Beijing has grown frustrated with Pyongyang, especially over its nuclear program. China and the U.S. worked together in drafting a U.N. resolution punishing the North for its Feb. 12 nuclear test.

But China still has valid reasons not to want the regime to suddenly collapse.

War in Korea would likely spark a massive exodus of North Korean civilians along its porous 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) border, which in turn could lead to a humanitarian crisis or unrest that the Chinese government would have to deal with. The fall of North Korea could pave the way for the United States to establish military bases closer to Chinese territory, or the creation of a unified Korea over which Beijing might have less influence.

China, the world's second-largest economy, also has significant trade with South Korea and the United States. Turmoil on the Korean Peninsula would harm the economies of all three countries.

Patrick Cronin, an Asia expert at the Center for a New American Security and a senior State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, said Beijing is helping set up back-channel negotiations with North Korea to ease the tensions. But he warned that the U.S. isn't likely to win China over as a reliable partner against North Korea beyond the current flare-up.

"There are limits to how far China and the U.S. have coincidental interests with regard to North Korea," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/despite-threats-risks-temper-korea-war-tensions-050653379.html

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Third-generation device significantly improves capture of circulating tumor cells

Apr. 3, 2013 ? A new system for isolating rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) -- living solid tumor cells found at low levels in the bloodstream -- shows significant improvement over previously developed devices and does not require prior identification of tumor-specific target molecules. Developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Engineering in Medicine and the MGH Cancer Center, the device rapidly delivers a population of unlabeled tumor cells that can be analyzed with both standard clinical diagnostic cytopathology and advanced genetic and molecular technology.

The MGH team's report has been published in Science Translational Medicine.

"This new technology allows us to follow how cancer cells change through the process of metastasis," says Mehmet Toner, PhD, director of the BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems Resource Center in the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine, the paper's senior author. "Cancer loses many of its tissue characteristics during metastasis, a process we have not understood well. Now for the first time we have the ability to discover how cancer evolves through analysis of single metastatic cells, which is a big step in the war against cancer."

The new device -- called the CTC-iChip -- is the third microchip-based device for capturing CTCs developed at the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine. The first two systems relied on prior knowledge of a tumor-specific surface marker in order to sort CTCs from whole blood and required significant adjustment for each different type of cancer. The systems also required four to five hours to process a single blood sample.

The only U.S. Food & Drug Administration-cleared, commercially available device for capturing and enumerating CTCs -- the CELLSEARCH? system developed by Veridex, LLC -- relies on magnetic nanoparticles that bind to the same epithelial protein used in the MGH -developed microchip-based devices and cannot always find CTCs present at very low numbers. In January 2011 the MGH entered into a collaborative agreement with Veridex and its affiliate Janssen Research & Development, LLC, to establish a center of excellence in research on CTC technologies.

Combining elements of both approaches -- magnetic labeling of target cells and microfluidic sorting -- the CTC-iChip works by putting a blood sample through three stages. The first removes from the sample, on the basis of cell size, all blood components except for CTCs and white blood cells. The second step uses a microfluidic process developed at the MGH to align the cells in a single file, allowing for extremely precise and rapid sorting. In the third stage, magnetically labeled target cells -- either CTCs tagged via the epithelial marker or white blood cells tagged on known blood-cell antigens -- are sorted out. Tagging white blood cells instead of CTCs leaves behind a population of unlabeled and unaltered tumor cells and doesn't rely on the presence of the epithelial marker or other known tumor antigens on the cell surface.

The new system was able to process blood samples at the extremely rapid rate of 10 million cells per second, handling a tube of blood in less than an hour. Both the mode of sorting out tagged CTCs, called tumor-antigen-dependent, and the technique that depletes white blood cells, called tumor-antigen-independent, recovered more than 80 percent of tumor cells from different types of cancer that had been added to blood samples. Comparison of the antigen-dependent-mode CTC-iChip with existing commercial technology for processing blood samples from patients with prostate, breast, pancreatic, colorectal and lung cancer showed the CTC-iChip to be more sensitive at detecting low levels of CTCs.

In the antigen-independent mode, the CTC-iChip successfully identified CTCs from several types of cancers that had lost or never had the epithelial marker, including triple-negative breast cancer and melanoma. CTCs isolated through this mode were put through standard cytopathological analysis, which revealed structural similarities to the original tumor, and detailed molecular genotyping of CTCs from a single patient found significant differences in gene expression patterns among individual CTCs.

"We're only beginning to identify potential applications of the ability to analyze how tumors mutate as they spread, but this should help improve our understanding of the fundamental genetic principles of metastasis," says Toner, the Benedict Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "We hope to develop this technology to the point where it could be used for early diagnosis, which is the 'Holy Grail' that all of us working on CTC technology have been striving for."

Ravi Kapur, PhD, of the Center for Engineering in Medicine, leader of the innovation team within the MGH Circulating Tumor Cell Center, says, "The CTC-iChip provides a first-in-class device for high-efficiency, high-speed tumor cell sorting from a clinically relevant blood volume. The chip is designed for mass manufacturing, and simple automation for clinical translation." The team is working with collaborators at Veridex and Janssen to refine the system for commercial development.

Study co-author Daniel Haber, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Cancer Center and Isselbacher/Schwartz Professor of Oncology at HMS, adds, "The study of cancer metastasis has been limited by the inability to quickly and reliably isolate tumor cells in transit in the blood. This new approach is likely to be a game changer in the field."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts General Hospital, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Emre Ozkumur, Ajay M. Shah, Jordan C. Ciciliano, Benjamin L. Emmink, David T. Miyamoto, Elena Brachtel, Min Yu, Pin-i Chen, Bailey Morgan, Julie Trautwein, Anya Kimura, Sudarshana Sengupta, Shannon L. Stott, Nezihi Murat Karabacak, Thomas A. Barber, John R. Walsh, Kyle Smith, Philipp S. Spuhler, James P. Sullivan, Richard J. Lee, David T. Ting, Xi Luo, Alice T. Shaw, Aditya Bardia, Lecia V. Sequist, David N. Louis, Shyamala Maheswaran, Ravi Kapur, Daniel A. Haber, and Mehmet Toner. Inertial Focusing for Tumor Antigen?Dependent and ?Independent Sorting of Rare Circulating Tumor Cells. Sci Transl Med, 3 April 2013 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3005616

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

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/1Riz_INj38Y/130403141436.htm

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SpaceShipTwo glides past the moon

Bill Deaver

A waning moon serves as a backdrop for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo during a glide test on Wednesday over the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. For more pictures from the test flight, check Parabolic Arc. For more about photographer Bill Deaver, check the Mojave Transportation Museum's website.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane glided its way through another test flight on Wednesday, in preparation for its first powered launch later this year.

The plane was carried up from California's Mojave Air and Space Port, nestled beneath its WhiteKnightTwo mothership, at 7:18 a.m. PT (10:18 a.m. ET), Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier reported. After its release at high altitude, SpaceShipTwo successfully landed back on the airport runway at 8:40 a.m. PT.

"This is the second of three planned glide flights with the engine configuration installed, prior to the start of powered flights later," Messier wrote. During powered test flights, SpaceShipTwo will light up its hybrid rocket engine after WhiteKnightTwo sets it loose.

"We'll burn it for longer and longer on each test to go faster and higher until we do a space shot," George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's president and CEO, told the Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal last month. "We hope to get there before the end of the year, if not before."

Virgin Galactic's plan calls for SpaceShipOne's test pilots to put the plane through a series of trips to outer space, reaching altitudes beyond 62 miles (100 kilometers). Then it will be time to take on paying passengers. More than 500 customers have put down $200,000 for tour packages that will give them a few minutes of weightlessness and an awesome view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space.

Although the tests are being conducted in California, the passenger trips are expected to be run from Spaceport America in New Mexico, starting as early as next year. A key requirement for the New Mexico operation was met this week when the state's governor, Susana Martinez, signed a law that provides more protection for the infant spaceship industry.?

More about SpaceShipTwo:

---

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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Aid groups: US should send cash, not food, abroad

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, former President Bill Clinton apologized for long championing food aid policies that helped Arkansas rice growers but made it harder for the impoverished country to grow its own crop.

Floods of imports of U.S. rice had put many of the country's growers out of business, and Clinton called his policies a "mistake."

Three years later, aid groups are pushing President Barack Obama to make the kind of change Clinton argued was needed and send cash in lieu of crops.

The White House won't say whether Obama's budget proposal, scheduled to come out next week, will suggest changing the way foreign food aid is distributed. But food aid groups, farm groups and their allies in Congress are preparing for the possibility Obama will tackle the issue in his second term.

At issue is whether the government should ship U.S.-grown food overseas to aid developing countries and starving people or simply help those countries with cash to buy food. Currently, the United States is shipping food abroad under the "Food for Peace" program started almost six decades ago by President Dwight Eisenhower to help farmers get rid of food surpluses and boost the country's image during the Cold War.

This approach has long been a profitable enterprise for American farmers and shippers, and those groups are strongly opposing any changes to the program.

But several food aid groups say times have changed and argue that shipping bulk food abroad is inefficient and expensive when government budgets are tight and developing countries need every dollar. Particularly controversial is the process of what is called "monetization," or selling the food once it arrives overseas to finance development projects. A 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office found monetization cost the U.S. an extra $219 million over a three years, money that could have been used for other development projects.

Aid groups are split on the point, since some finance their activities through monetization. But major aid groups like Oxfam and CARE say the process can destroy local agriculture by dumping cheap crops on the market at a price too low for local farmers to compete.

The food aid groups are pushing Obama to shift all or part of the average $1.8 billion spent on the program annually to other cash development accounts. If the administration does propose change, it could be in for a tough political battle.

Worried that an overhaul of the Food for Peace program could come in Obama's budget, a bipartisan group of 21 senators wrote a letter to the president in February asking him not to make changes.

"American agriculture is one of the few U.S. business sectors to produce a trade surplus, exporting $108 billion in farm goods in 2010," the senators wrote. "During this time of economic distress, we should maintain support for the areas of our economy that are growing."

The letter was signed by Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, the Democratic chairman of the Senate subcommittee that controls agriculture spending. The top Republicans on both of those panels signed the letter as well, as did Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski of Maryland.

Farm groups say the program is also a public relations tool for the United States.

"Bags of U.S.-grown food bearing the U.S. flag and stamped as "From the American People" serve as ambassadors of our nation's goodwill, which can help to address the root causes of instability," several farm and shipping groups wrote in a February letter to Obama.

"These are the kinds of things you don't want to make dramatic quick changes to," says Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, one of the groups that signed the letter.

But aid groups say change is a long time coming. Gawain Kripke of Oxfam says his group estimates that by spending the same amount of money, the United States could provide assistance for 17 million more poor people by changing the way the aid is distributed.

Blake Selzer of CARE says he is encouraged that food aid is being discussed.

"A lot of people don't understand our food aid program," he says. "The more daylight this is given the more people will say to themselves, is this the best way to use our tax dollars?"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/aid-groups-us-send-cash-195948893.html

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Obama's dad training kicks in (CNN)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

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One Year Later, Nearly Half Of Instagram's 100 Million Users Are On Android

Instagram has been around for what feels like forever, but it seems like just yesterday that the app migrated over to Android after being a long-time iOS exclusive. Today marks one year of Instagram's presence on Android, and to celebrate the company shared on its blog that in just that short time around half of its users come from Android. Last we heard, Instagram had over 100 million active monthly users in February, growing at a rapid pace at that. The push over to Android was a huge part of that, garnering over 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/19WlLmQy0Qk/

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Track who's supporting same-sex marriage now

The cascade of senators announcing or clarifying their support for same-sex marriage in the past two weeks has somewhat obscured the fact that more than half of the Democrats in the Senate backed the policy before it became fashionable. By the time Vice President Joe Biden abruptly announced his own support for the policy on May 5, 2012, nearly two-dozen senators had already signed on to a campaign begun several months earlier calling for marriage equality to be included on the Democratic Party's platform. Another eight, including independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, expressed their support prior to 2012.

The following chart tracks each Democratic senator's position on same-sex marriage organized around when he or she made the announcement. In some cases, this date is ambiguous. After the Huffington Post listed Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow among those who had not formally supported the measure, for example, her office indicated that she had already done so as part of her 2012 reelection campaign. Wikipedia has a highly comprehensive page on the subject that served as a basis for many of the links in this chart, all independently verified.

The chart also includes notable Democratic leaders outside the Senate as well as Republican and independent senators who have endorsed same-sex marriage.

See someone who is missing or who you think is in the wrong place? Let us know.

Update, April 3, 2013, 2:15 p.m.: Senators Schumer, Gillibrand, Boxer, Feinstein and Franken have been moved from the "pre-Biden" to "Prehistory" category to reflect earlier endorsements.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/same-sex-marriage-senate-endorsement-tracker-154748412--politics.html

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