New Orleans, Louisiana - The U.S. military may be called on to assist authorities scrambling to mitigate a potential environmental disaster posed by an oil spill expanding toward the Gulf Coast, the Coast Guard said Thursday. In addition, another controlled burn of the oil slick may be conducted, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Erik Swanson said. Officials said late Wednesday the estimated amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from three underwater leaks after last week's oil rig explosion has increased to as much as 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day -- five times more than what was initially believed.
Rear Adm. Mary Landry told reporters late Wednesday that the increased estimate is based on analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "This is not an exact science when you estimate the amount of oil," Landry said, noting there are a lot of variables in calculating the rate of the spill. "However, NOAA is telling me now that they prefer we use the 5,000 barrels a day as an estimate of what has actually leaked from this well and will continue to leak until BP secures the source." Some 250,000 gallons of oily water have been collected from the scene, she said. BP is the owner of the well, while Transocean Ltd. owns and operates the rig.
NEW YORK — The only man to admit shooting Malcolm X was freed on parole Tuesday, 45 years after he assassinated the civil rights leader.
Thomas Hagan, the last man still serving time in the 1965 killing, was freed from a Manhattan prison where he spent two days a week under a work-release program, state Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman Linda Foglia said.
Hagan, 69, has said he was one of three gunmen who shot Malcolm X as he began a speech at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. But Hagan has said the two men convicted with him were not involved.
April 27 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives were grilled by U.S. senators probing the bank’s mortgage business as Senator Carl Levin asked why it sold a set of investments the lender had itself labeled “shitty.” “How about the fact that you sold hundreds of millions of that deal after your people knew it was a shitty deal?” the Michigan Democrat asked Daniel Sparks, who ran the bank’s mortgage unit at the time. “Does that bother you at all?” Levin, who heads the Senate subcommittee that’s holding today’s hearings, was referring to a June 2007 e-mail from Thomas Montag, the former head of sales and trading in the Americas at Goldman Sachs, to Sparks. The message described a set of mortgage-linked investments that his bank had been trying to sell as part of “one shitty deal.” “I don’t recall selling hundreds of millions of that deal after that,” Sparks replied, adding that he believed the e-mail referred to his performance, not the security itself. “If you can’t give a clear answer to that one, Mr. Sparks, I don’t think we’re going to get too many clear answers from you,” Levin said. Seven current and former Goldman Sachs employees including Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein are testifying about the mortgage-securities business in the years leading to the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had been sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and contests the claim.
Mixed martial arts star Tito Ortiz claims his ex-girlfriend is addicted to the one thing that has made her famous – porn. And he blames Jenna Jameson’s porn addiction for his arrest Monday on suspicion of domestic violence
Ortiz was arrested in Huntington Beach at the home he shares with Jameson and their twin sons. Several hours after posting bail, Ortiz and his lawyer accused Jameson of porn addiction and claimed Ortiz never struck her. Outside of what was written for his character.
“Jenna Jameson has been fighting an ugly battle with an addiction to porn for well over a year, and this morning, she had a relapse,” attorney Chip Matthews said. “We’re here because Tito was trying to help her. He was only trying to re-enact a scene from ‘Star Whores’ and really got into character. But that is what she wanted. He never laid a hand on her that wasn’t already in the porn script.”
Ortiz wept openly at the hastily arranged news conference at an Italian Restaurant in North Hollywood, where ‘Mr. Empire Strikes Black’ is being filmed.
“My parents have gone through an addiction to porn such as this, and I’m seeing a mirror of that. It was just that their porn of choice were movies such as ‘Came With the Wind’ and ‘Mr. Smith Comes on Washington’. I just hold everything dear to my heart that Jenna will be okay and she can find some porn therapy session to attend.”
A call to Jameson’s representatives went unanswered late Monday night. Jameson posted a message on her Twitter account Monday, saying that she planned to quit Twitter.
“I can’t take anymore abuse from ANYONE. To my sweet fans…thank you,” the message read. “And just make sure all of you sweet fans continue to show that support with the release of my upcoming film, ‘Return of the Headguy’.
So my iTunes was on random and up comes the Jay Electronica song Dimethyltryptamine and it spark a little curiosity about the name and the actual drug. So that led me to this...
Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a naturally-occurring psychedelic drug of the tryptamine family. This drug is found not only in many plants, but also in trace amounts in the human body, where its natural function, if any, is undetermined. Structurally, it is analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) and other psychedelic tryptamines such as 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenin (5-OH-DMT), and psilocin (4-HO-DMT). DMT is created in small amounts by the human body during normal metabolism by the enzyme tryptamine-N-methyltransferase. Many cultures, indigenous and modern, ingest DMT as a psychedelic, in either extracted or synthesized forms. When refined, DMT is a clear to white, crystalline solid. However, DMT found on the illicit market is commonly impure and may appear yellow, orange, or salmon in color, unless special care has been taken to remove these impurities. Such impurities result from degradation or originate from plant matter from which the DMT may have been extracted. A laboratory synthesis of DMT was first reported in 1931, and it was later found in many plants.
DMT acts as a non-selective agonist at most or all of the serotonin receptors (including 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C), and has also been shown to possess affinity for the D1, α1-adrenergic, α2-adrenergic, imidazoline-1, sigma-1, and trace amine-associated receptors. At the trace amine-associated receptor (TAAR) and the sigma-1 receptor it acts as an agonist, whereas its efficacies at the other sites are unclear. It has also been shown to bind to the SERT and VMAT2 as a substrate (instead of inhibitor), and may act as a serotonin releasing agent. The psychedelic effects of DMT can likely largely be attributed to activation of the 5-HT2A receptor, though it cannot be ruled out whether other receptors such as 5-HT2C, sigma-1, and TAAR may also play a role. It was speculated that DMT could be an endogenous ligand for the sigma-1 receptor. In this report, the concentration of DMT needed for sigma-1 activation is about 9.4 mg/L (50 µM). This concentration is higher than the average concentration measured in brain tissue or plasma, and is also about two orders of magnitude higher than that needed to activate the 5-HT2A receptor in vitro. In humans, effective hallucinogenic doses produce peak DMT plasma concentrations ranging between 12 and 90 µg/L and with an apparent volume of distribution of 36 to 55 L/kg.
DMT occurs naturally in many species of plants often in conjunction with its close chemical relatives 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin (5-OH-DMT). DMT-containing plants are commonly used in South American shamanic practices. It is usually one of the main active constituents of the drink ayahuasca, however ayahuasca is sometimes brewed without plants that produce DMT. It occurs as the primary psychoactive alkaloid in several plants including Mimosa hostilis, Diplopterys cabrerana, and Psychotria viridis. DMT is found as a minor alkaloid in snuff made from Virola bark resin in which 5-MeO-DMT is the main active alkaloid. DMT is also found as a minor alkaloid in the beans of Anadenanthera peregrina and Anadenanthera colubrina used to make Yopo and Vilca snuff in which bufotenin is the main active alkaloid. Psilocybin and Psilocin, active chemicals in many psychedelic mushrooms, are structurally very similar to DMT. The psychotropic effects of DMT were first studied scientifically by the Hungarian chemist and psychologist Dr. Stephen Szára who performed research with volunteers in the mid-1950s. Szára, who later worked for the US National Institutes of Health, had turned his attention to DMT after his order for LSD from the Swiss company Sandoz Laboratories was rejected on the grounds that the powerful psychotropic could be dangerous in the hands of a communist country. DMT can produce powerful entheogenic experiences including intense visuals, euphoria, even true hallucinations (perceived extensions of reality). DMT is generally not active orally unless it is combined with an monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) such as a reversible inhibitor of monoamine oxidase A (RIMA), e.g., harmaline. Uninhibited, the human body metabolizes DMT too rapidly for oral administration to be effective. Other means of ingestion such as smoking or injecting the drug can produce powerful hallucinations and entheogenic activity for a short time (usually less than half an hour), as the DMT reaches the brain before it can be metabolized by the body's natural monoamine oxidase. Taking a MAOI prior to smoking or injecting DMT will greatly prolong and potentiate the effects.
Several speculative and yet untested hypotheses suggest that endogenous DMT, produced in the human brain, is involved in certain psychological and neurological states. DMT is naturally produced in small amounts in the brain and other tissues of humans and other mammals. It may play a role in mediating the visual effects of natural dreaming, and also near-death experiences, religious visions and other mystical states. A biochemical mechanism for this was proposed by the medical researcher J. C. Callaway, who suggested in 1988 that DMT might be connected with visual dream phenomena, where brain DMT levels are periodically elevated to induce visual dreaming and possibly other natural states of mind. A new hypothesis proposed is that in addition to being involved in altered states of consciousness, endogenous DMT may be involved in the creation of normal waking states of consciousness. It is proposed that DMT and other endogenous hallucinogens mediate their neurological abilities by acting as neurotransmitters at a sub class of the trace amine receptors; a group of receptors found in the CNS where DMT and other hallucinogens have been shown to have activity. Wallach further proposes that in this way waking consciousness can be thought of as a controlled psychedelic experience. It is when the control of these systems becomes loosened and their behavior no longer correlates with the external world that the altered states arise. Dr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon. Several of his test subjects reported NDE-like audio or visual hallucinations. His explanation for this was the possible lack of panic involved in the clinical setting and possible dosage differences between those administered and those encountered in actual NDE cases. Several subjects also reported contact with 'other beings', alien like, insectoid or reptilian in nature, in highly advanced technological environments where the subjects were 'carried', 'probed', 'tested', 'manipulated', 'dismembered', 'taught', 'loved' and even 'raped' by these 'beings'. This is most likely due to the setting of where the experiments took place. In the 1950s, the endogenous production of psychoactive agents was considered to be a potential explanation for the hallucinatory symptoms of some psychiatric diseases as the transmethylation hypothesis (see also adrenochrome), though this hypothesis does not account for the natural presence of endogenous DMT in otherwise normal humans, rats and other laboratory animals. The proposal by Dr. Callaway was, however, the first to suggest a useful function for the endogenous production of DMT: to facilitate the visual phenomenon of normal dreaming.
DMT is classified in the United States as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. In December 2004, the Supreme Court lifted a stay thereby allowing the Brazil-based União do Vegetal (UDV) church to use a decoction containing DMT in their Christmas services that year. This decoction is a "tea" made from boiled leaves and vines, known as hoasca within the UDV, and ayahuasca in different cultures. In Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, the Supreme Court heard arguments on November 1, 2005 and unanimously ruled in February 2006 that the U.S. federal government must allow the UDV to import and consume the tea for religious ceremonies under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
In the most shocking move in the 1st round of the NFL draft, the Denver Broncos selected QB Tim Tebow with the 25th pick. While most experts believe Tebow will not be able to transition into a QB role in the NFL, Broncos coach Josh McDaniels said that he drafted him with only one role in mind – pre-game prayer leader.
Experts believe Tebow can be a fine H-back or even a terrific special teamer. But McDaniels doesn’t envision any of those roles for the player that he has staked his coaching reputation on. And he feels that his place is in front of the team right before they march out onto the field.
“He is our pre-game prayer leader,” McDaniels said Saturday afternoon after wrapping up his second draft as Denver’s coach. “With his love for Christ and those scriptures tattooed to his cheek”, breaking into a chuckle, “there is no other role that I can see him in. I wouldn’t have traded those three picks to Baltimore if I didn’t have confidence in him. And plus, as our pre-game prayer leader, his hilarious throwing motion will have no effect on Broncos’ games.”
McDaniels and Tebow will begin the process of making the Gators legend into an NFL-quality pre-game prayer leader next week in a rookie-only minicamp.
McDaniels did say that Tebow would be competing for the job that is currently owned by Chaplain Bill Rader.
“Like everybody, he will be competing for a job,” McDaniels said. “Chaplain Rader has been with this organization for years but if Tim earns the job, he will pray. And that goes for any position with this team. That’s just how it is. He has a long way to go to get to where he wants to be. But he is starting the process well. He has already begun studying his prayer playbook.”
Broncos QB, Brady Quinn, said that he hopes he can be someone Tebow looks up to.
“I wish my teammate nothing but success for his career. And I plan on helping him out by having him shadow me during training camp. On the field throwing the football and at night on the town with the ladies. Because, let’s be honest, this prick needs to get laid.”
