NewMexicoMatters.com

Internet shutdown frustrates Navajo Nation - SantaFeNewMexican.com

Link: Internet shutdown frustrates Navajo Nation - SantaFeNewMexican.com.

All of seventh-grader Nikkolas Page's school assignments are done on the Internet.

He logs on to a computer each day at 1 p.m. at the Inscription House Chapter on the northwestern side of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, downloads his assignments, and when he's done, submits the answers online.

Twice a week, he's required to attend live sessions with other students and teachers.

The 12-year-old was in Flagstaff this past week doing standardized tests required of all Arizona public-school students, but he might find his online schooling is not as easy to do this week.

The chapter house, which operates like a city government, was one of about 70 where Internet service was shuttered a week ago. OnSat Network Communications Inc., the company that had provided the service, said that's because it has not received $2.1 million in federal funds needed to pay a subcontractor for satellite time.

The Universal Service Administration Co., which administers the E-rate program, is withholding the funding because of a tribal audit that showed OnSat may have double-billed the tribe. The audit also raised questions about how the tribe requested bids for the Internet contract.

Mortgage Broker Association Having Problems Paying Mortgage

Link: Housing Crisis Hits Its Own.

A year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association was thrilled to sign a contract to buy a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Washington. Interest rates were low, the group's revenues were steady and the prospects for quickly renting out part of the structure were strong.

But since then, the association has fallen on tough times as many of the subprime mortgages dispensed by some of its members proved dicey. Borrowers discovered the loans were more costly than they had anticipated. Foreclosures soared, and cheap, inexpensive credit dried up, slowing the economy.

The result: The trade group is about to find it harder than it imagined to pay its own mortgage.

Scheduled to close on the building in the coming weeks, the association will have to pay millions of dollars more than it would have a year ago when it contracted to buy the 160,000-square-foot structure -- millions of dollars it is now less able to afford.

The group's leaders defend the transaction as prudent and, in the long run, wise. "Anytime is the best time to buy," said Kieran P. Quinn, chairman of the association. "Over a 10-year horizon, [the purchase] looks great."

But the short run looks a little bumpy. "The association's timing is not good, to say the least," said John E. "Chip" Akridge, a local developer. "I'm sure a year ago they would have rethought their decision if they knew what was going to happen."

Critics also see irony -- and some justice -- in this predicament. "They are certainly getting what they deserve," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group. "Mortgage bankers encouraged people to take out mortgages that were very risky, and the result of that was a large number of the mortgages went bad and caused mortgage interest rates to soar. Now they are the victims of high mortgage rates and chaos in the market more generally."

Oil, gas officials voice concern on possible drilling halt - Farmington Daily Times

Link: Oil, gas officials voice concern on possible drilling halt - Farmington Daily Times.

Lines are drawn in a classic northern New Mexico land-use battle as Rio Arriba County Commissioners move to impose a six-month moratorium on new oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, the Texas company poised to drill in the Tierra Amarilla region of the county is pleading ignorance of the county's environmental concerns.

Rio Arriba County is rooted deeply in land-use issues. It was in Tierra Amarilla that a group of Spanish land grant protesters seized control of the county courthouse June 3, 1967, to focus attention on land-use matters.

If county commissioners follow through with plans to slap a six-month countywide moratorium on oil and gas drilling later this month, oil and natural gas workers in San Juan County stand to take a significant hit, local industry officials claim.

That's because although both counties produce natural gas in the northwest part of New Mexico, only San Juan County is home to the workers whose jobs are in the San Juan Basin's oil and gas patch.

U.S. Cannot Manage Contractors In Wars, Officials Testify on Hill - washingtonpost.com

Link: U.S. Cannot Manage Contractors In Wars, Officials Testify on Hill - washingtonpost.com.

With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.

At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

Governor rejects efforts to reform title insurance - SantaFeNewMexican.com

Link: Governor rejects efforts to reform title insurance - SantaFeNewMexican.com.

Gov. Bill Richardson has turned down requests from state regulators, the attorney general and others to have the Legislature consider reforms of the title insurance industry, which contributed to Richardson's presidential campaign.

Advocates say legislation is needed to bring price competition to the title insurance system, which could lower closing costs for home buyers.

Richardson will not put title insurance on the agenda of the 30-day session, but the industry's political contributions played no role in the governor's decision, according to a Richardson spokesman, Allan Oliver.

Appeals court upholds toxic waste ruling - SantaFeNewMexican.com

Link: Appeals court upholds toxic waste ruling - SantaFeNewMexican.com.

The state Court of Appeals has upheld a decision by the Environment Department that lets Sandia National Laboratories cover a toxic waste dump with dirt rather than dig it up.

The appellate court, in a ruling issued Wednesday, affirmed Environment Secretary Ron Curry's decision in 2005 not to require excavation of the Albuquerque-area landfill.

Ohio report shows ES&S m100 vulnerable to vote switching

Link: 1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released .

The EVEREST researchers described a vulnerability in the ES&S M100 optical scanner in which simply flipping the write-protect switch on the device's CF card to "on" would result in a precinct-wide undercount that's extremely hard to detect. If this switch is activated after the polls are opened and reset before the polls are closed...the internal counts of the m100, and the paper tape reports will be correct and the system will function normally, but the counts of the votes scanned will not be added to the electronic media delivered to the central Board of Elections...

To add to the level of difficulty in detection of the exploit, while the physical ballots are in the ballot box in the correct number and the paper tape shows the correct number, the memory card is delivered to the central Board of Elections where it is read and processed. The current processes in use in most polling places are a simple review of the paper tapes, which would be correct. As such, it is likely that unless close scrutiny or recounts of the precinct were performed that surgical use of this vulnerability would go undetected. Note that this write-protect switch is apparently easy to flip accidentally.

Obviously, turning on the write-protect for the duration of a whole election would cause that machine's precinct to report "zero" votes cast, thereby tipping off election officials that something was wrong. But if a malicious precinct worker were to just reach down periodically and flip the switch on and off during the course of a day's polling, he or she could easily cause a serious undervote that would only be detected by a hand count of the optical scan ballots.

Voting Machines Used in N.M. Elections Decertified by CO Secretary of State due to programming errors and lack of security

Following an internal assessment of voting machines used in 2004 and 2006, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman fired off letters to major voting machine vendors informing them that their products had been decertified for use do the detection of serious flaws in their programming that could jeopardize the integrity of the 2008 vote count.

Listed below are the machines decertified and the primary reasons for their disqualification. Note that Precinct Optical Scanner, M100, decertified due to an "inability to complete testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programmer errors," is the same model used in every precinct in the state of New Mexico.

Note that the ES&S iVotronic systems were decertified due to "vulnerability to security attack" and "failure to provide audit-able data to detect security violations." The iVotronic was used exclusively on election day 2004 in San Juan County, NM… no other NM County used this equipment. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Native American populations was 5.8%. The election day undervote rate in precincts with >50% Anglo populations was 2.3%.

In addition, Colorado decertified Sequoia Voting Systems (CO Sequoia Decertification.pdf ) for "failure to operate in a secured state requiring passwords" and "failure to provide auditable data to detect security violations." Sequoia Voting systems were used throughout New Mexico during the 2004 election. To see exactly where, check out this link.

To learn more about irregularities in the 2004 election due to e-voting, check out this study of the 2006 elections results, published on Brad Blog.

Lawyers from firm that does state business also give thousands to governor's campaign - SantaFeNewMexican.com

Link: Lawyers from firm that does state business also give thousands to governor's campaign - SantaFeNewMexican.com.

Lawyers with a New Mexico firm that has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from contracts with the state are among the top contributors to Gov. Bill Richardson's presidential campaign.

Lawyers with the firm of Sutin, Thayer and Browne have donated $36,465 to Richardson's campaign.

The firm has received at least $750,000 from the state for providing legal services to the Richardson administration under two contracts since mid-2005.

A number of large donors to Richardson's campaign do business with state government or have an interest in legislation, and a critic says that creates the appearance of favoritism.

However, Gilbert Gallegos, a spokesman for the governor, said Richardson "had no role with any contract that the Sutin law firm has with the state."

PRC hosting forum on Nuclear Power

From Break The Grip!: PRC Hosts Nuclear Forum Today

We have just learned that the PRC is hosting a forum today on Nuclear Power with speakers: at the PRC Hearing Room at the PERA building just after 9:30 am. The PERA building is located at the Northeast corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta.

The PRC's agenda listing is:
"COMMENT ON THE FUTURE OF NUCLEAR ENERGY: VICE-CHAIRMAN JASON MARKS, PRESENTED BY BRUCE BARNABY, MARVIN MOSS, DON HANCOCK, DAVE MCCOY AND JIM FERLAND"

Public comment is scheduled just before this.

This forum comes on the heels of PNM installing a Mr. Jim Ferland, a major nuclear industry player, to head new generation development for PNM in May. During the same week that this occurred, Governor Bill Richardson began openly supporting nuclear power development.

Nuclear power development has consistently paved the way for nuclear weapons development throughout the world. Yet the Bush Administration is proposing to re-start reprocessing nuclear fuel rods, precisely the approach that enabled India, for example, to acquire nuclear weapons in three short years in the late 1960s after they pledged publicly not to (we gave them the technology on the basis of their pledge). The National Academy of Sciences recently called for putting the brakes on Bush's plan: Click here to read.

Meanwhile, industry is pushing ahead to turn New Mexico into a one-stop nuclear store: Chevron, Hydro Resources, and others are all pushing to re-start uranium mining here; LES is already building an enrichment plant near Eunice, NM, and another is proposed; A reprocessing facility is being proposed near Roswell, New Mexico. And a BTG! member heard an Association of Commerce and Industry, the most powerful business lobby in the state, say that they intend to see a nuclear power plant built in New Mexico within ten years.

Finally, the attempt by the Richardson Administration and PNM to drastically weaken renewable energy provisions of the so-called Renewable Energy Transmission Authority" suggests that this is also really about building more conventional power plants.

AbqJournal August Article Said NM is dodging Mortgage Fallout

Link: ABQjournal Business: Why Albuquerque and New Mexico are Dodging the Foreclosure Storm.

New Mexico, with the Albuquerque metro area leading the way, is bucking the national trend toward increasing home foreclosures. Substantially fewer New Mexico home buyers stopped making payments on their mortgages during the first half of this year compared to last year, according to a recent report. While foreclosures were down 30 percent in New Mexico, they were up 58 percent nationwide in the first half of 2007. The national average was one out of 134 households. During the first six months of this year, one out of every 395 households in New Mexico was at some stage in foreclosure, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac. "Some of the larger, more populous states are driving the high national foreclosure rate," said Daren Blomquist of RealtyTrac.

Uranium plant eyed for southern New Mexico

Uranium plant eyed for southern New Mexico: "CARLSBAD, N.M. - A French corporation is looking at U.S. locations for a uranium enrichment facility, including an area between Carlsbad and Hobbs."

(Via Stateline.org RSS - New Mexico.)