“Misha was important. Tamerlan was searching for something. He was searching for something out there,” – Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, the ex-husband of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s sister, Ailina.
No one has yet figured out who Misha is. The best Khozhugov gave the AP is “a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard.” Also: an Armenian native and a convert to Islam. He seems to have been the key factor in Tamerlan’s radicalization.
If Rhode Island passes marriage equality then all the states in New England will have gay marriage.
— Brandon Powell (@Arnian) April 23, 2013
Promising news out of Rhode Island:
All five Republicans in the 38-member Rhode Island Senate – including Minority Leader Dennis Algiere of Westerly – plan to support the same-sex marriage bill backed by supporters of the issue, RIPR has learned. … [It] reportedly marks the first unanimous backing from a partisan legislative caucus in the US for same-sex marriage.
The state Senate’s judiciary committee this afternoon voted to allow the bill to reach the floor tomorrow. A reader adds:
If the Senate passes the bill, Rhode Island will be the next state to legalize marriage for all. The Senate President is opposed to the bill but has indicated that she will still allow it to come to the floor, and it is expected to pass overwhelmingly. Still, the big news is that it has the support of all GOP Senators. As you always say, know hope.
Also, from Nevada:
Monday night, the Nevada Senate voted 12-9 to repeal the state’s constitutional amendment banning the recognition of same-sex couples’ marriages. That language would be replaced to recognize all marriages between two people, “regardless of gender.” As BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner points out, the Senate is the first legislative chamber in the country to affirm the overturn of a marriage amendment.
The debate lasted over an hour, during which one Senator came out for the first time. Sen. Kelvin Atkinson (D) announced, “I’m black. I’m gay… I know this is the first time many of you have heard me say that I am a black, gay male.”
Update from a reader on late-breaking news out of Delaware:
You left out the Delaware House vote: 23 – 18 in favor! On to the Senate!
People celebrate in front of the Paris City Hall on April 23, 2013, hours after the French National Assembly adopted a bill legalizing same-sex marriages and adoptions for gay couples, defying months of opposition protests. In its second and final reading, a majority of lawmakers approved the bill by a vote of 331 to 225. By Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images.
Nate Cohn expects it will become a wedge issue beneficial to Democrats:
It’s easy to envision the next Democratic presidential candidate campaigning on gun control—and winning. Thirteen years ago, Democrats needed rural Ohio, West Virginia, or Missouri to win the presidency. Today, Democratic presidential candidates are less reliant on rural, conservative gun owners than at any time in the history of the party. Democrats win with big margins in cities and suburbs, where support for gun control is an asset, not a hindrance. This is even true in Ohio, where Obama won twice despite losing additional ground in the traditionally Democratic, gun-toting, southeastern part of the state. Now Republicans find themselves in the place that haunted Democrats in the early part of the last decade: To win, Republicans need to reclaim the socially moderate suburbs around Denver, Washington, and Philadelphia, where gun control is a real asset to Democratic candidates.
In the wake of last week’s tragedy, the regulatory framework that governs fertilizer plants is getting increased attention. Terrence Henry describes the outcome of a 2006 investigation of the West facility by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ):
The Commission doesn’t generally pay a visit to facilities like the one in West unless someone complains. “Historically, fertilizer plants have not been given the level of attention of scrutiny that other industrial or petrochemical facilities have received,” Craft says. The plant was also regulated by other state and federal agencies, a gallimaufry of acronyms like PHMSA, OSHA, DSHS, and others, but there appears to have been little communication and coordination among them. …
In its report to the EPA in 2011, West Fertilizer said its worst-case scenario was a release of one of its storage tanks of anhydrous ammonia “as a gas over 10 minutes.” It said nothing of fire risk. It also said nothing of ammonium nitrate at the site. But according to records from the Texas Department of State Health Services obtained by StateImpact Texas, the plant had as much as 270 tons of ammonium nitrate at the site in 2012. To put that in perspective, the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 and injured hundreds, used 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate mixed with other chemicals and diesel fuel, or about 2.4 tons.
Bill Buzenberg places some of the blame on the Chemical Safety Board:
Each year there are some 200 serious industrial accidents like the fertilizer plant explosion that are deemed to be of “high consequence.” Yet the Chemical Safety Board — modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board — is able to investigate only a handful, and then often takes years more to issue a report.
Tim Murphy worries that a House bill proposed in February will take away one potential avenue for regulation:
[The fertilizer industry] introduced a bill to formally prohibit the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate security and safety at chemical production and storage sites, by mandating that any such inspections be carried out by the Department of Homeland Security instead. Their bill also left it up to manufacturers to determine whether or not to make improvements to the safety of their workplace. … “Dividing safety and security has been a game that the chemical industry has tried to play for many years,” [chemical safety consultant Paul] Orum says. “That’s the point of the Pompeo bill—divide safety from security. But they’re not separable.”
(Photo: Search-and-rescue workers comb through what remains of a 50-unit apartment building the day after an explosion at the West Fertilizer Company destroyed the building on April 18, 2013 in West, Texas. According to West Mayor Tommy Muska, around 14 people, including 10 first responders, were killed and more than 150 people were injured when the fertilizer company caught fire and exploded, leaving damaged buildings for blocks in every direction. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Decatur, Indiana, 6.48 am
Ramesh Ponnuru believes that the immigration bill contains a “terrible flaw”:
The guest-worker program is where they go wrong. For the Republican politicians who have in the past been its main supporters, this provision is like a dessert with no calories: Businesses get the benefit of the temporary workers’ labor and they get to make some money, but the rest of us don’t have to make room for immigrants in our society, and Republicans don’t have to worry how they will vote.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with the idea. One of the worst things about illegal immigration is that it creates a class of people who contribute their labor to this country but aren’t full participants in it and lack the rights and responsibilities of everyone else. A guest-worker program doesn’t solve this problem. It formalizes it.
Grad students and professors at Cornell University are finding order in the chaos of rock concerts:
In a run-of-the-mill mosh pit, [researcher Matthew] Bierbaum said, dancers collide with each other randomly and at a distribution of speeds that resembles particles in a two-dimensional gas. “How these supposedly intelligent beings behave like an ideal gas, I don’t know,” the physicist quipped. Some moshers don’t move completely randomly, however. In circle pits, a subset of mosh pits, dancers collide in a vortexlike pattern. So Bierbaum and the other Cornell physicists described this behavior with a computer simulation based on flocking, a phenomenon that results when particles follow their neighbors…. The Cornell team hopes to use [their model] to study how crowds move in emergency situations such as riots, he said.
A few massive, NSFW circle pits are seen above.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), aimed at investigating cyber-threats, just passed in the House. Digital-rights activist Mark Jaycox outlines the precise effects of the bill in its current form:
Companies have new rights to monitor user actions and share data – including potentially sensitive user data – with the government without a warrant. Cispa overrides existing privacy law, and grants broad immunities to participating companies.
Andrea Peterson explains the rationale of the bill’s proponents:
[U]nderneath the problems of scope and privacy, the goal of CISPA is to create a functional structure for coordinating information about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats so intelligence can be shared. This would allow the government to share information about the tactics of adversaries with victims, or send up a warning flare about an emerging threat. Consider the report released earlier this year by cybersecurity firm Mandiant about a group of hackers engaging in corporate espionage likely affiliated with the Chinese military: It came along with a cache of threat intelligence indicators that could help identify other attacks by the group in the future, such as domain names, IP addresses, encryption certificates, detailed descriptions of over 40 families of malware they use.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is marshalling opposition:
The Fourth Amendment limits the government’s ability to use CISPA powers, but there would still be constitutionally dangerous implications: the government would also be granted broad legal immunity for any “decisions based on” cyber threat information, and CISPA’s “notwithstanding” clause could override government privacy laws like the Privacy Act (which protects personal information in government records) and the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act (which limits the use of automated matching of government records).
As it stands, CISPA is dangerously vague, and should not allow for any expansion of government powers through a series of poorly worded definitions. If the drafters intend to give new powers to the government’s already extensive capacity to examine your private information, they should propose clear and specific language so we can have a real debate.
Paul Tassi explains why the Internet hasn’t protested the CISPA the same way it did SOPA:
Pitched as a cybersecurity bill and not an anti-piracy measure, most will think it doesn’t affect them the way SOPA could have. Additionally, there’s probably some level of fatigue from the first protest, as there are probably always going to be bills like these floating around, and major websites can’t really black themselves out multiple times a year in protest.
Dana Liebelson adds that big corporations won’t be coming to the rescue either:
The Obama administration last week declared that it “remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities.” But privacy concerns may not be enough to stop the bill. CISPA supporters spent 140 times more money on lobbying for the bill [than] its opponents, according to the Sunlight Foundation. Big-name companies that openly support CISPA include AT&T, Intel, IBM, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, and other tech giants are quietly on board, including Google and Facebook[.]
#BREAKING: Boston Police URGE people on Twitter to STOP REPORTING SCANNER TRAFFIC. #watertown
— FOX 4 News (@fox4kc) April 20, 2013
On Friday, millions followed the progress of the Boston manhunt via the BPD scanner. Ambers, a longtime police-scanner junkie, maintains that journalists should never use information from a scanner without a second source and believes that continued misuse, like that seen last week in Boston, will lead to greater encryption of the feeds:
Because authorities have the power to force police agencies to encrypt their channels, and because few will take the time to think about the equities the public and the media have in preserving access to them, I worry that this information commons, as it were, will be regulated too quickly because of the irresponsible actions of a few.
The Dish 