The lawmakers reported 42 threats in the first three months of this year, compared with 15 in the last three months of 2009, said Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance W. Gainer, who had information about threats involving both chambers.
"The incidents ranged from very vulgar to serious threats, including death threats," Gainer said. "The ability to carry them out is another question and part of an investigation to determine what, if any, appropriate steps to take."
Nearly all of the recent threats appear to come from opponents of the health-care overhaul, said Gainer, who also served four years as chief of the U.S. Capitol Police. And, he said, there have been "significantly more" threats against House members than against senators.
The threats, which have led to at least three arrests, have not abated since President Obama signed the measure into law March 23. The Capitol Police have contacted the FBI about such threats even more often since the law was signed, said Lindsay Godwin, an FBI spokeswoman.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) became the best-known of the recently targeted lawmakers Wednesday, when authorities accused a man in San Francisco of making dozens of threatening calls to her home and her husband's office.
In response to the threats, Capitol officials have been working to ensure that the 454 Senate offices across the country are secure. Some of the offices, a quarter of which are in federal buildings, are receiving additional equipment to help with the screening of mail. In other instances, law enforcement officials are recommending new locks and surveillance cameras...
private anymore. "Normally, we don't give publicity to this," said Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House committee that oversees the Capitol Police.
The threats have come at home and at work, online, on the phone and in person.
This week, Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.) received hostile e-mails to his Cohen for Congress campaign Web site, an incident that was reported to the Capitol Police and the FBI office in Memphis. One e-mail said, "If our tea parties had hoods, we would burn your [expletive] on a cross on the White House front lawn," according to Cohen's chief of staff.
A propane gas line was cut in March at the Charlottesville home of Rep. Tom Perriello's (D-Va.) brother after a self-identified "tea party" activist posted the address on the Internet and said it was the congressman's house.
A brick was thrown through the window of the Niagara Falls district office of Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) , and someone left her a voice mail suggesting that the children of health-reform supporters would be targeted by snipers.
Rep. Bart Stupak (Mich.), the leader of a bloc of antiabortion Democrats who eventually cut a deal with the Obama administration and voted for the bill, received a fax with a drawing of a noose and an anonymous voice mail saying: "You're dead. We know where you live. We'll get you."
Despite the threats, Murray and Slaughter haven't changed their public schedules, according to spokesmen, and Perriello hasn't slowed down since the vandalism at his brother's house.
Iran: No Way Back From Nuclear State: (CBS/AP) Ahmadinejad Defiant Despite Threat of Sanctions; New Centrifuge Accelerates Uranium Enrichment Program. Iran unveiled a third generation of domestically built centrifuges Friday as the Islamic Republic accelerates a uranium enrichment program that has alarmed world powers fearful of the nuclear program's aims.
The new machines are capable of much faster enrichment than those now being used in Iran's nuclear facilities, and Iranian officials praised the advancement as a step toward greater self-sufficiency in the face of international sanctions targeted at choking off the nuclear work.
During a ceremony marking Iran's National Day of Nuclear Technology, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled back a white curtain to reveal one of the tall, cylindrical machines to a crowd of assembled dignitaries. The display capped months of announcements about the development of the new machines.
Ahmadinejad declared there was no way back for Iran's nuclear work despite opposition from the United States and other world powers, though he insisted it had only peaceful aims like power generation.
Iran would remain a nuclear state, he said, "whether enemies want it or not."
President Barack Obama's announcement on Tuesday of a new American nuclear policy enraged Iran's leaders because the guidelines classify Iran as a potential target for a nuclear attack. Obama's policy included pledges to reduce America's nuclear arsenal, refrain from nuclear tests and not use nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them.
Iran and North Korea were not included in that pledge because they do not co-operate with other countries on nonproliferation standards...
The new generation of centrifuges, which spin uranium gas at extremely high speeds to purify it, will allow Iran to produce fuel for as many as six nuclear power plants, the president said.
The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the machines were 10 times more powerful than ones now in use and had passed all necessary mechanical tests.
The machines are at the core of Iran's disputed nuclear program. Enrichment technology is of concern to the international community because it can be used to generate fuel for power stations or material for nuclear bombs.
The United States and its allies suspect Iran's civilian work is a cover for developing a weapons capability. With more advanced centrifuges, Iran can more rapidly amass enriched material that could be turned into the fissile core of warheads, should Tehran choose to do so...
Iran's first nuclear power plant is to be inaugurated later this year in the southern port of Bushehr with the help of Russia. Iran says it plans to build some 20 nuclear power plants.
Ahmadinejad also announced that Iran aspired in the future to export nuclear technology.
Seeking to support claims of nuclear self-sufficiency, Salehi, the nuclear chief, said Iran recently examined a uranium deposit in the centre of the country with "a remarkable reservoir."
That runs counter to the belief that Iran does not have significant deposits of raw uranium, making it dependent on imports.
Iran has two known uranium enrichment plants and announced in February that it plans to start construction this year on two more facilities deep inside mountains to protect them from attack.
Iran says it will install more than 50,000 centrifuges at its main enrichment facility in the central town of Natanz. Currently they have installed about 9,000 there.
The U.S and Israel have not ruled out a military option for stopping Iran's nuclear program if diplomacy and sanctions fail.
I find this story absolutely fascinating. Usually, I just try to pick out the best pieces and excerpt a story but this guy did such a great job of writing it that I was glued to the entire piece of writing. A lot of the facts here are new to me and may be to you as well - so I ran the story in its entirety.
Nuclear Waste May Get A Second Life by Richard Harris: (NPR) The Obama administration is promoting nuclear power, but at the same time it has put an end to plans to bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Now, a blue-ribbon committee is pondering what to do with the waste. One option under consideration is a process that would dramatically reduce its radioactive lifetime.
Less than 1 percent of spent reactor fuel is made up of the nasty radioactive elements that last hundreds of thousands of years.
And Sherrell Greene at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee says the technology to remove those elements from waste is as old as nuclear reactors themselves.
New Use For Old Technology
Greene points out the world's first continuously operating reactor, and then points up at a 24-foot tall graphite block that's dotted with holes about the size of corks. It looks nothing like a power reactor because it never was.
Instead, it was called an atomic pile. And back in the 1940s, the world's first nuclear engineers used long metal rods to slide uranium slugs into the holes along the front face. Nuclear reactions inside the pile turned uranium into plutonium.
"It's hard to see it, but the slugs would fall out the back and there's a trench," Greene says. "You see the transport trench right here, and it would be moved to the reprocessing building."
Back in the 1940s, scientists here were reprocessing the waste to get at the plutonium, to use it for nuclear weapons research.
These days, technologists like Greene would like to extract that plutonium, and related elements, from spent fuel. But they want to use it as a nuclear fuel. In the process, that would also keep those long-lasting radioactive materials out of nuclear waste dumps.
This is doable. Worldwide, about a quarter of spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed. But for reasons we'll get to in a few minutes, the United States stopped pursuing this technology in the 1970s. Now, with a possible nuclear energy renaissance on the horizon, there's interest once again.
Reconsidering Reprocessing
Not far from the historic first reactor, Greene and his colleagues at Oak Ridge are taking a fresh look at reprocessing.
Building 7920 has a simple white cinder-block exterior. Inside this decades-old facility are some relics of the nuclear heyday. Today they're being used to manipulate and reprocess samples of waste from nuclear reactors.
At the core of this building, technicians peer through 4 1/2-foot thick windows made of glass and mineral oil. The ultrathick glass serves as radiation shielding.
They use mechanical arms to manipulate items inside the highly radioactive hot cell.
Jason Cook adroitly sorts through the tools with the mechanical arm. It seems awkward, but he says after six years of practice it's pretty much second nature to him.
"You get used to it," he says. "It's not as bad as it looks."
The setup practically looks like a museum piece. But researchers here have recently used these hot cells to manufacture a sample of new reactor fuel, made from spent nuclear waste. Greene explains it contains plutonium and other long-lived radioactive elements.
The idea is to send this material back into a reactor. There it will generate more energy. And in the process, the long-lived radioactive materials will break down into elements with much shorter lifetimes.
The resulting experimental fuel pellets look like bullets.
"These are the first pellets that have been produced from commercial nuclear fuel," Greene says, "in which we did not produce any pure separated plutonium in the process."
Greene says if waste weren't such a hot-button issue, nuclear power would actually look pretty attractive. One person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can — which is tiny, compared with the many tons of carbon dioxide the average American dumps into the atmosphere each and every year. And even on a national scale, Greene says it's not as much as you might think.
"If I put in one place all of the spent fuel generated by all of the commercial power plants in the United States throughout history," he says, "all of that spent fuel could be fit into a pool of water 25 feet deep and 300 feet on a side."
The size of a football field. Right now, that pool would need to remain reliable for a million years — which is one reason even putting it in Yucca Mountain seemed like less than a sure thing. Reprocessing the waste wouldn't reduce its volume — but it would dramatically reduce its radioactive lifetime. And that could make waste storage a much easier problem to solve.
Economic, Safety Downsides
So why hasn't the United State adopted this technology? Well, it turns out if you think of it in terms of a way to make more nuclear fuel, that's a very expensive way to go. Frank von Hippel at Princeton, a longtime skeptic of nuclear fuel reprocessing, says it's likely to remain a very expensive substitute for starting from scratch with uranium ore.
"The price would have to go up about 10 times for it to be economically justifiable to reprocess," von Hippel says.
Von Hippel's main concern, though, is that this technology can promote the spread of nuclear weapons. In fact, India used the reprocessing technology we gave it in the 1970s to make a nuclear explosive. And that changed our attitude toward reprocessing.
The U.S. "adopted the policy that we don't reprocess [and] you don't need to either," he says.
Even so, England, France, Japan and Russia have built reprocessing plants. But von Hippel says the technology is not proving to be a winner — especially for Japan.
"The ironic thing is, in effect the plant isn't working," he says. "They spent $20 billion on it and it's in fact eight years behind schedule. So they are, in fact, having to devise interim storage for their spent fuel."
So von Hippel says, from the standpoint of economics — and nuclear proliferation — it makes the most sense to leave nuclear reactor waste alone.
Greene at Oak Ridge agrees that policy issues and economics need to be considered in the debate over reprocessing.
"Our job as researchers really is to remove the scientific and technical barriers and to provide options to our national leaders and to our country," he says.
Commercial concerns play a role, as well. The French company AREVA is interested in selling a reprocessing plant in the United States. General Electric Hitachi is also developing an advanced form of the technology. And they're waiting to hear the judgment of the White House's blue ribbon committee on nuclear waste, which is due in 2012.
For Decades, Stevens Molded High Court Rulings: (NPR) Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced Friday that he will step down from the Supreme Court when the justices break for the summer, started out his time on the nation's mightiest bench as something of a maverick.
But during his 34 years of service, which ranks him among the longest-serving justices in U.S. history, Stevens became a brilliant tactician, forging unexpected majorities that established new legal rules on issues ranging from the death penalty to national security.
Appointed to the court by President Gerald Ford, he became the leader of the court's liberal wing when the court's composition changed and moved increasingly to the right.
Today, with the court split 5-4 on many issues, Stevens — who is the current court's oldest member — is most often in the minority, so the nomination of another liberal in his place would not change the ideological makeup of the court.
Often called "a judge's judge," Stevens was something of a throwback to a less rancorous era, when, as one writer put it, "law and politics were a noble pursuit, not a blood sport..."
*** Read more about this subject of what comes next for the Supreme Court and how they can affect our nation by clicking on the link. Great article.
And this woman is The Great Hope of the Republican Party for 2012 Presidential campaign? You have got to be kidding.
Poll: Low Favorability Ratings for Sarah Palin: (CBS) Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continues to receive unfavorable ratings from the American public overall, a new CBS News poll shows, though many Republicans do hold a favorable opinion of her.
But even as the former GOP vice presidential candidate continues to build up her persona as a media personality and conservative spokesperson, nearly four in 10 self-identified conservatives say they do not have an opinion of her or know too little about her to have an opinion.
Twenty-four percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, while 38 percent view her unfavorably, according to the poll, conducted March 29 through April 1. Thirty-seven percent of the public is undecided or hasn't heard enough to offer an opinion. Her ratings have held fairly steady over the past year.
Only 7 percent of Democrats say they have a favorable view of Palin and 59 percent have a negative view. By contrast, 43 percent of Republicans have a positive view of Palin and 16 percent have a negative view.
Palin has become a sort of spokesperson for the conservative Tea Party movement. She gave the keynote speech at the first National Tea Party convention this year, and she kicked off a national Tea Party bus tour last month.
Still, 39 percent of conservatives said they were undecided or hadn't heard enough to have an opinion of Palin, compared with 36 percent who had a favorable view and 23 percent who said they had an unfavorable view of her.
College graduates were also among the demographic groups likely to have a negative view of Palin, the poll found: 52 percent of Americans with a college degree said they had an unfavorable opinion, while 33 percent of those without a degree had an unfavorable opinion. Among both groups, 24 percent had a favorable view.
Geography has some impact, too. While the former Alaska governor receives net negative ratings across all regions of the country, she gets her highest favorable rating from Americans living in the Midwest at 31 percent; her lowest comes from those residing in the Northeast at 18 percent. Men and women have similarly unfavorable views of Sarah Palin.
This was a CBS poll: This poll was conducted among a random sample of 858 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone March 29-April 1, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from random digit dial samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.
This is one of those heart warming stories where a wealthy person understands their community responsibility and accomplishes a lot of good for others. Kudos go to this Fischer House foundation for helping vets and their families transition physical healing and relationships back to normal.
Obama Funds A Place For Veterans To Heal: (NPR) Fisher House helped Tammy Duckworth heal. As an Army Reserve helicopter pilot in Iraq, she was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that cost her both her legs and severely injured her right arm. Eventually, she ended up at Fisher House at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
The Fisher House Foundation has built 45 facilities on campuses at military medical centers around the country, providing housing to veterans, wounded soldiers and their families free of charge. When he was a senator from Illinois, Barack Obama regularly visited Fisher House at Walter Reed.
First lady Michelle Obama, through her work with military families, is also "very aware" of Fisher House, says Duckworth, now an assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs. Last month, when President Obama announced that he would give his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize money to 10 charities, Fisher House was the single largest recipient.
Fisher House saves families money during long hospital stays. More importantly, it offers them a ready-made support group. People who have already been in residence at Fisher House for months help newcomers navigate the military and hospital bureaucracies — and offer them someone to talk to who understands what they're going through.
"No one's child is the one child whose dad is different," Duckworth says.
"It is an invaluable program, especially for service members going through a lengthy rehabilitation process," says Ryan Gallucci, a spokesman for the veterans group AMVETS...
"I think the Fisher House is the best asset for a family that's going through something like traumatic injuries from war," he says. "You get to reintegrate with your family, which is pretty hard if you're hurt..."
For the wounded, Fisher House provides "training wheels" for resuming normal life, Duckworth says. "I learned to cook again and do laundry from a wheelchair at the Fisher House," she says.
She also started to argue with her husband over little things, like making dinner and taking out the garbage. That's when Duckworth began to believe what she'd been told by older wounded vets: that life would become normal...
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