"Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama announced Monday that he has signed an executive order allowing new sanctions against companies that enable Syria and Iran to use technology such as cell phone monitoring to carry out human rights abuses.
"The order is part of a broader strategy intended to strengthen the administration's ability to prevent atrocities, including creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board, Obama said in somber remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.
" "These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them," Obama said of the measure, which targets the Syrian and Iranian governments, as well as companies that provide them with high-tech equipment to use against their own people."
"A new study says that for the first time since the Great Depression, there may be fewer Mexican immigrants coming into the United States than there are moving from the United States back to Mexico. According to the Pew Research Center, the net migration between the U.S. and Mexico over the last five years was essentially zero, and the downward trend suggests that flow of both legal and illegal immigrants may have actually reversed back toward Mexico.
"There are many possible reasons to explain the decline, but the most obvious one would seem to be the struggling U.S. economy, which has cost millions of available jobs, particularly in construction and in the South, where recent immigrants generally thrive. There have also been big increases in enforcement, deportations, and border security, although the report also says that arrests of illegal immigrants trying to cross the border has actually plummeted by nearly 75%. Whether that's because fewer people want to come here or they just don't think it's worth the risk is hard to pin down, but the number of folks willing to take the chance is definitely declining.
"Given the continued hysteria over illegal immigrants and how demographic shifts might change the country in the future, many Americans might be shocked to learn that the shift is actually heading in the other direction. There have been several state laws just within the last couple of years that were passed on the premise that illegal immigration was out of control, even as the population of Mexican immigrants is apparently lower than it has been in decades. (Some might argue that the news laws are responsible for that, but the trend was clearly in place even before they were passed.) The Supreme Court will actually hear arguments this week about the harsh Arizona law that has been at the center of the debate for the last couple years, but this new evidence may put the crackdown in a new light, since the problem it was intended to resolve may not actually exist." from Dashiell Bennett @ The Atlantic Wire
"Social Security and Medicare, the government-run health plan for senior citizens, are together the largest U.S. public benefit programs and account for one-third of the federal budget. The programs' costs are projected to grow rapidly because of the aging U.S. population and, in Medicare's case, the rising cost of health care....
"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the Obama administration would seek to work with Congress to come up with a long-term solution to repair the solvency of the disability trust fund but didn't offer specifics. "The best thing to do is a long-term solution," he said....
"Social Security's worsening outlook comes from a combination of higher cost-of-living adjustments pushing benefits up and lagging wage growth holding down tax revenue.
"In recent years, the Social Security disability rolls have soared, as many Americans with mental and physical health problems sought to enter the program and others with less severe issues applied because of a scarcity of work." from Damian Paletta @ The WSJ
Call for Growth to Counter German Push for Austerity
" “The formula is not working, and everyone is now talking about whether austerity is the only solution,” said Jordi Vaquer i Fanés, a political scientist and director of the Barcelona Center for International Affairs in Spain....
"From trading floors to polling stations to the streets of cities across Europe, the message appears increasingly to be that countries cannot cut their way to fiscal health. They need growth, too. In recent months, powerful voices have joined the chorus, including those of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, and Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has called repeatedly for Europe to defer budget cutting in favor of some form of stimulus spending.
Pressured by the presidential campaign, even Mr. Sarkozy, once Ms. Merkel’s most prominent ally, has begun to talk of the need for growth." from Nicholas Kulish @ NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/call-for-growth-puts-pressure-on-german-led-austerity.html
"The gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena is also on hand — albeit it coincidentally — to mark the passage of government near-exclusivity in space exploration. A large exhibition chronicles "The History of Space Photography" through May 6....
"Guest curator Jay Belloli worked with several consultants from the nearby Jet Propulsion Lab. (JPL, founded at Caltech and affiliated with NASA, has 23 spacecraft and 10 instruments conducting active missions, according to its website.) Belloli and his team selected 150 noteworthy images, most from the last 50 years of space exploration, and added three video projections that feature various celestial animations....
"The show includes classics, such as Edward Hubble's 1923 telescopic photograph verifying the existence of galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Astronaut John Glenn's 1962 color photograph taken from the window of his orbital spacecraft is a kind of drive-by tourist snapshot on steroids (it shows the Georgia coastline). "The History of Space Photography" offers total visual fictions too, since images made from cameras performing digital scans gathered over time (sometimes many minutes) are composites; color is also always malleable and print size is arbitrary...." from Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
Bright purple crab discovered in Philippines
Four new species of crab that sport some wild colors have been discovered near the Philippine island of Palawan.
From Our Amazing Planet: link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47158113/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.T5bQh6tYvdU
