Could Outgoing Republicans Hold Keys to 'Cliff' Deal?

Nov 30, 2012 1:45pm

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

The outlook for reaching some sort of bipartisan agreement on the so-called “fiscal cliff” before the Dec. 31 deadline is looking increasingly grim. Shortly after noon today, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, appeared before the cameras to say the talks had reached a “stalemate.”

But there may be a glimmer of hope. There are currently 33 outgoing members of Congress — they’re either retiring or were defeated last month — who have signed the Grover Norquist pledge stating that they will not raise taxes. Those members, particularly the ones who have traditionally been somewhat moderate, could hold the key to that stance softening.

“You have 33 people who do not have to worry about the future political consequences of their vote,” said ABC political director Amy Walter. “These are people who theoretically can vote based purely on the issue rather than on how it will impact their political future.”

One outgoing member has publicly indicated a willingness to join with Obama and the Democrats on a partial deal.

“I have to say that if you’re going to sign me up with a camp, I like what Tom Cole has to say,” California Republican Rep. Mary Bono Mack said on CNN on Thursday. Cole is the Republican who suggested that his party vote to extend the Bush tax-rates for everyone but the highest income earners and leave the rest of the debate for later. Mack’s husband, Connie, however, also an outgoing Republican member of Congress, said he disagreed with his wife.

But in general, among the outgoing Republican representatives with whom ABC News has made contact, the majority have been vague as to whether or not they still feel bound by the pledge, and whether they would be willing to raise tax rates.

“[Congressman Jerry Lewis] has always been willing to listen to any proposals, but there isn’t,” a spokesman for Rep. Lewis, Calif., told ABC News. “He’s said the pledge was easy because it goes along with his philosophy that increasing tax doesn’t solve any problems. However, he’s always been willing to listen to proposals.”

“Congressman Burton has said that he does not vote for tax increases,” a spokesman for Dan Burton, Ind., said to ABC.

“With Representative Herger retiring, we are leaving this debate to returning members and members-elect,” an aide for Wally Herger, Calif., told ABC News.

The majority of Congress members will likely wait until a deal is on the table to show their hand either way. However, it stands to reason that if any members of Congress are going to give in and agree to raise taxes, these would be the likely candidates.

An agreement will require both sides to make some concessions: Republicans will need to agree to some tax increases, Democrats will need to agree to some spending cuts. With Republicans and Democrats appearing to be digging further into their own, very separate territories, the big question is, which side will soften first?

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Giant tortoises bounce back in the Galapagos

LONESOME GEORGE'S death in the Galapagos Islands may have signalled the end of the Pinta Island tortoises, but a related subspecies on a neighbouring island has been saved from extinction. The huge success of the rescue mission suggests that similarly endangered species may have a chance, too.

The Galapagos boast the world's largest and most iconic tortoises. Throughout history, pirates and whalers have fed on the animals, and introduced pest species like goats to the islands, destroying the tortoises' habitat. "Goats are very problematic," says Michel Milinkovitch at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. "They eat everything." As a result, the giant-tortoise population of Española Island dwindled to near extinction four decades ago. In a bid to rescue it, conservationists in 1971 began collecting all the tortoises they could find on Española - just 14 - and took them to nearby Santa Cruz island to breed in captivity. They were joined by a 15th tortoise from San Diego Zoo in California.

In total, this breeding colony comprised 12 females and 3 males. Meanwhile, conservationists cleared Española of goats. Baby tortoises were hand-reared until they were about 5 years old before being taken to Española in batches. The programme was widely regarded as a success story. Since its inception, over 1700 tortoises have been reintroduced.

A true measure of success, though, is how well the animals are coping on the island - whether they are able to survive and breed when left to their own devices. All the new tortoises were born from the same 15 animals, so genetic diversity is thought to be low. That can cause a problem, as inbred animals die younger, have poor fertility, and are often more vulnerable to environmental changes. "There's always a big risk that the animals don't survive or don't breed," says Milinkovitch.

To investigate how well the tortoises were doing, Milinkovitch and his colleagues carried out a genetic analysis of all tortoises on Española, searching for tortoises born on the island.

Eighteen years ago, none of the tortoises on Española had been born there. From blood samples collected in 2007, the researchers have now found that about a quarter of the tortoises are native, the offspring of reintroduced animals (Evolutionary Applications, doi.org/jts).

"We're really excited," says Milinkovitch. "The habitat is restored, the species is thriving and the animals are breeding happily. We can now safely say that the species is saved."

"It certainly looks like it," agrees Richard Griffiths at the University of Kent, UK, though researchers will have to check back in a couple of generations' time to be sure.

Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Programme, is more cautious: "I'm not sure you can ever say a species is completely safe." He gives the example of white and black rhinos in Africa, which were recently rescued from the brink of extinction. But, since the start of this year, around 500 are thought to have been poached. "It's fragile," he says. But Vié adds that the early success of the tortoise programme is encouraging. "We need these kinds of successes. What is really important here is that you can do something about this extinction crisis. There is always hope."

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Putin's "health issue" sees Japan PM cancel visit

TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has cancelled a planned visit to Russia next month due to a "health issue" affecting President Vladimir Putin, media reports and a government source said on Friday.

The mayor of a northern Japanese city said Noda had explained the reasons for the cancellation to him during a meeting in Tokyo Friday, Jiji Press and Kyodo news agencies reported.

Kyodo said the mayor quoted Noda as saying "President Putin's health condition is bad".

Noda, who is facing a December election widely expected to see him lose his job, met with Nemuro City mayor Shunsuke Hasegawa to talk about the Russian-controlled Kuril islands, the source of a long-standing territorial dispute between Moscow and Tokyo.

A Japanese government source told AFP that Russian officials had informed their Japanese counterparts the leaders' planned meeting would have to be cancelled due to Putin's unspecified health problem.

A spokesman for Noda on Friday declined to confirm the prime minister's reported remarks to the mayor or that health reasons were behind the cancelled trip, which had been scheduled in September.

According to Russian media reports, Putin has recently postponed a number of foreign trips and largely stayed at his suburban Moscow government retreat after aggravating a sports injury.

The Kremlin had insisted there had been no change to his schedule.

Russia said Wednesday Putin would visit Turkey next week after postponing the trip last month.

- AFP/ir

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Acura seeks flagship status for new RLX model

Acura's new RLX model features an impressive set of technologies, and a few quirks.

(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)

LOS ANGELES - Once upon a time, Acura pushed the cutting edge of cabin technology, pioneering such features such as navigation and active noise cancellation. But times changed and Acura didn't, letting other automakers steal the high-tech mantle. Now Acura fights back with the RLX, a new high-end sedan with some odd quirks.

By and large, premium and luxury automakers use rear-wheel-drive for their flagship sedans, an architecture maintained more out of tradition than real necessity. Acura has alway bucked this trend, and continues to do so with the RLX. This model will launch as a front-wheel-drive
car sporting a 3.5-liter direct injection engine.

But current standards, that specification is nothing to write home about, as even economy car makers go to direct injection. However, later next year Acura promises a much higher tech drivetrain, this one incorporating a hybrid system and all-wheel-drive. The 3.5-liter V-6 will remain, and get added power from an electric drive system at the rear wheels. As with other hybrids, the battery pack will recapture energy that would have been lost from braking.

The hybrid version should not only add significant power, but Acura estimates it will get 6 mpg better for average fuel economy than the front-wheel-drive V-6 version.

Acura boasts a few intriguing technologies for the new sedan. For one, it will come with LED headlights standard, wide arrays that bookend the Acura shield grille. LED headlights use much less power than current bi-xenon lamps, and should last much longer, as well. In addition, LED headlights allow for a more tightly defined throw pattern.

The front-wheel-drive model will also get an innovative handling technology, four wheel steering. Acura calls this system Precision All-Wheel Steer. It is designed to work in concert with traction control and stability technologies to allow for fast, stable cornering. The all-wheel-drive hybrid version will not feature this technology, but should offer torque vectoring at the rear wheels.

The exterior of the RLX looks unremarkable, a long, smooth-sided sedan with little ornamentation. Its most distinguishing features are its grille and headlights. However, what could be seen as lack of flair becomes understatement when you sit in the cabin, which exudes a sense of luxury through its materials and design.

Most telling for the luxury experience is an optional 14 speaker Krell audio system, a step up from the standard 10 speaker ELS system. During an in-car demo on the show floor, the system delivered an incredibly dynamic audio experience. Playing tracks with traditional instruments on an Acura demo CD, the entire range of a single note from a bass guitar came through clearly, while the vocal reproduction made it sound like the singers were in the car. For those who appreciate music, this system will offer plenty of satisfaction.

Krell is not a generally familiar name, playing in the high-end audio world. The company spent four years during the development of the RLX, coming up with speaker technologies and placement, and refining the system's output. Beyond its sound quality, the system announces its presence with nice, metal grilles on the door speakers.

The dashboard of the RLX on display in Los Angeles had two LCDs in the center stack, which was reminiscent of the 2013 Accord model recently launched by Honda. In the Accord, the screen arrangement is an inelegant solution to building cars with and without a navigation option. For the RLX, Acura should have either made navigation standard, and consolidated infotainment on one screen. Alternatively, the company could have just made a single screen host only phone and audio information when the navigation option was not present. The two screen system is a little strange.

The RLX will also offer a host of driver assistance features, from blind spot monitoring to adaptive cruise control, helping it compete with other luxury flagships.

The front-wheel-drive RLX model should go on sale in the first half of 2013, with the hybrid model following in the second half.

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Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNL

Looking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.

The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand challenges"—igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory, according to the NIF website. Nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

This July, California-based NIF made history by combining 192 laser beams into a record-breaking laser shot that packed over 500 trillion watts of peak power-a thousand times more power than the entire United States uses at any given instant.

"This was a quantum leap for laser technology around the world," NIF director Ed Moses said in September. But some critics of the $5 billion project wonder why the laser has yet to ignite a fusion chain reaction after three-and-a-half years in operation. Supporters counter that such groundbreaking science simply can't be rushed.

(Related: "Fusion Power a Step Closer After Giant Laser Blast.")

—Brian Handwerk

Published November 29, 2012

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Man Arrested in Fla. Girl's 1993 Disappearance

Police have arrested a 42-year-old man and charged him with murder in the case of a Florida girl who vanished almost 20 years ago.

Andrea Gail Parsons, 10, of Port Salerno, Fla., was last seen on July 11, 1993, shortly after 6 p.m. She had just purchased candy and soda at a grocery store when she waved to a local couple as they drove by on an area street and honked, police said.

Today, Martin County Sheriff's Department officials arrested Chester Duane Price, 42, who recently lived in Haleyville, Ala., and charged him with first-degree murder and kidnapping of a child under the age of 13, after he was indicted by a grand jury.

Price was acquainted with Andrea at the time of her disappearance, and also knew another man police once eyed as a potential suspect, officials told ABC News affiliate WPBF in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Handout/Martin County Sheriff's Office

"The investigation has concluded that Price abducted and killed Andrea Gail Parsons," read a sheriff's department news release. "Tragically, at this time, her body has not been recovered."

The sheriff's department declined to specify what evidence led to Price's arrest for the crime after 19 years or to provide details to ABCNews.com beyond the prepared news release.

Reached by phone, a sheriff's department spokeswoman said she did not know whether Price was yet represented by a lawyer.

Price was being held at the Martin County Jail without bond and was scheduled to make his first court appearance via video link at 10:30 a.m. Friday.

In its news release, the sheriff's department cited Price's "extensive criminal history with arrests dating back to 1991" that included arrests for cocaine possession, assault, sale of controlled substance, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and violation of domestic violence injunction.

"The resolve to find Andrea and get answers surrounding the circumstances of her disappearance has never wavered as detectives and others assigned have dedicated their careers to piecing this puzzle together," Martin County Sheriff Robert L. Crowder said in a prepared statement. "In 2011, I assigned a team of detectives, several 'fresh sets of eyes,' to begin another review of the high-volume of evidence that had been previously collected in this case."

A flyer dating from the time of Andrea's disappearance, and redistributed by the sheriff's office after the arrest, described her as 4-foot-11 with hazel eyes and brown hair. She was last seen wearing blue jean shorts, a dark shirt and clear plastic sandals, according to the flyer.

The sheriff's department became involved in the case after Andrea's mother, Linda Parsons, returned home from work around 10 p.m. on July 11, 1993, to find her daughter missing and called police, according to the initial sheriff's report.

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Countering the new horsemen of the apocalypse

Nuclear war, climate change, lab-created viruses and out-of-control machines need to be understood, but there are risks to lumping threats together

CALL them the modern horsemen of the apocalypse: nuclear war, climate change, doomsday viruses and out-of-control machines. These are the subjects of the proposed Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), which this week attracted much media attention. "We're talking about threats to our very existence stemming from human activity," says Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge who wants to found the centre with philosopher Huw Price and Skype inventor Jaan Tallinn.

These new horsemen map quite readily onto the portrayals of war, famine, pestilence and death. Perhaps that's because they're only the latest manifestation of age-old anxieties about the fate of the human race. So is the CSER just the respectable face of doom-mongering?

Events that would entirely eradicate humanity are hard to envisage (New Scientist, 3 March, p 36), but the 20th century saw the advent of technology that could seriously threaten human life as we know it - nuclear weaponry - and the 21st might well see the emergence of more. So the end of the world is now more conceivable than ever - although there's no particular reason to expect it imminently (garbled Mayan prophecies notwithstanding). And Rees is right to say that we don't pay enough attention to the huge, rare risks that might bring it about. Setting them out and sizing them up is worthwhile.

But do we need a centre to bring together specialists in such disparate fields? It's not clear what is to be gained by lumping together, say, nuclear war - whose risks are relatively well understood and contained - and rapacious AI, whose key mitigant may be software design rather than weapons inspections. Why not include genuinely existential natural risks, such as Earth-crossing asteroids? And then there's the potential for robust climate change analysis to become associated with as yet speculative "Terminator studies".

We won't know unless we try it. And the effort might bring fresh perspective to a world full of people who still fret that the LHC will spawn a world-destroying black hole - while they stubbornly ignore the clear and present dangers of climate change.

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Abbas seeks historic state backing at UN

UNITED NATIONS: Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas will head to the General Assembly on Thursday with huge backing for his bid for UN recognition of statehood despite strong US and Israeli opposition.

Abbas will make the case for Palestine to become a UN "non-member observer state" and indicate his conditions for talks with Israel in a key speech to the 193-member assembly.

The Palestinian leadership is determined to make the 65th anniversary of a UN resolution on the division of Palestinian territory a "historic" landmark of their efforts to set up an independent state.

The United States, a staunch ally of Israel, has launched an aggressive campaign against the bid, warning that the vote will do nothing to improve the prospects for new peace talks aimed at ending the decades-long conflict.

US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Middle East envoy David Hale met with Abbas at his New York hotel on Wednesday but failed to get the resolution withdrawn or amended, officials said.

"It would be like changing my name," Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki told reporters when asked if the Palestinians were ready to change their request.

Abbas also held talks with a host of ministers and top diplomats in the day before his speech, including Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who pledged his country's support, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Much attention will be focused on the number of countries that back the observer state status. The Palestinians say 132 countries recognize their state bilaterally.

Some of those are expected to abstain, however. And some, such as France and other European nations, are expected to vote in favor even though they have not formally recognized a Palestinian state.

Canada has said it will join the United States in opposing the resolution. Only two European countries, Germany and the Czech Republic, are expected to vote against.

Britain announced it would abstain unless the Palestinians pledged not to seek an International Criminal Court (ICC) case against Israel and promised an immediate return to negotiations with the Jewish state.

The recent Israeli military onslaught against rocket attacks from Gaza could increase support for the Palestinians, diplomats said.

But several European countries, including some backing the bid, believe the Palestinians should have waited until after US President Barack Obama installed his new administration and Israel held elections, diplomats said.

The foreign ministers of Canada, Turkey, Jordan and Indonesia are to speak at the General Assembly meeting starting at 2000 GMT.

Success will give the Palestinians access to UN agencies and treaties and allow them to apply to join the ICC - a prospect that worries Israel.

Senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Hanan Ashrawi said Abbas resisted "intensive pressure" to make concessions on the ICC.

Palestinian envoys have said Abbas will not rush to join the court but could use it if Israel does not change its policies on settlements and other matters.

The United States blocked the application for full membership of the United Nations that Abbas made in September 2011.

The United States and Israel say a Palestinian state can only emerge from direct negotiations, which have been frozen since September 2010.

"We have made very clear to the Palestinian leadership that we oppose Palestinian efforts to upgrade their status at the UN outside of the framework" of talks with Israel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

The Palestinian Authority and UN agencies that admit the Palestinians could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in financing because of the vote. US law prohibits funding for any international body recognising a Palestinian state.

Washington has warned Abbas he risks losing around $200 million in aid, which is currently blocked in the US Congress.

Israel is considering freezing the transfer of tax and customs funds it collects for the Palestinians, while one Israeli foreign ministry policy paper even suggested "toppling" the Palestinian Authority.

But ministry spokeswoman Ilana Stein said Israel would most likely not take any punitive measures unless the Palestinians used the upgrade "as a platform for confrontation" at the ICC.

"Israel's reaction to the Palestinian move depends on what they choose to do. If they use this resolution as a platform for confrontation, we will have to act accordingly," Stein said.

- AFP/de

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Meet Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Hollywood's new copyright ally

Incoming Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte on stage at a gala event in Washington D.C. in 2010 organized by a pro-SOPA music industry group.

(Credit:
ASCAP)

The outgoing chairman of a House of Representatives panel responsible for U.S. copyright law conceived the memorable Stop Online Piracy Act. Its next chairman happens to be even more enthusiastic about expanding digital copyright law.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte was elected head of the House Judiciary committee today, much to the dismay of advocacy groups that had doggedly worked to defeat SOPA and Protect IP a year ago.

The Virginia Republican has long been a steadfast ally of Hollywood and other large copyright holders, saying as recently as two months ago that "I remain committed to enacting strong copyright laws." In a press release last year, Goodlatte said he was supporting SOPA because the legislation -- which was withdrawn in the face of an unprecedented Internet protest -- would "protect American jobs" and prevent American babies from dying after drinking "counterfeit" baby formula.

"It's unfortunate to see another copyright maximalist taking over the chairmanship of the Judiciary committee, especially because Rep. Goodlatte has failed to show even a slight change of heart after the resounding defeat of SOPA," says Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a vocal SOPA critic. "If anything he's doubled down, despite the bill's profound unpopularity."

In a local radio interview weeks after an explosion of criticism prompted outgoing Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith to abandon SOPA, Goodlatte defended the Hollywood-backed bill that he helped to shape. SOPA remains necessary to combat "the theft that's taking place on the Internet," he told WFIR Radio.

Bob Goodlatte, right, receiving the 2011 President's Award from another pro-SOPA music industry group, which praised him for his "ongoing efforts to curb digital theft"

(Credit:
NMPA)

Goodlatte is even more of a copyright hawk than Smith, who is losing his Judiciary chairmanship because of term limits. Goodlatte previously distributed a press release saying he "applauds" the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and said it's "unrealistic" to think that current copyright law's notice-and-takedown provisions will continue to exist (he thinks they're too burdensome for copyright holders). He's also co-chairman of the Anti-Piracy Caucus, which boasts that copyright industries "generate more revenues than any other single manufacturing sector."

A Goodlatte spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment from CNET today.

The conservative Republican's support for digital piracy crackdowns is hardly new. In 1997, he was responsible for a federal law that makes peer-to-peer pirates liable for up to $250,000 in fines and three-year prison terms. His No Electronic Theft Act made not-for-profit piracy a federal crime; until then, it had been merely a civil offense.

SOPA and Protect IP temporarily vanished after millions of Americans joined an online protest in January against the bill, which included alerts on the home pages of Google.com and Craigslist.org, although Hollywood has indicated it has not given up. Both bills are designed to target so-called rogue Web sites by allowing the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines and Internet service providers that would force them to make the suspected piractical site effectively vanish, a procedure that has led to some First Amendment concerns.

Hollywood's (new) favorite Republican

During last winter's SOPA debate, outgoing Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith emerged as Hollywood's favorite Republican politician.

Now Goodlatte is poised to claim that title. The TV, movie, and music industries already were Goodlatte's top industry contributor during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (Since early last year, Goodlatte has been chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property, which probably helped.)

It might seem like an odd relationship. Goodlatte is a social conservative who once voted for a federal investigation of a salacious scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for a ban on Internet gambling, and for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He reliably receives a zero percent rating on scorecards prepared by the ACLU and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Goodlatte represents one of the more conservative corners of Virginia: the 6th District includes Lynchburg and Harrisonburg, and in 2008 opted for John McCain over Barack Obama by a 58 to 42 percent margin. It was home to evangelical pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and was where Falwell founded Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in the world.

The entertainment industry prefers Democratic politicians, of course. No less than 78 percent of political contributions from Hollywood went to Democrats in 2008, and DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer were Obama's top "bundlers" during this year's campaign.

But when Republicans are in power, the entertainment industry will woo the GOP. The SOPA-supporting National Music Publishers' Association, a copyright hawk that sued Google over allegedly infringing YouTube clips, honored Goodlatte with its President's Award last fall. The group lauded the Virginia congressman as someone who has "tirelessly championed the importance of intellectual property rights."

A year earlier, Goodlatte was a guest of honor at a gala in Washington, D.C. organized by another pro-SOPA group, the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers. It was held in advance of the group's Capitol Hill lobbying day, and featured entertainers including singer-songwriters Tracy Chapman and Jessi Alexander. Goodlatte was chosen to introduce musician J.D. Souther, who performed "You're Only Lonely" and "Heartache Tonight."

The Motion Picture Association of America, too, is effusive in praising Goodlatte's copyright expansion efforts. An MPAA blog post said "kudos to Chairman Goodlatte" for defending SOPA against criticism, and a press release said Hollywood "hails" Goodlatte for helping to craft the legislation in the first place. The Recording Industry Association of America, not to be left out, announced that it "salutes" his efforts.

Goodlatte's relationship with Silicon Valley companies that near-uniformly opposed SOPA hasn't always been this tempestuous. In the late 1990s, he visited the San Francisco area to tout legislation to protect Americans' electronic privacy by relaxing encryption export controls. He also supported an opt-out approach to federal spam legislation that was more First Amendment-protective, and did not sponsor an unsuccessful 2002 bill that would have let copyright owners legally hack into computers connected to peer-to-peer networks suspected of harboring pirated files.

More recently, he's sided with technology companies on some legislation. He supported a cybersecurity bill known as CISPA, which industry liked but privacy groups and local tea party groups loathed. And he sponsored a Netflix-backed bill to update 1980s-era federal privacy laws for the Internet.

Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, said he was disappointed to see Goodlatte champion SOPA -- but thought he might be more tech-friendly than his predecessor in updating federal privacy law to require that police obtain warrants before reading Americans' e-mail or tracking their cell phone locations. The law is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA.

"Rep. Goodlatte strongly supported SOPA, including its extremely
controversial DNS filtering provisions," Radia said. "But he did introduce an
amendment (PDF) aimed at limiting SOPA's impact on foreign Web sites when only a portion of such a Web site was infringing. Hopefully Rep. Goodlatte will focus his energies on issues that advance Internet freedom, such as ECPA reform, rather than push policies that undermine it."

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Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

In the Tibetan mountains, a fungus attaches itself to a moth larva burrowed in the soil. It infects and slowly consumes its host from within, taking over its brain and making the young caterpillar move to a position from which the fungus can grow and spore again.

Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers and nomadic Tibetan harvesters, the parasite called cordyceps means hope—and big money. Chinese markets sell the "golden worm," or "Tibetan mushroom"—thought to cure ailments from cancer to asthma to erectile dysfunction—for up to $50,000 (U.S.) per pound. Patients, following traditional medicinal practices, brew the fungal-infected caterpillar in tea or chew it raw.

Now the folk medicine is getting scientific backing. A new study published in the journal RNA finds that cordycepin, a chemical derived from the caterpillar fungus, has anti-inflammatory properties.

"Inflammation is normally a beneficial response to a wound or infection, but in diseases like asthma it happens too fast and to too high of an extent," said study co-author Cornelia H. de Moor of the University of Nottingham. "When cordycepin is present, it inhibits that response strongly."

And it does so in a way not previously seen: at the mRNA stage, where it inhibits polyadenylation. That means it stops swelling at the genetic cellular level—a novel anti-inflammatory approach that could lead to new drugs for cancer, asthma, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and cardiovascular-disease patients who don't respond well to current medications.

From Worm to Pill

But such new drugs may be a long way off. The science of parasitic fungi is still in its early stages, and no medicine currently available utilizes cordycepin as an anti-inflammatory. The only way a patient could gain its benefits would by consuming wild-harvested mushrooms.

De Moor cautions against this practice. "I can't recommend taking wild-harvested medications," she says. "Each sample could have a completely different dose, and there are mushrooms where [taking] a single bite will kill you."

Today 96 percent of the world's caterpillar-fungus harvest comes from the high Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan range. Fungi from this region are of the subspecies Ophiocordyceps sinensis, locally known as yartsa gunbu ("summer grass, winter worm"). While highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine, these fungi have relatively low levels of cordycepin. What's more, they grow only at elevations of 10,000 to 16,500 feet and cannot be farmed. All of which makes yartsa gunbu costly for Chinese consumers: A single fungal-infected caterpillar can fetch $30.

Brave New Worm

Luckily for researchers, and for potential consumers, another rare species of caterpillar fungus, Cordyceps militaris, is capable of being farmed—and even cultivated to yield much higher levels of cordycepin.

De Moor says that's not likely to discourage Tibetan harvesters, many of whom make a year's salary in just weeks by finding and selling yartsa gunbu. Scientific proof of cordycepin's efficacy will only increase demand for the fungus, which could prove dangerous. "With cultivation we have a level of quality control that's missing in the wild," says de Moor.

"There is definitely some truth somewhere in certain herbal medicinal traditions, if you look hard enough," says de Moor. "But ancient healers probably wouldn't notice a 10 percent mortality rate resulting from herbal remedies. In the scientific world, that's completely unacceptable." If you want to be safe, she adds, "wait for the medicine."

Ancient Chinese medical traditions—which also use ground tiger bones as a cure for insomnia, elephant ivory for religious icons, and rhinoceros horns to dispel fevers—are controversial but popular. Such remedies remain in demand regardless of scientific advancement—and endangered animals continue to be killed in order to meet that demand. While pills using cordycepin from farmed fungus might someday replace yartsa gunbu harvesting, tigers, elephants, and rhinos are disappearing much quicker than worms.

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