Egyptian Pyramids Found By Infra-Red Satellite Images
Egyptian Pyramids Found By Infra-Red Satellite Images – BBC News
More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.
Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.
“To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist,” says US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.
She has pioneered the work in space archaeology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found.
“We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was emerging, but for me the “Aha!” moment was when I could step back and look at everything that we’d found and I couldn’t believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt.”
The team analysed images from satellites orbiting 700km above the earth, equipped with cameras so powerful they can pin-point objects less than 1m in diameter on the earth’s surface.
Infra-red imaging was used to highlight different materials under the surface.
Ancient Egyptians built their houses and structures out of mud brick, which is much denser than the soil that surrounds it, so the shapes of houses, temples and tombs can be seen.
“It just shows us how easy it is to underestimate both the size and scale of past human settlements,” says Dr Parcak.
And she believes there are more antiquities to be discovered:
“These are just the sites [close to] the surface. There are many thousands of additional sites that the Nile has covered over with silt. This is just the beginning of this kind of work.”
BBC cameras followed Dr Parcak on her “nervous” journey when she travelled to Egypt to see if excavations could back up what her technology could see under the surface.
In the BBC documentary Egypt’s Lost Cities, they visit an area of Saqqara (Sakkara) where the authorities were not initially interested in her findings.
But after being told by Dr Parcak that she had seen two potential pyramids, they made test excavations, and they now believe it is one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt.
But Dr Parcak said the most exciting moment was visiting the excavations at Tanis.
“They’d excavated a 3,000-year-old house that the satellite imagery had shown and the outline of the structure matched the satellite imagery almost perfectly. That was real validation of the technology.”
The Egyptian authorities plan to use the technology to help – among other things – protect the country’s antiquities in the future.
During the recent revolution, looters accessed some well-known archaeological sites.
“We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time and we can alert Interpol to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.”
She also hopes the new technology will help engage young people in science and will be a major help for archaeologists around the world.
“It allows us to be more focused and selective in the work we do. Faced with a massive site, you don’t know where to start.
“It’s an important tool to focus where we’re excavating. It gives us a much bigger perspective on archaeological sites. We have to think bigger and that’s what the satellites allow us to do.”
“Indiana Jones is old school, we’ve moved on from Indy, sorry Harrison Ford.”
Daily Benefactor News – NYC Sanitation Department’s Slow Snow Cleanup Was A Union Budget Protest
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NYC Sanitation Department’s Slow Snow Cleanup Was A Union Budget Protest – New York Post
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts – a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department – and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan – at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.
The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”
New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process – and pad overtime checks – which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.
The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.
They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in com bating a fierce, fast-moving bliz zard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.
The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.
In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors – down from 6,300 – because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.
Sources said budget cuts were also at the heart of poor planning for the blizzard last weekend. The city broke from its usual routine and did not call in a full complement on Saturday for snow preparations in order to save on added overtime that would have had to be paid for them to work on Christmas Day.
The result was an absolute collapse of New York’s once-vaunted systems of clearing the streets and keeping mass transit moving under the weight of 20 inches of snow.
The Sanitation Department last night denied there was a concerted effort to slow snow removal.
“There are no organized or wildcat actions being taken by the sanitation workers or the supervisors,” said spokesman Matthew Lipani.
Joseph Mannion, president of the union that represents agency supervisors, said talk of a slowdown “is hogwash.” But he admitted there is “resentment out there” toward Mayor Bloomberg and his administration because of budget cuts.
His counterpart at the rank-and-file’s union, Harry Nespoli, has also denied there is a job action, though he admitted his guys are working lucrative 14-hour shifts.
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”
But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.
And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.
One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.
“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg – quickly becoming the public face of failure this week – spent a second consecutive day yesterday defending himself to critics of his administration’s handling of the storm.
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Daily Benefactor News – The Top Ten Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts In The United States – More Articles
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The Top Ten Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts In The United States – Pajamas Media
In the first half of this essay, Gerrymandering 101, I explained how gerrymandering works and why it’s so ubiquitous. Here in the exciting conclusion I name and shame the ten most gerrymandered districts of the current 111th Congress – plus 20 bizarre bonus districts not mentioned in the title.
(10.) North Carolina-12
This is what most people imagine when they think of a gerrymandered district – what I call “Gerrymander Classic.” NC-12 looks very much like the gerrymandered districts of the 19th century, but taken to extremes. As bad as it is, NC-12 at least looks like a congressional district, with meandering lines, consistent width, and hand-drawn appearance. As we’ll soon see, modern gerrymandering is often another animal altogether, with jarring shapes and artificial boundaries that are not just offensive to the eye but somehow feel like an insult to rationality.
(9.) Florida-20
This is what gerrymandering looks like in the modern era: ugly. Gone are any attempts at aesthetics. In the old days, redistricters at least tried to disguise their gerrymandering by drawing district lines that looked almost kinda sorta reasonable. No more. Nowadays many districts, with FL-20 being a good example, seem to be the result of computer algorithms with no regard whatsoever for human or natural boundaries. Needless to say, all sense of “community” within a congressional is out the window altogether when it is shaped like this, with jagged tendrils reaching out every which way to gobble up the desired demographic.
(8.) Pennsylvania-12
PA-12 is a rare example of “packing” (jamming as many opposition voters as possible into one district) that backfired. This district was created to be a Democratic stronghold formerly held by Congressman Jack Murtha, who was assumed to have a lock on the district. At the last redistricting in 2000, the Republicans in charge gave up on the area, which is solidly unionized, and decided to “pack” Murtha’s new district with as many Democrats as possible, to allow the remaining districts in the region a chance to have slim Republican majorities. But in the intervening ten years everything has changed: the area grew more and more conservative, and the locally popular Murtha died, opening up the seat to possible challengers. In the 2010 election, PA-12 barely remained Democratic with Mark Critz winning by a hairsbreadth 50.8%-49.2% margin – while most of the surrounding districts overwhelmingly went Republican. Thus, if the foolish 2000 Republican redistricters had not consciously set out to create a “packed” Democratic district, and had instead just drawn the boundaries at random, they could have easily won all the races in the area, instead of losing this one (and the adjacent PA-4) by the slimmest of margins. Note to gerrymanderers: THINGS CHANGE. What may appear to be a wise gerrymander maneuver today may blow up in your face sometime in the future.
(7.) North Carolina-6
I have included NC-6 as a perfect example of “inverse gerrymandering,” a district that is partly hollowed out internally by a different gerrymandered district – in this case, the northern end of NC-12, our first example above. NC-6 is a stark reminder that no gerrymander is freestanding: all congressional districts are interlocked like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and every time you enclose any area by some outrageous boundary line, you are disincluding that same area from some surrounding district. So for every gerrymander you create, you are likely to also have a less-noticeable but just as offensive inverse gerrymander next door.
(6.) Florida-3
Florida has more than its fair share of gerrymandering nightmares. But while many of the state’s districts were admittedly drawn to favor Republican candidates, FL-3 is instead a federally mandated “minority-majority” district gerrymandered to give black voters a voice:
[FL-3] was drawn in 1992 to be North Florida’s black-majority seat and Democrats were shifted from the surrounding districts to make the surrounding districts more Republican. It currently stretches from Jacksonville’s downtown in the north to Orlando’s in the south, and stretches east and west to include other largely minority and Democratic areas such as Gainesville, Sanford and Eatonville. As a result of this gerrymandering, the district is strongly Democratic with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of D +18 and gave Obama 73% of its vote in the 2008 election. It is 50.9% black and 35.4% white… The 3rd District is at the center of the debate over the potential impact of the FairDistricts initiative. Due to its shape, the 3rd is one of several districts that violate restrictions in the initiative which require compact districts that conform to geographical and political boundaries. On the other hand, the 3rd District is protected by the Voting Rights Act and a non-compact shape may be necessary to ensure it remains an effective African-American seat.
The “FairDistricts Initiative,” ballot proposals designed to finally make Florida’s redistricting theoretically nonpartisan, was finally approved by voters this year on November 2 – but was immediately challenged in court not by the Republicans as you might imagine but by none other than Corrine Brown, the representative of FL-3! Why? Because the new law stipulates that districts be geographically compact, which would eliminate her voting bloc and most likely her seat in Congress, when FL-3 is totally reconfigured next year. Which is ironic, because Republicans also view the new law with disdain, seeing it as a plot to swing the redistricting advantage back to the Democrats. Sigh. Can’t we all just get along? (Answer: NO!)
(5.) Illinois-17
Political scientists love to cite IL-17 as the prototypical gerrymandered district, and you are likely to see IL-17 used as the illustration in many academic treatises about redistricting. And we can see why here. Its shape has often been described as “a rabbit on a skateboard,” though to me it looks more like an embryonic ichneumon wasp with a pancreatic cyst. We saw above how PA-12 was a gerrymandering blunder by the Republicans; IL-17 is the opposite, a gerrymandered district created by Democrats to ensure themselves a seat in western Illinois – but which this year was snatched from their grasp by Tea Party candidate and now congressman-elect Bobby Schilling. Ooops! The Democrats went out on a limb when drawing IL-17 – several limbs, by the looks of it – but the wave election of 2010 changed the electoral landscape. Let me repeat my warning to over-confident redistricters next year: THINGS CHANGE. Gerrymander at your own risk.
(4.) Florida-22
Florida-22 isn’t a congressional district: it’s a series of random lines generated by a malfunctioning dot-matrix printer. What else could explain the sheer purposelessness of the innumerable jagged ins and outs of a district so thin that in a few places you could run across it in under a minute? All of this to achieve – what? A district that is almost perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Couldn’t the same result have been effected a little more simply, perhaps by circling some random part of a Florida map with a felt pen? But all is forgiven, Florida-22, because on November 2 you elected as your representative Allen West MFC (My Favorite Congressman), quite obviously the next President of the United States.
(3.) Arizona-2
Arizona’s second district is the one most likely to make people burst out laughing. I mean, c’mon. And the explanation for this atrocity only makes it seem worse:
The odd shape of the district is indicative of the use of gerrymandering in its construction. The unusual division was not, however, drawn to favor politicians. Owing to historic tensions between the Hopi and the Navajo Native American tribes and since tribal boundary disputes are a federal matter, it was thought inappropriate that both tribes should be represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by the same member. Since the Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, and in order to comply with current Arizona redistricting laws, some means of connection was required that avoided including large portions of Navajo land, hence the narrow riverine connection.
So, the district was drawn this way so that Hopis and Navajos don’t give each other “electoral cooties” by having to vote for the same congressman? What – is America now a 3rd-grade playground? Imagine how Republicans in Nancy Pelosi’s district feel, or Democrats in rural Texas. All across America people have to line up at polling places alongside people whom they despise. Get over it.
(2.) Maryland-3
Maryland-3 is the poster child for the lunacy that is gerrymandering. And the funniest part? The Democratic politicians who created it deny that it’s gerrymandered at all:
The new district was concocted after the 2000 Census when Maryland, like all states, drew up new congressional and state legislative district boundaries to reflect changes in the population.
Former Secretary of State John T. Willis, who was in charge of the redistricting as chairman of the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee, said the committee did not mean for the 3rd District to look like it does. That’s just how the numbers worked out, he said.
“It’s a very complex situation, and population is the No. 1 driving characteristic,” Willis said.
The final plan, Willis noted proudly, created eight congressional districts that had almost exactly the same number of people in them.
“All of our congressional districts don’t deviate by more than one person,” he said.
But Rascovar said that no matter how the committee “painted it”, the new boundaries were drawn to favor Democratic candidates in the 2nd District.
“They needed ‘x’ number of votes… what you end up doing is juggling these neighborhood votes, and it becomes absurd,” Rascovar said.
“The most absurd is that the politicians drawing up these districts are no longer concerned with the neighborhoods,” he said. “All they care is, ‘How many loyal Democrats can I get in this district?’”
Willis disagreed. Although the interests of incumbent representatives were taken into consideration, he said, no single district was favored.
We didn’t draw the district that way on purpose. It was an accident! Honest!
(1.) Illinois-4
Here it is: The most ridiculous congressional district in the entire country. No, you’re not looking at two districts; IL-4 has two absurdly gerrymandered halves held together by a thin strip of land at its western edge that is nothing more than the median strip along Interstate Highway 294. The end result is a gerrymandered gerrymander, a complete mockery of what congressional representation is even supposed to be. As with AZ-2, the intention behind IL-4 was to create an ethnic enclave, in this case an Hispanic-majority district within an otherwise overwhelmingly non-Hispanic Chicago. Problem is, Chicago has two completely distinct and geographically separate Hispanic neighborhoods – one Puerto Rican, the other Mexican – but neither is large enough to constitute a district majority on its own. Solution? Lump all Hispanics together into a supposedly coherent cultural grouping, and then carefully draw a line surrounding every single Hispanic household in Chicago, linking the two distant neighborhoods by means of an uninhabited highway margin. Voila! One Hispanic congressperson, by design. And as a side-effect, the most preposterous congressional district in the United States.
But wait – our gerrymander tour isn’t over. If you think those ten were bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. While they may have indeed been the ten most gerrymandered districts in the nation, at least they shared something admirable in common: They were legal. The same cannot be said about our next ten districts, which may not be as crazily shaped as the ones above, but which are in one crucial aspect far worse: they’re noncontiguous.
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Planned Parenthood received $349.6 million in tax dollars in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2008, and it paid its president $385,163, plus another $11,876 in benefits and deferred compensation.
According to a “fact sheet” published by the organization, its Affiliate Health Centers performed 324,008 abortions in 2008, the latest year for which Planned Parenthood has publicly released an annual report.
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Obama Panel Probes Stimulus Waste… At Ritz Carlton – Washington Examiner
Members of a key panel created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have scheduled a meeting on November 22 to consider ways to prevent “fraud, waste, and abuse of Recovery Act funds.”
The meeting will be held at the super-luxe Ritz Carlton Hotel in Phoenix, AZ. The group is the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, a sub-committee of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency board.
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Minn.’s Pawlenty Ups Challenge To Fed Health Law – News Max
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a potential GOP presidential candidate, stepped up his attack Thursday on President Obama’s federal health care law with a court filing challenging its cost to states.
Pawlenty and Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri joined in the federal court filing in Pensacola, Fla. A judge there ruled that parts of a lawsuit filed by 20 other states challenging the health care overhaul can go to trial.
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‘Explosive’ Debt Commission Recommendations Include $961 Billion Tax Hikes – MRC
Nearly $1 trillion. Certainly that’s a big enough tax hike to warrant mention in a broadcast evening news show, especially after an election fueled by anger against government overspending and potential tax hikes.
Yet, only one of the three broadcast evening shows mentioned that number in its report about the debt commission’s preliminary recommendations that shook Washington on November 10th.
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Study: 100,000 Hispanics Left Arizona After SB1070 – Daily Caller
A new study suggests that there may be 100,000 fewer Hispanics in Arizona than there were before the debate over the state’s tough new immigration law earlier this year.
BBVA Bancomer Research, which did the study, worked with figures from the U.S. Current Population Survey. The study says the decline could be due to the law known as SB1070, which partly entered into effect in July.
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Chocolate Shortage Forecast – KIAH
Imagine a world without chocolate. Screams from chocolate lovers are piercing, but the nightmare scenario could become reality. Experts believe there will be a chocolate shortage this year. Most of the world’s cocoa crops are in West Africa.
That area is suffering from a drought and crops are being destroyed by two mysterious diseases that have scientists baffled.
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Federal Judges Deny 63% Of Deportation Requests – Sweetness & Light
Federal immigration judges in Los Angeles rejected 63 percent of deportation requests this year filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials – the third highest number in the nation.
One of the primary reasons for the rejections is that judges found the government had no legitimate grounds for seeking a removal order, according to a Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse report.
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Dave C
