The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.
Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots...
A "field" of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.
Dr. Daniele Zullino keeps glass bottles full of white powder in a safe in a locked room of his office.
Patients show up each day to receive their treatment in small doses handed through a small window.
Then they gather around a table to shoot up, part of a pioneering Swiss program to curb drug abuse by providing addicts a clean, safe place to take heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory...
Patients among the nearly 1,300 addicts whom other therapies have failed to help take doses carefully measured to satisfy their cravings but not enough to cause a big high. Four at a time inject themselves as a nurse watches.
In a few minutes most get up and leave. Those who have jobs go back to work.
"Heroin prescription is not an end in itself," said Zullino, adding that the 47 addicts who come to his office receive a series of additional treatments, such as therapy with a psychiatrist and counseling by social workers.
"The aim is that the patients learn how to function in society," he said, adding that after two to three years in the program, one-third of the patients start abstinence-programs and one-third change to methadone treatment...
Crimes committed by heroin addicts have dropped 60 percent since the program began in 1994, according to the Federal Office of Public Health says.
Bargain-hungry shoppers stepped on a fallen Wal-Mart worker, who died Friday morning, after the crowd knocked down the store's front doors -- and the worker -- during the "utter chaos" of a Black Friday shopping melee, Nassau County police said...
[Nassau Police Det. Lt. Michael] Fleming said an estimated 2,000 people had gathered in line around 5 a.m. as the store was preparing to open...
People in the rear of the line began pushing, cascading the people in the front into the doors, which were knocked off their hinges, Fleming said.
Hundreds of shoppers who then streamed in literally stepped on the worker who later died, Fleming said...
Shoppers who surged past the fallen Wal-Mart worker into the store were asked to leave by other store workers, some of them crying and visibly upset, said one shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, of Far Rockaway.
Though rumors circulated among the shoppers that someone had been badly injured, people ignored the Wal-Mart workers' requests that they stop shopping, move to the front of the store and exit, Cribbs said.
"They kept shopping. It's not right. They're savages," Cribbs said.
[It] is a very close-knit, very friendly, very politically diverse, very racially diverse. You have all kinds of poles there. You have [conservative] Judge Richard Posner on one pole and Louis Farrakhan on the other. And everything in between. It's an interesting neighborhood, a college town [the University of Chicago]. It's close-knit. It's kind of like Wasilla, Alaska, except that it's different.
On the Weather Underground--
I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter [of his memoir, Fugitive Days], I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.
Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.
And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?
On election night--
One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn't help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there's something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening...
We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn't want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn't want to savor that? Who doesn't want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it's their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let's not lose hope in ourselves. But let's wish them all the best.
Last Wednesday, my dad gushed that I'd gotten to cast this vote in my third presidential election. He'd been waiting 40 years, he said.
After (only) eight years, I got to cast an aspirational vote -- and win.
A President who reads newspapers. Who reads poetry.
More.
A President who recognizes the times that try men's souls; a President who seeks new thinking and better angels; a President who trusts democracy. A President who engages the world; who engages ideas; who engages dissenters.
Last week, I was accused--amusingly but seriously--by a colleague of being drunk on Obama Kool-aid when I expressed approval of the Rahm Emanuel pick. I still like the pick. But I don't think I've drunk the Kool-aid...all right, I may have sipped it. But that's not the point.
The point is that my colleague's larger accusation was that I was rationalizing a disappointing decision. I was, in his view, actively avoiding my first disappointment with my preferred (and trumpeted) President-Elect. I wasn't. I couldn't have been.
I'm already disappointed. No praising of Rahmbo will postpone Obama's first failure. He has already failed me.
His stance on same-sex marriage is a deep disappointment and a shameful failure. His stance is, in fact, the same stance ratified by Californians with Prop 8 last Tuesday -- even as they elected him President by the biggest margin since FDR. Ok, so he didn't support Prop 8 because he doesn't support amending the state's constitution to deny a right to same-sex marriage. His stance is for full civil unions, full civil rights -- everything except that word, "marriage." And that's, essentially, what Prop 8 has left for gay Californians. That is to say: not nearly enough.
It's difficult to express how enormously inadequate that answer is. How enormously not enough.
Maybe Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage is more tactical than principled (like his opposition to health insurance mandates might be). Maybe coming out more strongly against Prop 8--doing ads, say--would have lost him votes, in California or elsewhere. It seems all but certain that coming out strongly for same-sex marriage would have lost him votes -- maybe enough to lose him the election.
So if it was tactics, it was understandable; if it was principles, it was wrong. But either way, President-Elect Obama is already, by this measure, a disappointment and a failure.
I, of course, knew that when I voted for him. And I wanted him elected despite it. And I phone-banked for him and canvassed for him and got out his vote. And if someone asked me about his opposition to same-sex marriage--which happened only twice--I rationalized it away (the lesser of possible evils, which I still believe) and worked the vote anyway. And in that way, I disappointed myself. And his failure became my own.
And our failure hurt people I love, even as I (and they) celebrated on November 4. Yes we did.
That night, just as Obama was about to speak to the crowd gathered in Grant Park, I finally got the overwhelmed California Secretary of State website to load. And I announced the percentages to my friends. Disbelief. Holding out hope for remaining precincts (which would not, in the end, help), we settled into silence as our candidate and his family took to the stage.
He told us that night, that he would be the whole country's President. That he needed all of our help.
And we will do our part. Gladly. Proudly. Fired up.
But we needed his help, too. And he let us down.
And so this victory, like too many victories, is bittersweet. Too many of us blackened our neighbors' eyes, as we blackened our historic ovals. Too many of us--our President-Elect, included--shut our ears to the howling, and turned our heads against the wind. In this way, as in so many others, the coming moment on January 20, 2009, is not enough. But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger.
A moreperfectunion? A just and lasting peace among ourselves? Not yet. But some day, soon I hope, we will, all of us, get there. The mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the Union. And the morning will be breaking.
My grandparents were George Wallace supporters. Yeah. I know. I know.
But they were. My mom's parents. Standing in the schoolhouse door. Segregation now, tomorrow, forever.
My dad says they had a framed picture of Wallace on their mantle.
And he tells this story. He was very involved in Robert Kennedy's campaign in '68. College campus and youth organizer. RFK's assassination was devastating for him. Sometime around June 7th or 8th, he and my mom went to her parents' house for dinner. They ate in the kitchen. Over the kitchen table, there was a vent that poured cold air down onto whoever was seated at that end of the table. The usual practice was to use Scotch tape to cover the vent with a piece of newspaper. That night, with my dad seated at the opposite head of the table, my grandparents had taped up the front page from a couple days before. Robert Kennedy's face--along with the banner headline announcing his death--stared down at my dad throughout the meal. He could barely eat. He swears they did it on purpose.
I remember eating with my mom, my sister, and my grandparents at a now-closed Chili's in the affluent suburb I grew up in. I couldn't have been more than 6 or 7. My grandmother said something to my mom that I either couldn't hear or couldn't comprehend. I asked what she'd said. She glanced at my mom, who looked away. "I just don't like when people mix coffee and tea," she said, looking over my left shoulder. This didn't make any sense to me either. I looked around -- didn't see anyone doing that. I can't remember if my mom explained it to me afterward, or if I just figured it out for myself: my grandmother wasn't talking about mixed hot beverages, but about mixed race couples.
Several years back--I was about 14, I think--I was at my grandparents' apartment, sifting through a bowl of mixed nuts. "I don't like these ones," I remember saying. "What are they called?" "Brazil nuts," my mom said -- quickly, I remember thinking. "We used to call them something you can't say anymore," my grandmother said. My mom sighed. "What?" I asked. My mom shook her head. "Tell me," I said. "We used to call them nigger toes," my grandmother said.
My dad has claimed for as long as I can remember that my grandparents "mellowed" over the years. That they changed. My grandfather started unbuttoning his collar occasionally. Et cetera. My dad claims it was his influence.
Maybe. I think it may just have been time.
This past month, my grandfather turned 95. My grandmother is 85. I got a voicemail from my mom a couple weeks ago. Between telling me about her most recent lunch with my sister, and reminding me to call her more often, she mentioned this: "Your grandparents voted early yesterday. Absentee. For Obama. Both of them."
I was fairly stunned. I hadn't thought to try to persuade them. I realize now that I had, I'm fairly ashamed to say, written off their votes. But my grandparents voted for Barack Obama. A black man. With a white mother and an African father. Who's running against a white war hero. Barack Obama.
I'm not sure why. They know I've been volunteering for the campaign. Maybe they were thinking of my preference when deciding on theirs. But I hope it was more than that. More than resignation. I hope it was progress.
Something's astir in America. Come Wednesday: Now, Tomorrow, and Forever might just have a whole new meaning.
Community organizers like Obama know what's going on. If they remember. The important thing is memory. You know in this country, we all have Alzheimer's. Obama has got to remember his days as an organizer. It all comes back to the neighborhood. Well I hope the election is a landslide for Obama.
