Fox News:

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) told FOX Business Network that he fears the U.S. government may try to assassinate the whistleblower who leaked information about National Security Administration surveillance programs to the media.
In an interview with FOX Business on Tuesday, Paul said he was worried that someone within the U.S. government might try to use a missile to kill Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old who has been the source of information about two top secret NSA programs.

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis."
Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said the booming mortgage market, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, has attracted unscrupulous professionals and criminal groups whose fraudulent activities could cause multibillion-dollar losses to financial institutions.
"It has the potential to be an epidemic," said Swecker, who heads the Criminal Division at FBI headquarters in Washington. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.

A Cali couple discovers a Kennedy-era nuclear fallout shelter in their backyard...

When a California couple closed a deal to buy a home in Woodland Hills earlier this month, they knew that their new home came with a unique feature - a 1960s nuclear fallout shelter.
But what Chris and Colleen Otcasek initially believed to be nothing more than a hole in their backyard turned out to be a perfectly preserved underground refuge fully stocked with vintage supplies....

The inventory of the shelter also includes kitchen supplies like Reynolds Wrap foil and Saran wrap, Kleenex tissues, argyle clothing, an assortment of sleeping pills, and the ever-important bed-pen.
In case the family got bored while waiting for the radiation to clear above round, they could play a board game or read a dozen copies of Analog science fiction magazine inside their temporary dwelling.

Why are Americans alarmed by something like this?

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley. Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

So why the sudden alarm and concern over the obvious? My guess is it has more to do with the inculcated deep distrust Americans have of the government, and this distrust is, at the end of the day, more useful to the right than it is to the left. And, by the way, this is the same information that's gathered by marketing firms all the time with little or no worry or fear from the public. Of the many disappointments that Obama's presidency has generated, this NSA one will prove to be of a second order. Watching Americans is really nothing new in the post-9/11 world...

The other day, Dominic asked whether the Boston bombings would cause Americans to love their security cameras harder than ever. Looks like the answer is yes:

Americans overwhelmingly favor installing video surveillance cameras in public places, judging the infringement on their privacy as an acceptable trade-off for greater security from terrorist attacks, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

A week after the Boston Marathon attack, which was unraveled after the release of video footage of the two suspects flushed them out of hiding, 78 percent of people said surveillance cameras were a good idea, the poll found.

But that's what the people of America think. What do the people of Slog think?

I sure hope it's true that Boeing has engineered a fail-safe solution to the Dreamliner's self-immolating battery problem, but their confident claims have that disturbing famous last words ring to it:

Two top Boeing executives delivered an unflinching defense of the 787 Dreamliner in a Friday morning news conference in Japan... “We’ve been able to demonstrate that no fire is possible,” [Boeing VP Mike] Sinnett concluded.

Not that it'll keep me from flying in a 787, and this is probably more of a PR issue than a technical one. But if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that the gods hate hubris and love irony.

Eeeek:

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria with the potential to cause untreatable infections pose "a catastrophic threat" to the population, the chief medical officer for Britain warns in a report calling for urgent action worldwide.

Also: "The problem of microbes becoming increasingly resistant to the most powerful drugs should be ranked alongside terrorism and climate change on the list of critical risks." One root of the problem: doctors over-prescribing, and scared patients over-demanding, antibiotics for every little thing.

Meanwhile, the CDC is warning that a new SARS-like virus has popped up in the Middle East.

With the Washington State Legislature now being warned about problems with a bill intended to protect people from aerial drones, perhaps it's time for the drone-fearing masses to consider how they might dodge drones without government help. From the experts:

Al-Qaeda's list of 22 tips for dodging drone attacks—including at least one believed to originate with Osama bin Laden—has been found hidden inside a manila envelope in a building abandoned by Islamists in Mali.

The document includes advice such as "hide under thick trees" (believed to be bin Laden's contribution), and instructions for setting up a "fake gathering" using dolls to "mislead the enemy."

And if there don't seem to be enough thick trees in this Evergreen State to offer sufficient protection, there's always the anti-drone scarf.

BBC:

Brightly burning rocks could be seen for hundreds of kilometres as they crashed into the Ural region.

Chelyabinsk residents reported the ground shook, windows shattered and car alarms were set off during the shower.

"A meteorite exploded above the Chelyabinsk region," an emergencies ministry spokesman told Interfax, while one report spoke of several injuries.

Update: Phil Plait at Slate says asteroid and Russian meteor shower appear to be unrelated.

I’m trying to piece together what happened from the videos. First of all, I do not think this is related in any way to the asteroid 2102 DA14! For one thing, this occurred about 16 hours before DA14 passes. At 8 kilometers per second that’s nearly half a million kilometers away from DA14. That puts it on a totally different orbit.

For another, from the lighting, time of day, and videos showing the rising Sun, it looks like this was moving mostly east-to-west. I may be off, but that’s how it looks. DA14 is approaching Earth from the south, so any fragment of that rock would also appear to move south-to-north.

Time:

What’s got a lot of cosmic worriers glancing skyward this month was the announcement that on Feb. 15, a 148-ft. (45 m) long asteroid known as 2012 DA 14 will pass just 17,200 mi. (27,7000 km) above the Earth. And if 17,200 miles sounds like a lot, consider that it’s only one-thirteenth of the distance to the moon and actually below the 22,000 mi. (35,800 km) altitude at which some of our satellites orbit. That leaves awfully little margin for error in NASA’s cosmic calculations. So there’s plenty of reason to worry, yes? Well, no, actually. But making that call for any one object—knowing which space bullets are likely to hit us and which ones we’re likely to dodge—can be a complicated business.

A stunned nation mourns.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will remove airport body scanners that privacy advocates likened to strip searches after OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS) couldn’t write software to make passenger images less revealing...

The agency removed 76 of the machines from busier U.S. airports last year. It will now get rid of the remaining 174 Rapiscan machines, with the company absorbing the cost, said Karen Shelton Waters, the agency’s assistant administrator for acquisitions.

The scanner-manufacturing company couldn't meet a congressional requirement to make the images more generic—which would presumably have shown everything except details of your swimsuit area. Working for TSA just isn't what it used to be. (Via Gizmodo.)

It's a sheep in wolf's clothing and a law-enforcement sting in plain sight!

Also, it's legal at midnight to possess and smoke marijuana.

All the bad news from Science Daily:

Sea levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests.

And...

The shells of marine snails — known as pteropods — living in the seas around Antarctica are being dissolved by ocean acidification according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. These tiny animals are a valuable food source for fish and birds and play an important role in the oceanic carbon cycle.

And...

Permafrost covering almost a quarter of the northern hemisphere contains 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon, twice that currently in the atmosphere, and could significantly amplify global warming should thawing accelerate as expected, according to a new report released November 27 by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Along the eastern seaboard, Sandy has killed 13 people and stranded 6.5 million people without power. In New York City, a statement from MTA Chairman Joseph J.Lhota:

The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system, in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots. As of last night, seven subway tunnels under the East River flooded. Metro-North Railroad lost power from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line and to New Haven on the New Haven Line. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards and suffered flooding in one East River tunnel. The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel is flooded from end to end and the Queens Midtown Tunnel also took on water and was closed. Six bus garages were disabled by high water. We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the process of recovery. Our employees have shown remarkable dedication over the past few days, and I thank them on behalf of every New Yorker. In 108 years, our employees have never faced a challenge like the one that confronts us now. All of us at the MTA are committed to restoring the system as quickly as we can to help bring New York back to normal.

The market will be closed for a second day. Politics is at a standstill. Nature makes its return...

As many as 300,000 customers in seven states are without power, CNN reported.

The Hudson and East rivers in New York City have begun overflowing their banks.

Officials warned that flooding in lower Manhattan could inundate the city's underground electric and communications lines and subway system.

Trading on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq will stay suspended for a second day on Tuesday. The United Nations headquarters in New York has also been closed.

...and politics to go through another bout of Romnesia:

By the way, the world will not end like this...

• NASA

As the UW professor and science writer Peter Ward pointed out to me once, the day there is no wind at all is the first day of the end.

The largest coordinated regional earthquake drill ever is happening right now, 10/18 at 10:18 a.m., which is why at this very moment I am preparing for what would happen in the event a major earthquake were to hit the aging masonry building that houses The Stranger, by simulating being crushed to death under tons of rubble.

Ow.