CAMP PLAN: GOP BORROWS DEMS’ IDEAS ON TAX REFORM – POLITICO’s Zachary Warmbrodt, Lauren French, Brian Faler and Kelsey Snell dive into the Camp plan: “House Republicans’ top tax writer is set to offer something unthinkable in virtually any other context: a big new tax on the wealthy. A proposal slated to be released this week by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp will include a special surcharge on the wealthy, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. The surtax and a new bank tax that lobbyists are widely expecting both sound like proposals Democrats have repeatedly offered in recent years, drawing scoffs from Republicans.
– “The Camp plan narrows tax brackets and cuts the top individual and corporate rate to 25 percent but includes a special 10 percent surtax on joint income more than $ 450,000, according to the document, confirmed by a Republican aide. The wealthiest individuals now face a top tax rate of about 40 percent, while the top corporate rate is about 35 percent to make the difficult math behind any reform work, and it would have the added political bonus of allowing him to claim that he’s extending an olive branch to Democrats. … The Michigan Republican is expected to release his long-awaited plan Wednesday.
– “Rumors have swirled in recent days on K Street that big banks and insurers will face a special surcharge, likely 3.5 percent basis points on financial firms with more than $ 500 billion in assets. These two ideas are reminiscent of the administration’s proposed ‘Buffett rule’ on millionaires as well as a proposed bank tax proposed by President Barack Obama in recent years.” http://politi.co/1cmnW4C
– BUT SENATE MINORITY LEADER MITCH McCONNELL promptly declared that there’s no hope for tax reform this election year. AP: http://strib.mn/MtiINp
– Camp outlined and defended his plan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today: “The tax code changes in my plan are not intended as a means of raising revenue. If loopholes are closed, Americans should get the benefit by way of lower rates. Tax reform needs to be about strengthening the economy and making the code simpler and fairer. That’s what Republican President Ronald Reagan did when he worked with Democrats in Congress in 1986. We need to get to work and repeat that success.” http://on.wsj.com/1ho9kpD
** Republicans and Democrats finally agree! Congress has bipartisan legislation to repeal Medicare’s broken funding formula. But not if Congress gives up before the March 31 deadline. SGR is the problem; H.R. 4015 and S. 2000 are the solution. FixMedicareNow.org
RUNNING TALLY: About 4 million people have signed up for health coverage under the Obamacare exchanges since Oct. 4, up from 3.3 million at the end of January. POLITICO’s Susan Levine: http://politi.co/1pslhis
PRESIDENT OBAMA, visiting St. Paul, Minn., later today, will call for a four-year, $ 302 billion transportation bill to replace the law that expires at the end of September. Our own Kathryn Wolfe writes: “The White House didn’t say whether Obama will offer a full reauthorization proposal — for the first time in his presidency — or simply a “vision.” But he has been clear recently that he wants to use money from overhauling corporate taxes to make up for chronic shortfalls in the Highway Trust Fund’s gasoline tax revenues.” http://politi.co/1frujth
HILL REPORTER MATT LASLO has got something brewin’. He emails Huddle: “We’re hoping to change Washington one sip at a time …” http://billsandbrews.com/
CRUZ GOES AFTER GOP ‘PARTY BOSSES’ … AGAIN – POLITICO’s Manu Raju reports: “Ted Cruz is at it again. Cruz said last fall he wouldn’t raise money for a controversial group attacking fellow Republicans. But the Texas senator has since written a fundraising missive for another conservative group that’s backing the primary challengers to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others. This time, the tea party freshman has helped the lower-profile Madison Project, a political action committee working to defeat McConnell and Sens. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Thad Cochran of Mississippi — and prop up other primary challengers in 2014 midterm races. In the mailer, Cruz asks donors to ‘pull out all the stops’ to elect ‘solid, principled, conservative fighters’ who will ‘not answer to the party bosses in Washington, D.C.’” http://politi.co/1psiLsD
– Meet Amanda Carpenter, Ted Cruz’s Twitter torrent. Roll Call’s Humberto Sanchez: http://bit.ly/1fruswX
CLINTON STUMPS FOR GRIMES – New York Times, A16, “Ex-President Ventures Where Some Might Not,” By Jonathan Martin in Louisville, Ky.: “When Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s Democratic Senate candidate, welcomed former President Bill Clinton to a fund-raiser here Tuesday, she offered a rendering of recent political history suited for red-state Democrats: Mr. Clinton’s tenure was showered with praise, former President George W. Bush was mildly scorned, and President Obama was implicitly rebuked. ‘We all know what the problem is: it’s a Washington, D.C., that just doesn’t understand Kentucky,’ Ms. Grimes said. Her gibes at the capital’s ‘dysfunction’ were chiefly aimed at her likely opponent, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, but her nostalgia for the 1990s, when Ms. Grimes was in her teens, and her lament about the present was also aimed at linking herself to Mr. Clinton and distancing herself from Mr. Obama.” http://nyti.ms/OC1L5u
DINGELL HAT TRICK: DEBBIE’S IN – Anna Palmer and Scott Wong report for the hometown paper, with an assist from Seung Min Kim: “The Dingell dynasty dates back to the era of FDR and there’s very little that can stop it from rolling on. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) announced Monday he’s leaving the seat he took over from his father nearly six decades ago. And now his wife, Debbie Dingell, on Friday is planning to announce in the 12th District her candidacy for the open seat, according to a source close to Dingell. Debbie Dingell wasted no time putting together a campaign apparatus, holding a conference call Monday night with her husband’s former aides. She also may sever ties with the American Automotive Policy Council, where she has led the manufacturing arm of the Big Three-backed trade group, according to a source familiar with the situation.
– “Debbie Dingell has huge advantages over nearly any challenger: She will be able to tap into the powerful Dingell machine, her husband’s campaign coffers and a vast network of political operatives and donors. And she’s already got the support of powerful Wolverine State figures like retiring Sen. Carl Levin. …Political observers in Michigan and Washington say she’d be the favorite to win the seat that’s been continuously held by John D. Dingell Sr. and John D. Dingell Jr. since 1933, the year Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House.” http://politi.co/1jzIdZu
NANCY PELOSI AND HOUSE DEMOCRATS today will formally launch a discharge petition to raise the minimum wage to $ 10.10 per hour, Seung Min Kim reports: http://politi.co/NwJ9Th
– This morning at the Capitol, two top White House officials – Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and David Simas, deputy senior advisor for communications and strategy, will brief House Democratic members on the importance of raising the minimum wage to $ 10.10 an hour, a Democratic aide emails Huddle.
– But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed a vote on hiking the minimum wage until March or April, citing scheduling conflicts and GOP obstruction, CBS’s Rebecca Kaplan reports: http://cbsn.ws/1hogTNg
GOOD WEDNESDAY MORNING, FEB. 26, 2014, and welcome to The Huddle, your play-by-play preview of all the action on Capitol Hill. Send tips, suggestions, comments, complaints and corrections to swong@politico.com. If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @scottwongDC.
My new followers include @LisaMarieBoothe and @tellittoal.
TODAY IN CONGRESS – The Senate meets at 9:30 a.m. and at 11:30 a.m. will continue work on the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014. Votes are possible but are not currently scheduled
The House is in at 10 a.m. with first votes expected between 2 and 3 p.m. and last votes expected between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. on the Taxpayer Transparency Act and the Stop Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act. The House will also begin consideration of the All Economic Regulations Are Transparent Act.
AROUND THE HILL – House Democrats huddle at 9 a.m. in HVC-215, though no media availability is planned. Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders hold a post-conference media availability at 10 a.m. in HC-8. Sen. Bob Menendez and other Foreign Relations Committee members meet with UK Foreign Secretary William Hague at 10:30 a.m. in S-116. Sen. Barbara Boxer speaks on the health effects of tar sands and Keystone XL Pipeline at 10:30 a.m. in Dirksen 406. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Donna Edwards, and others participate in a discussion hosted by the National Partnership for Women & Families at 11 a.m. in SVC 212-10.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick speaks on executive branch authority at 11 a.m. at the House Triangle. Sens. Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, Debbie Stabenow, Barbara Boxer and Sheldon Whitehouse discuss benefits of health care reform at 11:30 a.m. in S-120. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp unveils his tax reform plan at 1:30 p.m. in HVC Studio A. Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and others speak on the minimum wage increase at 2 p.m. in HVC-215. On Thursday morning, Sen. Bob Corker speaks at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel.
CORRECTION: Yesterday’s “Around the Hill” section incorrectly identified the congressman hosting a reception for First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones. Rep. Morgan Griffith and the Congressional Friends of Wales Caucus actually hosted.
PLENTY OF ISSUES, NO BREAKTHROUGHS – Speaker Boehner and President Obama had their first one-on-one meeting in more than a year, the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn reports: “Disentangled from showdowns or looming crises, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner held a rare one-on-one Oval Office meeting Tuesday addressing potential areas of common ground that could lay a foundation for more ambitious goals like immigration and trade that remain long shots for action this year. … Yet the one-hour session unfolded in an atmosphere in which both sides could benefit from modest bipartisan accomplishments. In addition to trade and immigration, aides said the speaker and Obama also discussed manufacturing, flood insurance, Obama’s health care law, upcoming spending bills, California drought relief, wildfire suppression and a highway construction bill.” http://bit.ly/1o5yL06
GOP ON ARIZONA GAY BILL: MAKE IT GO AWAY – James Hohmann and Burgess Everett report for POLITICO: “As Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer weighs whether to sign a bill that would allow businesses to deny services to gay customers, top national Republicans just want the issue to go away. Proponents of the legislation — which Brewer has until Saturday to sign or veto and is reportedly leaning against — say the bill is designed to protect religious liberty. But many Washington Republicans see it as a political loser, giving the left another cudgel to attack conservatives as intolerant while motivating liberals and younger voters ahead of the midterm elections. It also threatens to widen the chasm between social conservatives and GOP operatives, who have become increasingly public in their support for gay marriage. … ‘I hope she moves quickly,’ [GOP Arizona Sen. Jeff] Flake said. ‘I just don’t see any reason to wait.’” http://politi.co/N29gS5
GOP’S ANSWER TO ‘WAR ON WOMEN’ CHARGE – The New York Times’ Ashley Parker in Tucson, Ariz.: “In Ms. [Martha] McSally, Republicans believe they have found what they hope is the human solution to their gender gap: A woman warrior to help them combat what Democrats have tried to paint as their ‘war on women.’ Ms. McSally, 47, who is favored in her party primary, is also part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s ‘Project GROW,’ a recruiting and mentoring program designed to promote women and encourage them to run for elected office. … In an interview, Ms. McSally agreed that Republicans ‘have a bad brand’ when it comes to women, but said her candidacy may help. ‘I think certainly having someone like me that comes in, I’ve been spending my whole life breaking stereotypes, and I think I would do it again,’ she said, though added, ‘Just like my time in the military, I’m not running because I’m a woman.’” http://nyti.ms/1c7xUMG
DEMOCRATS’ IMMIGRATION GAMBIT – Seung Min Kim writes for POLITICO: “Though aides say no decision has been made, House Democratic leaders are strategizing on when to deploy what’s known as a discharge petition, which would have to garner a majority of lawmakers’ signatures to force immigration legislation onto the House floor for a vote. Advocates of the gambit are aiming to increase the pressure on Republicans who have so far resisted moving on reform this year. But the pro-reform coalition is split over the timing of the discharge effort — with some urging lawmakers to take it up immediately and others advising them to hold off.” http://politi.co/NvyAjk
FIRST BLACK CONGRESSWOMAN GETS A STAMP – Eli George reports for WIVB in Buffalo, N.Y.: “The U.S. Postal Service is honoring the first African-American Congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm. The USPS is releasing a limited edition Black Heritage Forever Stamp featuring Chisholm, which was unveiled on Tuesday at Forest Lawn Cemetery. She and her husband are both interred there. Those who were close to the Congresswoman say she was a pioneer. Chisholm even made a run at the Democratic nomination for president in 1972.” http://bit.ly/1c7GcUY
TUESDAY’S TRIVIA WINNER – Shelby Boxenbaum was first to correctly answer that Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) is the most senior woman in the House. She ranks 15th overall.
TODAY’S TRIVIA – Roll Call’s David Hawkings points out that Debbie Dingell could make history by becoming the first person in Congress to succeed their living spouse. http://goo.gl/GFa82U Huddle reader Caitlin Gallagher asks: Who was the most recent member of Congress to be succeeded by his spouse? The first person to correctly answer gets a mention in the next day’s Huddle. Email me at swong@politico.com.
GET HUDDLE emailed to your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile device each morning. Just enter your email address where it says “Sign Up.” http://www.politico.com/huddle/
** After years of saying “wait until next year,” Congress finally has bipartisan legislation to repeal Medicare’s broken funding formula. This is the news seniors have been waiting for. But we’re not over the finish line yet. Congress must act by March 31st to avoid another costly temporary patch. Let’s pass H.R. 4015/S. 2000, scrap the broken SGR formula and fix Medicare once and for all! FixMedicareNow.org
Current Economic Collapse News Brief -- Episode 267
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Current Economic Collapse News -- News Brief -- Episode 245
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Current Economic Collapse News -- News Brief -- Episode 233
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Samantha Kinzig of Longmont, Colo., and her daughter Isabel, 5, took a close look at a damaged bridge in Longmont Friday. Heavy rains that fueled widespread flooding in numerous Colorado towns have eased, but forecasters predict more on Saturday and Sunday.
Marc Piscotty/Getty Images
Samantha Kinzig of Longmont, Colo., and her daughter Isabel, 5, took a close look at a damaged bridge in Longmont Friday. Heavy rains that fueled widespread flooding in numerous Colorado towns have eased, but forecasters predict more on Saturday and Sunday.
Marc Piscotty/Getty Images
The rains that brought severe flooding to parts of northern and central Colorado have eased, allowing people a chance to regroup before more rain comes, possibly as soon as Saturday afternoon. Thousands of residents have been displaced by the flooding, from Fort Collins in the north to Colorado Springs in the south, since waters hit dangerous levels Wednesday.
The floods have been blamed for four deaths, as the Two-Way reported Friday.
First responders are using the break to find people stranded by the waters — including one driver who told local KUSA News TV that he survived being trapped under water by finding a bubble of air in his car. The man says he remained there for about two hours before help arrived.
The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch from noon Saturday to late Sunday in northeast and north central Colorado.
From NPR member station KUNC, Nathan Heffel filed this report for our Newscast unit:
“Flooding continues over a wide section of northern Colorado from the Rocky Mountain foothills to towns on the western region of the eastern plains. Officials in Boulder County, one of the hardest hit, says scores of people in mountainous areas remain without water, electricity, or proper sewage facilities.
“Ben Pennymon with the Boulder Office of Emergency Management says residents need to understand this will be an ongoing event.
“Continue to be vigilant. The roads are, in a lot of places, are still impassable. So just — it’s not over yet,” Pennymon says. ‘We’re not in the clear, especially with the rain that is anticipated for this afternoon.’
“A Type 2 federal management team has been put in place to help oversee search and rescue and recovery operations in the County. Hundreds remain unaccounted for.”
Flash floods have complicated rescue efforts, after coursing rivers of water crumbled roads and filled them with debris. High water has forced the closure of parts of I-25 from the Wyoming border to Fort Collins, according to state transportation officials. That closure was still in effect early Saturday.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has released $ 5 million in emergency relief funds to aid with recovery efforts, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said Friday night. The governor declared a disaster emergency in 14 counties earlier in the day.
In a letter detailing how to help victims recover, Hickenlooper calls the event
Here’s what residents were saying Friday, as reported by Colorado Public Radio:
“A lot of people were up two nights in a row trying to fight the water,” said Sasha Fernandez.
“It’s just kind of been non-stop,” Boulder resident Nick Carter said. “Mostly non-stop adrenaline trying to battle the water as it comes and try to redirect it from around the house.
“There was cascading over some rocks in the front. There was just giant rapids like God’s wrath.”
“It literally took about an hour and half before I could see my ground,” said Mike Robins, who lives in a second story apartment above a self storage facility he manages on Arapahoe Avenue and 55th St.
“Whitewater rapids rushed down through our entire facility. It was like a water park. You could have gone inner tubing down into the back and ended up in the railroad tracks.”
“It’s just a really different feeling this morning,” Red Cross shelter worker Andra Coberly said Friday.
“I think everyone was in shock a little bit yesterday, and today the reality is really setting in.”
The National Weather Service is predicting drier and warmer weather to persist next week, beginning Monday.
The Obama administration is on Tuesday sending two top officials to Capitol Hill to give a top secret briefing to congressional staff.
Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria; Derek Chollet, the assistant secretary of defense for international affairs; and someone from the intelligence commmunity will brief chiefs of staff, legislative directors and other aides with top secret clearance.
The briefing will be about “U.S. policy for Syria and recent events,” according to an email sent to some aides Tuesday. The briefing will be at 5 p.m. in the U.S. Capitol Visitor’s Center.
In Washington, D.C., most politicians have a terrible track record anticipating how wars will unfold. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf War, Vietnam: as often as not, America’s wars of choice proceed in ways that no one in charge imagined, and the best intentions of hawks do nothing to make up for the lives and treasure squandered on missions that were never likely to succeed. But no hawk ever says at the time that he or she has no idea what will happen if they get their way.
President Obama has no clue how an American act of war against Syria would unfold, because it is unknowable. Intervention poses tremendous risks, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey explained. “We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action,” he told Congress. “Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.” In other words, we don’t know what will happen. But it could be awful. U.S. efforts to stop atrocities could even make the situation worse.
“Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next,” he added. “Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.” What would the U.S. do if the regime collapses and Islamist extremists take its place? Is it fair to ask American soldiers to risk their lives for that possible outcome?
The U.S. government could spend millions helping Syrian refugees. It could help pay for tsunami warning systems across the Indian ocean, or spend more funding the development of a malaria vaccine, or stop dumping agricultural commodities on poor countries in a way that stunts their economic development. There is no shortage of humanitarian suffering for us to address, if that’s how we want to spend our money, and I am fine with spending more of it helping people.
Injecting bombs and cruise missiles into a civil war probably isn’t the most cost effective way to help people. It is certainly the sort of humanitarian assistance most likely to make us bitter enemies, which inevitably happens when you pick a side and start killing some of the people on it.
Intervention in Syria could have catastrophic consequences for America and for the region. Non-intervention would pose no threat to us, and wouldn’t preclude us from alleviating suffering elsewhere on a huge scale (and with no risk of accidentally killing innocent civilians in the process). Hawks are most interested in humanitarian causes that can be carried out by force.
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| NASA/WikiMedia Commons |
Mohammad Mossadegh in front of the Straight of Hormuz, as seen from the international space station. |
Sixty years ago this week, on Aug. 19, 1953, the United States, in collaboration with Britain, successfully staged a coup in Iran to overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh that a newly declassified CIA document reveals was designed to preserve the control of Western companies over Iran’s rich oil fields.
The U.S. government at the time of the coup easily had manipulated Western media into denigrating Mossadegh as intemperate, unstable and an otherwise unreliable ally in the Cold War, but the real motivation for hijacking Iran’s history was Mossadegh’s move to nationalize Western-controlled oil assets in Iran. According to the document, part of an internal CIA report:
“The target of this policy of desperation, Mohammad Mosadeq, [sic] was neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility as he was so often pictured in the foreign press; however, he had become so committed to the ideals of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds. In refusing to bargain—except on his own uncompromising terms—with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government. These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.”
There you have it, the smoking gun declaration of the true intent to preserve high profits and cheap oil that cuts through all of the official propaganda justifying not only this sorry attempt to prevent Iranian nationalists from gaining control over their prized resources but subsequent blood-for-oil adventures in Iraq and Kuwait. The assumption is that “the best and most altruistic of worlds” is one that accommodates the demands of rapacious capitalism as represented by Western oil companies.
Tragically, the coup that overthrew Mossadegh also crushed Iran’s brief experiment in democracy and ushered in six decades of brutal dictatorship followed by religious oppression and regional instability. If Iran is a problem, as the United States persistently and loudly insists, it is a problem of our making. Mossadegh, who earned a doctorate in law from Neuchatel University in Switzerland, was not an enemy of the American people; he was an Iranian nationalist who as the CIA’s own internal report concedes was preoccupied with the well-being of his people as opposed to the profitability of Western oil interests.
The CIA report derides the Western media’s acceptance at the time of the coup of the demonization of all actors on the world stage that fail to follow the approved script provided by the U.S. government. As the report notes, the “complete secrecy about the operation,” breached only by leaked information, made it “relatively easy for journalists to reconstruct the coup in varied but generally inaccurate accounts.”
Without conceding responsibility for misleading the media, the report says “The point that the majority of these accounts miss is a key one: the military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [sic] and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government. It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPAJAX (the operation’s codename) was entered into as a last resort.”
Parts of the formerly top secret report, an internal CIA study from the 1970s titled “The Battle for Iran,” which detailed the CIA-directed plot, have been revealed previously. But the section disclosed Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive is, as the archive’s research director Malcolm Byrne writes in Foreign Policy magazine, the first time the CIA admits to “using propaganda to undermine Mossadegh politically, inducing the shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations.”
All of these actions were described in great detail by veteran CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt in a lengthy interview with me for the Los Angeles Times in 1979. Roosevelt is confirmed in the newly released documents as having the leading role in planning and executing the coup. In the interview, Roosevelt revealed his part for the first time, but instead of celebrating the success of the venture, he cautioned that it had set a terrible example.
As I summarized the conversation in the story that appeared on March 29, 1979: “Roosevelt said that the success of the operation in Iran—called Project AJAX by the CIA—so inspired then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Dulles wanted to duplicate it in the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia and Egypt, where he wanted to overthrow President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Roosevelt said that he resisted these efforts and finally resigned from the CIA because of them.”
Roosevelt, as he recounted in his memoir published five months after our interview, came away from the coup he engineered with serious concerns about the efficacy of such ventures. But unfortunately it became the model in Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and other countries, where the full official record is apparently judged still too embarrassing for our government to declassify.
 | Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s book, |
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Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
Those who don’t make sperm are more apt to develop malignancy
By Nathan Seppa
Web edition: June 21, 2013
Men who don’t produce sperm face nearly three times the risk of cancer compared with an average male population, researchers report June 20 in Fertility and Sterility.
About 4 million men in the United States are infertile, with a host of causes. Of them, about 600,000 men don’t deliver sperm from the testes to the semen at all.
Michael Eisenberg of Stanford University and his colleagues studied the medical records of Texas men who had visited a male health clinic between 1989 and 2009. The men averaged 36 years old when they were examined. Of 2,238 men found to be infertile, about one-fifth didn’t have any sperm in their semen.
Over an average follow-up time of 6.7 years, 10 of the 451 men who didn’t make sperm developed some kind of cancer, making them 2.9 times as likely as similar-aged men in the general Texas population to be diagnosed with cancer. The reason is unclear, the authors say. Men who were infertile for other reasons didn’t face an increased risk of cancer.
Male chickens lose phalluses before hatching
Web edition: June 6, 2013
A false-color micrograph shows the rudimentary penis (pink) of a chick embryo before it begins to shrink.
Credit: A.M. Herrera and M.J. Cohn, University of Florida
Some ducks have penises longer than their bodies, while chickens make do with a tiny bump. The vast size difference between the two types of fowl is due to a wave of cell death during chicken development, researchers report June 6 in Current Biology.
Although the ancestors of birds had penises, 97 percent of bird species have phalluses so small that they can’t insert into the female genitalia. Martin Cohn of the University of Florida and his colleagues found that in chick embryos, a gene turns on in the tip of the developing phallus, causing the cells to die and the tissue to wither away. In duck embryos, the gene does not turn on and the penis keeps on growing.
The researchers were able to kick-start some growth of the embryonic chick penis by blocking the action of the gene. That result suggests that chickens have not entirely lost the genetic pathways that make their waterfowl relatives better endowed.
Suggested Reading
S. Milius. For ducks, penis length depends on the other guys. Science News. Vol.178, August 28, 2010, p. 11. Available online: [Go to]
News in Brief: Japan’s 2011 earthquake upped Tokyo’s risk
Chance more than doubled that capital city will soon experience big temblor
Web edition: May 10, 2013
Chance more than doubled that capital city will soon experience big temblor
By Erin Wayman
Web edition: May 10, 2013
The magnitude 9 earthquake that shook Japan in 2011 more than doubled the risk that a big quake will rattle Tokyo in the next five years, geologists report May 2 in Geophysical Research Letters.
The 2011 quake hit 373 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. Afterwards, seismic activity around Japan’s capital spiked, and small earthquakes are now three times as frequent as they were before the 2011 event. The ground movement comes from a piece of Earth’s crust that’s wedged between the Eurasian plate, on which Tokyo sits, and the Pacific plate, which slides into the mantle beneath the Eurasian plate.
Shinji Toda of Tohoku University in Japan and Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., suggest that the 2011 quake transferred stress to the wedged fragment, triggering the increase in seismic activity. The pair calculates that the added stress raised the probability of a magnitude 7 or larger earthquake striking Tokyo in the next five years, from 6.6 percent to 17.2 percent.
Citations
S. Toda and R.S. Stein. The 2011 M=9 Tohoku oki earthquake more than doubled the probability of large shocks beneath Tokyo. Geophysical Research Letters. Published online May 2, 2013. doi: 10.1002/grl.50524. [Go to]
Suggested Reading
E. Wayman. Quakes may bring nearby rocks closer to rupture. Science News. Vol. 183, February 9, 2013, p. 13. [Go to]
D. Powell. Japan quake location a surprise. Science News. Vol. 179, April 9, 2011 p. 5. [Go to]
A. Witze. Great quake one of the biggest ever in Japan. Science News Online, March 11, 2011. [Go to]
Information about the 2011 earthquake from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program [Go to]
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