Federal Asbestos Legislation: The Winners Are ...

Under the guise of providing aid to victims of asbestos-related illnesses, a small group of companies has lobbied for and won relief from their liability worth tens of billions of dollars in the Senate's asbestos trust fund bill, according to this Public Citizen report.Their success in protecting their corporate interests, however, will sharply reduce the funds under the legislation that will be available to asbestos victims, the report finds. Meanwhile, some of the nation's largest financial investment firms have spent millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to position themselves to score big rewards should the legislation pass.The big winners in the legislation, S. 852, include a handful of Fortune 500 companies -- Dow Chemical, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Honeywell, Pfizer and Viacom -- and at least 10 asbestos makers that have filed for bankruptcy.Public Citizen found an intense Capitol Hill lobbying campaign on behalf of the Fortune 500 companies to win the financial concession was spearheaded by a relatively unknown entity called the Asbestos Study Group (ASG), which refuses to make its full membership list public

Tabled Labels: Consumers Eat Blind While Congress Feasts on Campaign Cash

As the Senate prepared to vote on its version of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) budget, Public Citizen released an investigation to illustrate how big agribusiness used millions of dollars in lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions, and a network of Washington insiders with close connections to the Bush administration and Congress, to thwart a consumer-friendly provision mandating country-of-origin labeling, popularly known as COOL.Mandatory country-of-origin labeling would require beef, pork, lamb, fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, fish, and peanuts to be labeled with where they were raised, grown or produced. Although the 2002 Farm Bill stipulated that the new program be implemented by September 2004, mandatory COOL has been postponed by Congress -- where lawmakers are under intense pressure from the meat and grocery industries -- for two years. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to once again delay COOL's implementation for meat until 2007. Industry is strongly lobbying the Senate to either delay the funding for the USDA to work on COOL or turn it into a "voluntary" program.Public Citizen analyzed donations from 19 companies and trade associations, each of which has announced opposition to mandatory country-of-origin labeling and has registered to lobby against COOL. They have contributed a total of $12.6 million to candidates for Congress and in soft money to the Republican and Democratic parties since 2000.These companies have focused their giving on 64 members of Congress who have sponsored a bill to replace the mandatory country-of-origin requirement with a voluntary one, which is considerably weaker and does not empower consumers with the right to know where their food is from. Instead, it offers industry a way to hide critical information from the public. These 64 members, accounting for only 12 percent of Congress, have received 28 percent of contributions to candidates from the COOL foes

Failure Investigation and Restoration of Two Cellular Sheetpile Structures

The Trainer - Delco Tap - Mickleton 220-38 kilo-volt transmission lines are carried across the Delaware River by two 332-foot high steel latticed towers each founded on a man-made foundation island structure. Each island structure is comprised of four interconnected cellular sheetpile structures. One island, suffered a severe partial failure due to long-term scour in the Delaware River, near Chester, Pennsylvania. The other island exhibited early symptoms of potential failure, also due to scour. The client was the Philadelphia Electric Company, now known as PECO, acting on behalf of the owner, the Atlantic Electric Company (AECO). The author served as project manager and principal investigator for AECOM (formerly Earth Tech, formerly TAMS). The paper describes the failure investigation, including the structures before and after failure, the original installation (1959-1960), the condition survey of each island, condition of the failed sheetpiles, divers’ findings of an underwater survey, hydrographic studies, scour and loss of sheetpile embedment. Also described are the subsurface investigation, soils laboratory testing, the soil/rock profile, the probable cause(s) of failure, the sequence comprising the failure mechanism, metallurgical findings, circumferential stress analysis and brittle failure of the sheetpile panels outside the interlocks. Remedial measures are described and the design and construction of the selected restoration/stabilization solution via a crushed stone buttress is presented. The author established the construction sequence and provided technical liaison to PECO during the underwater staged construction, which included geo-instrumentation and hydrographic monitoring of an 80,000 cubic yard crushed stone and riprap protected circumferential stabilizing buttress, over 50 ft high, placed around the failed island in the Delaware River. The failure investigation, the design and the restorative construction occurred during 1991-1994, yet the lessons learned from this case history are as aptly important today

Diamondoid diacids ('O4' species) in oil sands process-affected water.

RATIONALE: As a by-product of oil sands extraction, large volumes of oil sands process water (OSPW) are generated, which are contaminated with a large range of water-soluble organic compounds. The acids are thought to be derived from hydrocarbons via natural biodegradation pathways such as α- and β-oxidation of alkyl substituents, which could produce mono- and diacids, for example. However, while several monoacids ('O2' species) have been identified, the presence of diacids (i.e. 'O4' species) has only been deduced from results obtained via Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance high-resolution mass spectrometry (FTICR-HRMS) and nuclear magnetic resonance ((1)H-NMR) spectroscopy and the structures have never been confirmed. METHODS: An extract of an OSPW from a Canadian tailings pond was analysed and the retention times and the electron ionization mass spectra of some analytes were compared with those of bis-methyl esters of authentic diacids by gas chromatography × gas chromatography/time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC/TOFMS) in nominal and accurate mass configurations. RESULTS: Two diamondoid diacids (3-carboxymethyladamantane-1-carboxylic acid and adamantane-1,3-dicarboxylic acid) were firmly identified as their bis-methyl esters by retention time and mass spectral matching and several other structural isomers were more tentatively assigned. Diacids have substantially increased polarity over the hydrocarbon and monoacid species from which they probably derive: as late members of biodegradation processes they may be useful indicators of weathering and ageing, not only of OSPW, but potentially of crude oil residues more generally. CONCLUSIONS: Structures of O4 species in OSPW have been identified. This confirms pathways of microbial biodegradation, which were only postulated previously, and may be a further indication that remediation of OSPW toxicity can occur by natural microbial action. The presence and abundance of these diacids might therefore be useful as a measure of biodegradation and weathering

Campaign Finance Reform

The panelists in this session consider the following issues: (1) the problems posed by the current system of campaign finance, (2) alternative approaches and related legal constraints, and (3) advisable strategies to implement preferred reforms

A comparative approach to understanding tissue-specific expression of uncoupling protein 1 expression in adipose tissue

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Scaling of oscillatory kinematics and Froude efficiency in baleen whales

High efficiency lunate-tail swimming with high-aspect-ratio lifting surfaces has evolved in many vertebrate lineages, from fish to cetaceans. Baleen whales (Mysticeti) are the largest swimming animals that exhibit this locomotor strategy, and present an ideal study system to examine how morphology and the kinematics of swimming scale to the largest body sizes. We used data from whale-borne inertial sensors coupled with morphometric measurements from aerial drones to calculate the hydrodynamic performance of oscillatory swimming in six baleen whale species ranging in body length from 5 to 25 m (fin whale, Balaenoptera physalus; Bryde\u27s whale, Balaenoptera edeni; sei whale, Balaenoptera borealis; Antarctic minke whale, Balaenoptera bonaerensis; humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae; and blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus). We found that mass-specific thrust increased with both swimming speed and body size. Froude efficiency, defined as the ratio of useful power output to the rate of energy input (Sloop, 1978), generally increased with swimming speed but decreased on average with increasing body size. This finding is contrary to previous results in smaller animals, where Froude efficiency increased with body size. Although our empirically parameterized estimates for swimming baleen whale drag were higher than those of a simple gliding model, oscillatory locomotion at this scale exhibits generally high Froude efficiency as in other adept swimmers. Our results quantify the fine-scale kinematics and estimate the hydrodynamics of routine and energetically expensive swimming modes at the largest scale