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By Russ Choma on May 21, 2013 8:00 AM

Last week's collapse of a massive precious metals mine in Indonesia, which killed at least 17 workers, brought unwanted attention to the American company that owns the facility, Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold. But the company is already well-known to many here in Washington: Its top executives, as well as the company PAC, contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle to help fuel congressional campaigns. Freeport currently employs at least one former member of Congress as a registered lobbyist, and in the past has employed at least one other.


Freeport-McMoRan, which is based in Phoenix, strongly favors Republicans over Democrats with its contributions. In the 2012 cycle, the company's PAC and employees gave 80 percent of their $382,000 in donations to Republicans. The firm's favorite lawmaker? Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. He received the maximum $10,000 from the company PAC and another $43,000 from employees, making him the largest recipient of Freeport-McMoRan money.

Another major recipient of Freeport-McMoRan cash was David Dewhurst, who was defeated by Ted Cruz in the Republican primary for Texas' open Senate seat last year. Dewhurst, who was backed by many "establishment" Republican interests, received $10,000 from the company PAC and another $25,000 from company CEO James "Jim Bob" Moffett and members of his immediate family.

In the House, the top recipient of cash from the company is Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), to whom the company's PAC gave the maximum of $10,000. Boehner is also one of eight members of Congress who owns shares in the company, according to his most recent personal financial disclosure form.

more
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/05/owner-of-collapsed-indonesian-mine.html

By Christopher Mims


Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the end of this century.

more

http://qz.com/86685/the-audacious-plan-to-end-hunger-with-3-d-printed-food/

By Gwynn Guilford


The latest in China’s rolling cascade of food safety disasters comes from Guangzhou—the capital of Guangdong province in southern China, and one of China’s largest cities—where 44% of rice samples were found to contain poisonous levels of cadmium (link in Chinese). That rice was being served to unsuspecting diners in restaurants around Guangzhou (link in Chinese).

Unlike many other Chinese food scandals—rat meat sold as lamb, milk tainted with melamine, dead pigs in the river—the cadmium-laced rice isn’t just the result of unprincipled food providers trying to cut costs. Instead, it’s a reflection of the heavy levels of heavy-metal pollution that can be found throughout China’s farm lands. The country loses $3 billion a year to soil pollution.

While it’s less outrageously stomach-churning than, say, rat meat masquerading as mutton, the “cadmium rice” scandal, as the media has named it, is much harder to fix. Health inspectors can crack down on fake meat. But the soil pollution crisis is the result—and a telling example—of layer upon layer of state planning gone awry. Here’s why.

No ministry is accountable for regulating soil pollution (pdf, p.6), and earlier this year, the State Council pushed back setting up a soil pollution prevention system from 2015 to 2020. That’s despite the fact that between 40% and 70% of China’s soil is already contaminated with heavy metals and fertilizers. That results in toxic levels of lead in a third of China’s rice and high levels of cadmium in another one-tenth of it.

The government categorizes soil pollution levels as a “state secret.” This despite the fact Chinese academics have long been documenting the toxic effects of soil pollution—for example, one Chinese scientist found that the soil in at least half of China’s provinces and administrative zones is severely contaminated. The authorities have declined to publish the results of the first national survey of soil pollution, started in 2006; scholars involved in the project say the government has suppressed the preliminary findings.


more

http://qz.com/86416/how-half-of-all-rice-in-a-chinese-province-was-poisoned-by-pollution/

1. Almost all of Apple’s foreign operations are run through an Irish company with no employees.

The company told investigators that it lost all records concerning why Apple Operations International was originally set up in 1980, and why all of Apple global sales go through it. You might have a few ideas why if you keep reading.

2. Apple pays 2%—or less—in corporate income tax in Ireland.

The already low-tax country gives Apple special treatment with a negotiated 2% income tax rate. But that’s just the top-line number: Between 2009 and 2011, one Irish subsidiary, Apple Sales International, earned $38 billion and paid $21 million in taxes, for an effective rate of .06%.

3. Apple Operations International, which provided 30% of Apple’s worldwide net profits from 2009 to 2011, doesn’t pay taxes anywhere.

This move is devilishly brilliant: The US decides if it can tax you based on where you incorporate your company. Ireland decides if it can tax you based on the location of the people managing the company. So if you incorporate a subsidiary in Ireland, and manage it from the US, you don’t (so far) have to pay taxes in either country. And that’s exactly what Apple has done, not filing a tax return for AOI anywhere in the world in the last five years.

4. Apple’s US profits keep ending up in Ireland, too.

The report alleges more than just the avoidance of US taxes on foreign sales of Apple’s products. It also argues that Apple is effectively sending US profits to its Irish subsidiaries, too. How? Transfer pricing. Apple has set up a cost-sharing agreement with its Irish subsidiaries that gives them a disproportionate share of the profit from research and development that occurs in the United States. From 2009 to 2012, Apple allocated $4 billion in R&D costs to its US unit, which had $38.7 billion in profits, while its Irish subsidiary had $4.9 billion in R&D costs—and $74 billion in profits.

5. Most of the $102 billion Apple is keeping “overseas” is in US banks.

Just as its Irish companies are managed by US employees, Apple’s Irish cash is mostly kept in US financial institutions, largely managed by Braeburn Capital, Apple’s financial engineering nexus in Nevada.

more

http://qz.com/86740/the-seven-craziest-findings-in-the-us-investigation-of-apples-tax-avoidance-practices/

by: Erica Klarreich

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang — the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of mathematics’ oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic’s current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the Annals editors decided to put it on the fast track.

Just three weeks later — a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals — Zhang received the referee report on his paper.

“The main results are of the first rank,” one of the referees wrote. The author had proved “a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.”

Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.

more

http://simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/unheralded-mathematician-bridges-the-prime-gap/

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