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POPSBob Novak dies of cancer -- and his right-wing pals rush to lie about his role in the Plame case WTF? It's long been an established fact that Novak's reportage was wrong, and in fact was just a propaganda-driven smear on behalf of the Bush administration, since Plame in fact had nothing to do with Joe Wilson getting the Niger assignment. (George Tenet himself explained: "Mid-level officials in CPD decided on their own initiative to he'd helped them on a project once before, and he'd be easy to contact because his wife worked in CPD.") And since when has it "turned out" that "Bush was right" about the Niger yellowcake? Not only was the report on which he based the claim he made in the State of the Union built from set of hoax documents, but the White House ignored warnings that this was likely the case. Moreover, there has been no subsequent evidence to suggest that Saddam indeed sought yellowcake from Niger. Ah, but such things as facts and truthfulness m
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POPSBrazil Seeks More Control of Oil Beneath Its Seas This month, Brazil’s government said it wanted the national oil company, Petrobras, to control all future development of the deep-sea fields discovered in 2007, which international geologists estimate could hold tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil. The change would make Petrobras the operator for the 62 percent of the new area that has yet to be bid out, consigning foreign companies to the role of financial investors. That would limit their ability to help set the pace for the oil fields’ development, while giving Petrobras significantly more power to generate jobs and award lucrative contracts.
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POPSFrom a Distant Comet, a Clue to Life Within a few months, the Goddard scientists found glycine embedded in aluminum foil of the collecting apparatus. They had spent the time since then confirming that the glycine indeed came from the comet and not from contamination. “It’s not necessarily particularly surprising,” Dr. Elsila said of her extraterrestrial glycine in a phone conversation Tuesday. “I would have been surprised if it wasn’t there.” Dr. Elsila and her colleagues were able to show that the glycine from the comet had heavier quantities of the isotope carbon 13 than what occurs on Earth. They also detected a second amino acid, beta-alanine, but the quantities were too minuscule to confirm. The findings were presented Sunday at a Washington meeting of the American Chemical Society and will be published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.