Google gives $5 million for drones to hunt African rhino poachers

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbuMOTJihaw&hd=1[/youtube]

There are horrific photos of subdued rhinos with their horns amputated by poachers that have become a viral phenomenon. Google is now giving $5 million to a conservation group for lightweight drones that will patrol the African bush, exposing ivory hunters along the way.

Difficulty of getting U.S. visas for immigrant entrepreneurs hobbles building businesses

The process of getting a visa is slow, expensive, time-consuming, and often unsuccessful.

It seemed like all of the stars were aligning for Jay Meattle in early 2010. He had raised several hundred thousand dollars from investors in Boston for his start-up, Shareaholic. And the company, which enables people to easily share online content they find interesting, had just passed the milestone of 1 million users.

 

 

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Only 1 in 10 consumers in debt-settlement programs actually end up debt free

Only about one in 10 consumers participating in debt-settlement programs actually ends up debt-free in the promised period of time.

Debt settlement companies claim that they can significantly reduce someones debt for just pennies on the dollar.  And desperate debtors are looking for a quick fix to a problem that they have spent years creating.  They want the phone calls and letters to stop.  They want to get rid of the stress they are experiencing.

 

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Quality lapses at big drug manufacturing plants lead to shortages and danger

The Ben Venue facility in Bedford, Ohio has spent more than $300 million to upgrade the plant.

Quality lapses as big drug companies show that contamination and shoddy practices go well beyond the loosely regulated compounding pharmacies that have attracted attention because of their link to an outbreak of meningitis..

Weevils have been found floating in vials of heparin as well as morphine cartridges that contain up to twice the labeled dose. There are manufacturing plants with rusty tools, mold in production areas and — in one memorable case — a barrel of urine.

 

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The disaster that exposed the corruption of China’s economic boom

The crash at Wenzhou.

Train passengers hurried across Beijing South Station at the final call to board bullet train D301, heading south on the world’s largest, fastest, and newest high-speed railway, the Harmony Express on the morning of July 23, 2011. It was bound for Fuzhou, fourteen hundred miles away.

 

 

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How organized crime is destroying the rainforests

Organized crime is behind the trade in illegal timber in the rainforests.

The illegal logging industry has become very attractive to criminal organizations over the past ten years.  Up to 90 per cent of tropical deforestation can be attributed to organized crime, which controls up to 30 per cent of the global timber trade, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Program.

 

 

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How do we stop hospitals from killing us?

Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets

If there is even a minor airplane crash in the U.S., it makes the headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

 

 

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Scientific research threatened by fraud and misconduct

Scientists, like anyone else, can be prone to bias in their bid for a place in the history books.

For several years, Dirk Smeesters had spent his career as a social psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam studying how consumers behaved in different situations. He studied whether color had an effect on what consumers bought or if death-related stories in the media affected how people picked products. And whether it was better to use supermodels in cosmetics advertising than average-looking women.

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Vaccination opt-outs on the rise in private schools

The rate of children entering private schools without all of their shots jumped by 10 percent last year.

An Associated Press analysis has found that parents who send their children to private schools in California are much more likely to opt out of immunizations than their public school counterparts, an Associated Press analysis.  Even the recent re-emergence of whooping cough hasn’t halted the downward trajectory of vaccinations among these students.

 

 

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Coolant smugglers reap large profits

The Marcone company of St. Louis was implicated in a coolant smuggling scheme.

A trusted senior vice president of a century-old company from America’s heartland had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of it from China.  And now the chief executive of the company was on the witness stand trying to explain how the senior vice president did it.

 

 

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