Month: August 2018

A US appeals court has blocked the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to take a broadband subsidy away from Tribal areas.

The FCC decision, originally slated to take effect later this year, would have made it difficult or impossible for Tribal residents to obtain a $25-per-month Lifeline subsidy that reduces the cost of Internet or phone service for poor people. But on Friday, a court stayed the FCC decision pending appeal, saying that Tribal organizations and small wireless carriers are likely to win their case against the commission.

COVENTRY, R.I. — Gabe Schorner never considered himself a good student until he enrolled in his high school’s new welding program, where, in an industrial-style classroom, Mr. Schorner found himself enchanted by the molten metal and its bright blue glow as he molded it.

The skills he picked up led directly to a full-time offer from Electric Boat, the Rhode Island-based submarine manufacturer, where he is now making $16.50 an hour. “I don’t like the idea of going to college — I wanted to avoid taking on that debt and everything…

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

August 11, 2018 at 08:00PM

On Friday, a California jury hit Monsanto with $289 million in damages in a lawsuit brought by a patient suffering from terminal cancer, accepting the plaintiff’s claims that his disease was caused by the company’s popular herbicide, Roundup. The suit neatly sidestepped the complicated epidemiology of the active ingredient in the herbicide, glyphosate, and instead made the claim that the cancer was the result of glyphosate’s interactions with other chemicals in Roundup—a claim for which there is even less evidence.

The suit is one of hundreds in progress, and will almost certainly be appealed by Monsanto, which was recently purchased by chemical giant Bayer.

According to CNN, the suit was filed by a former groundskeeper for a school system near San Francisco named Dewayne Johnson. As part of his job, Johnson regularly used the popular herbicide, and claimed that he suffered extensive exposure during two accidents within the past decade.

The degree of exposure can be an issue with glyphosate. High levels of exposure in animal testing has hinted that the chemical could cause cancer, and some small epidemiological studies found a link between cancers and extensive exposure during agricultural work. That was enough for the World Health Organization to label the idea that glyphosate caused cancer as “probable.”

But there have been questions raised about the significance of the animal studies even as the WHO report was being prepared. And a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies found no consistent association of glyphosate with cancer. European safety regulators have come to an opposite conclusion to that of the WHO, determining that glyphosate is not a carcinogen.

Exposure outside of working directly with the chemical is produces levels that are widely considered safe. For example, FactCheck.org calculated that people would have to eat over 35 kilograms of agricultural products containing glyphosate a day just to reach the strictest safety limits.

So it would be difficult to judge whether Mr. Johnson’s two accidental exposures would cause any cancer risk whatsoever. But that issue was neatly sidestepped during the trial, as Johnson’s lawyers argued that his cancer was caused by the combination of glyphosate and other chemicals present in Roundup. The evidence there is even less certain; glyphosate has been off patent for decades, and is found in products from many manufacturers beyond Monsanto. As a result, most studies focus specifically on the herbicide, since studying individual formulations would leave the work without much statistical power.

For Bayer and its recently purchased subsidiary Monsanto, the verdict is a disaster. A quarter-billion of it is purely punitive damages, meant to punish the company for “acting with malice and oppression.” There are also thousands of other cases focusing on Roundup pending. The company has already stated that it plans to appeal the verdict, and a Bayer spokesman has told the BBC that glyphosate is safe to use.

The Trump administration is taking aim at a law designed to protect military service members from getting cheated by shady lending practices.

NPR has obtained documents that show the White House is proposing changes that critics say would leave service members vulnerable to getting ripped off when they buy cars.

The Military Lending Act is supposed to protect service members from predatory loans and financial products. But the White House wants to change the rules and take away some of those protections.

“If the White House does this it will be manipulating the Military Lending Act regulations at the behest of auto dealers and banks to try and make it easier to sell overpriced rip-off products to military service members,” says Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah, who reviewed the documents.

The product Peterson is referring to is called gap insurance. Here’s how it works: Cars lose some of their value the moment they are driven off the lot. Dealers often tell customers that if their car gets wrecked in a crash they could be financially harmed because regular insurance may not pay out the entire amount owed on the loan. Peterson says some car dealers push this insurance product really hard. “They convince people they’ve got to have this gap insurance.”

That kind of insurance can actually be inexpensive. Peterson, who helped write the regulations for the Defense Department, says it often costs as little as $20 to $30 a year and is available from a car buyer’s regular insurance company.

“But if you buy it from your car dealer, they may mark it up … I’ve seen gap insurance policies being sold for $1,500,” Peterson says.

That is over the course of the loan. The rules to protect service members block auto dealers from tacking on an extra product — such as overpriced gap insurance — and rolling it into their car loans.

The industry has been lobbying to change that, and the White House appears to be sympathetic. The administration just sent the latest version of a proposal to the Defense Department and documents show that it would give car dealers what they want. Peterson says the revised rules could also allow dealers to roll in all kinds of other add-on products.

Paul Metrey is vice president of regulatory affairs and chief regulatory counsel with the National Automobile Dealers Association. He says, “Service members certainly should have the same access to credit protections that their civilian counterparts have.” Now when service members buy cars and get loans at the dealer this “valuable” gap insurance product “is effectively not available to them,” he says.

Peterson says service members can still get this kind of insurance elsewhere, and often at a much better price.

“If somebody really wants to have some gap insurance to protect them from this situation, they should just go to their insurance company and buy it,” he says.

Meanwhile, there is another change in the works that critics say would more broadly weaken the enforcement of the Military Lending Act, or MLA. It involves Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.

Under Mulvaney, the bureau is planning to halt regular monitoring of payday lenders and other firms to see whether they are violating the act and cheating military personnel.

Retired Army Col. Paul Kantwill recently left a position at CFPB, where he worked on issues facing service members. The prospect of weaker oversight concerns him.

“I am troubled by this,” Kantwill says. “I am very concerned about it.”

The bureau says it would investigate complaints of abuse. But Kantwill says that is not enough. He compared the proposed changes to “removing the sentries from the guard posts guarding your military installation or your compound.”

He says the troops need protection. Before the MLA was put in place, many service members got stuck in damaging high-cost loans, he says.

Kantwill says going back to his days as a U.S. Army lieutenant in the 1990s, predatory lending was a big problem. “We saw the payday lenders and the vehicle title-loan places right outside the front gate.”

For example, Kantwill remembers there were 21 high-cost lenders outside the main gate at Fort Campbell, Ky. “The Military Lending Act and the regulations that implement it have gone a long way toward eliminating a lot of those practices,” he says.

Kantwill says when people in the military get mired in debt and high-cost loans, that creates problems for readiness. They can lose security clearances or just get distracted by financial trouble at home.

“And it can get even more serious than that,” he says. “Service members are kicked out of the service,” for reasons that involve an inability to handle their financial affairs.

All that is why Congress passed these special protections. So why would the CFPB pull back on enforcement this way?

Under Mulvaney, the bureau is claiming it might not have the legal authority to actively go looking for violations of the Military Lending Act. That’s according to a draft document circulating within the bureau obtained by NPR.

Kantwill disagrees with that interpretation. “There is broad specific authority for the bureau to be able to examine for these sorts of issues.”

As for the changes requested by the auto dealers, allowing them to roll products such as extra insurance into car loans, the Defense Department says the issue is still in the proposal stage.

In a statement, the department says any changes will, “be made only if necessary and in a way that does not reduce the MLA protections afforded Service members and their families.”

Early tomorrow morning

(Aug. 11), weather permitting, NASA will launch its newest spacecraft, called the

Parker Solar Probe

, aboard a huge United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket — and by December 2024, it will become the fastest spacecraft ever.

That’s when the probe will reach its closest point to the sun, coming within 3.83 million miles (6 million kilometers) of our star. At that point, the spacecraft will be speeding along at a whopping 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h). On Earth, that would be the equivalent of traveling from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in less than a minute — or from D.C. to Philadelphia in less than a second.

But the team behind the spacecraft is surprisingly blasé about the record-breaking feat. “Designing something to go fast in space is pretty much the same as you would design it to go slow in space; space has nothing to really impede its progress,” Parker Solar Probe project manager Andrew Driesman, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a NASA news conference yesterday (Aug. 9). “The spacecraft doesn’t know it’s going fast.” [The Greatest Missions to the Sun]

 

Nevertheless, it won’t be entirely smooth sailing, since the probe won’t be the only thing moving incredibly quickly. The Parker Solar Probe will also be surrounded by what scientists call a hypervelocity dust environment — a slew of tiny, fast-moving particles, some of which will inevitably bang into the spacecraft. The probe carries Kevlar blankets to protect itself from those impacts.

 

During its closest approach to the sun, the Parker Solar Probe will leave other speedy spacecraft eating metaphorical dust. For comparison, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched back in 1977, is currently traveling at about 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h), according to NASA — less than 10 percent of the Parker Solar Probe’s peak speed.

When it slipped into orbit around Jupiter in July 2016, NASA’s Juno probe briefly clocked in at 165,000 mph (266,000 km/h), making it the fastest spacecraft to date. That was achievable thanks, in part, to the gas giant’s own gravity — which some sticklers claim is cheating.

However, in terms of so-called heliocentric velocity only — the speed with regard to the sun, without the influence of planets — two other spacecraft currently hold the record: Helios I and II, two 1970s missions that slipped closer to the sun than Mercury is to our star, reaching speeds of about 150,000 mph (241,000 km/h).

But because things orbit faster the closer in, sailing within 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of the visible surface of the sun means that the Parker Solar Probe will almost triple that speed. Better wave goodbye to it while you can.

Editor’s note: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will launch Saturday, Aug. 11, at 3:33 a.m. EDT (0733 GMT). You can watch the launch live here on Space.com   beginning at 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV. Visit Space.com Saturday for complete coverage of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launch.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.comor follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.