Ariz. mom facing drug charge released in Mexico

NOGALES, Mexico (AP) ? A U.S. woman jailed in Mexico on a drug-smuggling charge was released late Thursday night after court officials reviewed her case.

Yanira Maldonado was greeted by well-wishers as she walked out of the jail and hugged her husband, Gary, as officials closed the jail doors behind her.

Maldonado was arrested by the Mexican military last week after they found nearly 12 pounds (5.4 kilograms) of pot under her seat on the commercial bus traveling from Mexico to Arizona.

Her release came hours after court officials reviewed security footage that showed her and her husband boarding a bus in Mexico with only blankets, bottles of water and her purse in hand.

She briefly spoke to reporters gathered outside the jail, saying she thanks God, her husband and her lawyer.

With that she walked hand in hand with her husband to a waiting car and departed.

Gary Maldonado said earlier Thursday that he was confident that the video should exonerate his wife in the nightmare scenario that has prompted outrage in the U.S. among politicians and pitted the conservative Mormon family against a judicial system that has long struggled with corruption.

Gary Maldonado was arrested by the Mexican military last week after they found nearly 12 pounds of pot under his wife's bus seat on a commercial bus traveling from Mexico to Phoenix. After Yanira Maldonado begged the soldiers to allow her to come along to serve as her husband's translator, the military officials decided to release him and arrest her instead, he said.

The family's lawyer in Nogales, Jose Francisco Benitez Paz, had predicted to reporters earlier that her was "100 percent" confident she would be freed once a judge reviewed the video from the bus company.

He noted that it was a fairly sophisticated smuggling effort that included packets of drugs attached to the seat bottoms with metal hooks ? a task that would have been impossible for a passenger like Maldonado.

"All the evidence they have is the drug under the seat," he said.

The Maldonados were traveling home to the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear after attending her aunt's funeral in the city of Los Mochis when they were arrested.

Gary Maldonado said authorities originally demanded $5,000 for her release, but the bribe fell through. When the couple tried to defend themselves, military officials told them the court would sort it out, Gary Maldonado said.

The couple took the bus because they thought it would be safer than driving. They had taken a similar bus during a separate trip in Mexico.

"We never thought this would ever happen," said Gary Maldonado, who doesn't speak Spanish and couldn't understand the court proceedings involving his wife.

Drug traffickers have increasingly been using passenger buses to move U.S.-bound drugs through Mexico.

In a notorious case, federal police in 2011 found half a ton of marijuana hidden under the seats of a bus headed to Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. They arrested the driver and two other people.

Federal agents and soldiers have set up checkpoints throughout Mexico's main highways and have routinely seized cocaine, marijuana, heroin and other illegal drugs from buses.

When drug suspects are arrested in Mexico, they face a murky situation. Mexico's justice system is carried out largely in secret, with proceedings done almost entirely in writing.

Four years ago, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, but it still has stiff penalties for drug trafficking.

Mexican law doesn't specify a minimum or maximum sentence in drug crimes and leaves it up to the judge to decide how long the sentence should be, said Jose Luis Manjarrez, a spokesman for federal prosecutors in Mexico.

The bus passed through at least two checkpoints on the way to the border without incident. In the town of Querobabi in the border state of Sonora, all the passengers were ordered off the bus and a soldier searched the interior as they waited. The soldier exited and told his superiors that packets of drugs had been found under seat 39, Yanira Maldonado's, and another seat, number 42. Her husband was in seat 40.

Gary Maldonado said a man sitting behind them on the bus fled during the inspection. He believes the man might have been the true owner of the drugs.

Mexican officials provided local media with photos that they said were of the packages Maldonado is accused of smuggling. Each was about 5 inches high and 20 inches wide, roughly the width of a bus seat. The marijuana was packed into plastic bags and wrapped in tan packing tape.

Earlier this week, Benitez presented testimony from Yanira Maldonado and from two relatives who accompanied the couple to the Los Mochis bus station, and two fellow passengers on the bus. All four testified that she had not been carrying any drugs.

He described her as depressed while in jail, but she had not been abused or mistreated.

"She doesn't accept any of the accusations that are being made," he said earlier. "She is sad because of the situation, in which she's being accused of a crime she didn't commit."

On Wednesday, an army lieutenant, a private and another sergeant were supposed to appear in court but they did not show up. The army did not explain why, Benitez said.

The lawyer said he had requested a list of the bus passengers and video of the passengers boarding in Los Mochis, and presented letters from people he described as prominent American officials vouching for Maldonado's character. He said he was awaiting financial information proving she would have no need to earn cash smuggling drugs.

A search of court records in Arizona didn't turn up any drug-related charges against Yanira or Gary Maldonado.

The Mexican Embassy in Washington said in a statement Tuesday that Yanira Maldonado's "rights to a defense counsel and due process are being observed." The embassy didn't respond to allegations she was framed.

Yanira Maldonado is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico, her family said. She and Gary Maldonado were married one year ago, and they celebrated their anniversary while she was jailed.

Jen Psaki, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, said U.S. consulate officials in Mexico were closely monitoring the case. State Department officials visited her Friday.

"Private citizens who travel abroad are expected to, of course, abide by the law in the country where they are visiting, and the consular office is in touch when cases like this arise to be helpful in advising," Psaki said in a press briefing in Washington on Wednesday.

___

Weissenstein contributed from Mexico City. Also contributing were AP writers Olga Rodriguez in Mexico City and Lara Jakes in Washington and researcher Barbara Sambriski in New York.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-woman-facing-drug-charge-released-mexico-062358842.html

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Social Security and Medicare: time running out to fix them, trustees say

The underlying financial condition of Social Security and Medicare did not change greatly in 2012 and both are still on borrowed time, trustees of the massive, politically sensitive programs said in separate annual reports issued Friday.

The longer Congress waits to deal with the financial shortfalls both programs face due to an aging population, the more painful the solutions will need to be, the trustees said. The window for effective action ?is in the process of closing ... as we speak,? public trustee Charles Blahous warned at a briefing for reporters. ?The primary story this year for Social Security is the cost of another year?s delay,? he added.

Projections for Social Security?s financial health are ?essentially unchanged,? Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said. The trust funds for retirement and survivors benefits and a separate fund for disability payments, when considered together, have a projected depletion date of 2033, unchanged from last year?s annual report. After the reserves were depleted, continuing payroll tax receipts would be sufficient to pay three quarters of promised benefits through 2087.

RECOMMENDED: How much do you know about US entitlement programs? Take our quiz.

Medicare trust funds run out of money sooner than those for Social Security. The trustees say the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund ? one of two funds that support the program ? will have enough money to cover its obligations fully until 2026 ? which is two years longer than predicted in last year?s report. After that, the share of hospital costs that could be financed with payroll tax revenues would decline from 87 percent in 2033 to 70 percent in 2050 and later, the trustees said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, one of the trustees, said that President Obama?s Affordable Care Act ?has helped put Medicare on more stable ground,? without eliminating services to recipients through various cost-reducing measures.

In a White House blog post, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling noted that the Medicare trustees project that the Part B premium, which pays to cover doctors? services, would not increase between 2013 and 2014.

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?Clearly we have one near-term forcing event? in terms of prompting congressional action, said public trustee Blahous, a research fellow at Stanford University?s Hoover Institution. The disability insurance trust fund is projected to be exhausted by 2016. Beyond that date, payroll tax receipts would be able to pay only 80 percent of scheduled disability benefits. One option for dealing with the shortfall would be to divert funds from the retirement benefit trust fund, but Mr. Blahous notes that would only add to the long-term problems facing the retirement fund.

The political and financial stakes are huge in attempting to address Social Security?s and Medicare?s financial woes. Some 58 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits, the Associated Press says. And as Acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris said at Friday?s briefing, many employers have stopped paying pensions where the benefits are set in advance.

?This is not your grandfather?s retirement,? he said, making Social Security and Medicare even more important to seniors.

The public trustees warned that ?each passing year of legislative inaction reduces the likelihood that a solution can be found that is acceptable to lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle.? Waiting until 2033, when the retirement trust fund runs out, would require huge cuts in benefits to keep the system solvent.

Benefits would have to be cut 23 percent across the board ? including those already being received by retirees. If an effort was made to confine the cuts to those newly eligible for retirement but not those already getting benefits, ?even wiping out 100 percent of their benefits would be insufficient? to close the system?s funding gap, Blahous said.

RECOMMENDED: How much do you know about US entitlement programs? Take our quiz.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/social-security-medicare-time-running-fix-them-trustees-215813350.html

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Origins of key cells in the thymus

May 30, 2013 ? Medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs) allow the thymus to ensure that the body's T cells are able to distinguish between potentially harmful foreign antigens and those that are produced by the body itself. A Swiss-Japanese research team suggests that mTECs do not share a common progenitor with cortical-thymic TECs (cTECs) that produce T cells, but may actually evolve from them.

T-lymphocytes, or T cells, are a principal component of the body's adaptive immune system. Together, these cells express a large repertoire of antigen specific receptors that recognise foreign material derived, for example, from pathogens and tumour cells. The generation of these antigen receptors occurs during T cell development in the thymus. This constitutes, however, a random process that also includes the formation of antigen receptors which respond well to the body's own proteins, so-called self-antigens. To prevent T cells bearing a self-reactive antigen receptor to exit from the thymus to the rest of the body where they may cause autoimmunity, a mechanism is in place that involves mTECs. These specialised thymic epithelial cells express most of the body's self-antigens. T cells that recognise their specific antigen presented by mTECs will undergo a process of programmed cell death and are consequently deleted in the thymus.

Very little is presently known about how cTECs and mTECs develop, or how they relate to each other. A Swiss-Japanese research team now reports that mTECs derive from cells that already express ?5t, a proteasome subunit that is densely concentrated in cTECs and no other cell types, including mTECs themselves. This finding, which is published in the May 27-30, 2013 edition of PNAS, suggests that mTECs may evolve from cTECs. This finding has not only implications for how mTECs develop, but also how they may have evolved.

The research project was led in Switzerland by Prof. Georg Holl?nder, Professor of Paediatric Immunology at the University of Basel and Action Research Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford. In Japan, the project was led by Prof. Yousuke Takahama of the Institute for Genome Research at the University of Tokushima, which initially discovered the ?5t proteasome subunit. Dr. Izumi Ohigashi of the Institute for Genome Research at the University of Tokushima and Dr. Saulius Zuklys at the University Children's Hospital of Basel serve as first authors.

Broad Potential

Professor Holl?nder believes that the benefits of a better understanding of the origins and functions of mTECs and cTECs extend well beyond basic research. The team's findings suggest that evolutionary pressures have caused the body to check the quality of T cells that it produces. The T cell antigen receptor repertoire in evolutionary older species have a receptor, and did not require the body to implement quality control -- but as the capacity developed to produce a seemingly infinite number of T cell antigen receptors the vital need to control their specificities has arisen. For this purpose the body may have "hijacked" existing cells, namely cTECs. Holl?nder also believes that the findings could inform attempts to reconstruct or develop in-vitro thymuses, which could in turn be used to help people who lack a normal thymus function because of inborn or acquired defects. "You can fix things if you know how they are formed in the first place," he claims.

The research was supported by Grants-In-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and by a Strategic Japanese-Swiss Cooperative Program on Molecular Medical Research from the Japan Science and Technology Agency and the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)-Z?rich.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/l6Ll4r0j9EM/130530094638.htm

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Dish puts Sprint bid for Clearwire under pressure

By Sinead Carew and Liana B. Baker

NEW YORK (Reuters) - One of the biggest minority shareholders in Clearwire Corp, on Thursday urged the wireless company to recommend against Sprint Nextel Corp's buyout offer after Dish Network Corp made a counter bid.

Crest Financial, which holds about 8 percent of Clearwire shares, said Clearwire should open itself to competitive bidding, and said that even though Dish's bid late Wednesday appeared superior it may still prove inadequate to shareholders.

In a statement late Thursday, Clearwire said it would adjourn its Friday meeting in which shareholders were expected to vote on Sprint's $3.40 per share offer, after Dish's latest counter bid of $4.40 per share. It said the meeting will reconvene on Thursday, June 13, giving the special committee nearly two weeks to decide on Dish's latest proposal.

Clearwire also said its special committee found Dish's latest proposal to be more "actionable" than Dish's previous one.

The new offer further complicates a consolidation scenario in which Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen is also competing against Japan's SoftBank Corp to buy Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service provider.

Sprint is the majority owner of Clearwire.

Some analysts speculated as to whether the Clearwire bid indicates that Dish would be happy with an investment in the smaller company or a spectrum purchase from Clearwire.

But Dish said it was not backing down from its bid for Sprint. "Our Clearwire offer in no way diminishes our interest or vision for a combined Dish/Sprint," a Dish spokesman said.

Clearwire, which in April warned it could default on debt interest payments due June 1 if the Sprint deal did not go through, said on Thursday it plans to make those payments, totaling about $255 million, on its first-priority, second-priority and exchangeable notes.

Under Sprint's December proposal to buy out Clearwire, the smaller company had the option to draw on $800 million in convertible debt in 10 monthly installments. But Clearwire said it has decided to forego the June $80 million draw under that arrangement, upon the recommendation of its special committee.

On the same day that Dish made the bid for Clearwire, Ergen and other Dish executives involved in the Sprint bid were holding meetings at Sprint's Overland Park, Kansas, campus as part of the due diligence process for that offer, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Whatever Dish's motivation for the Clearwire bid, analysts said it spells trouble for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and his efforts to gain approval for Softbank's $20.1 billion bid for Sprint at a shareholder vote on June 12.

Softbank had approved Sprint's bid to buy Clearwire.

BTIG telecom analyst Walter Piecyk said SoftBank should come up with a higher bid for Sprint soon, as Dish's Clearwire bid effectively reduces the value of Softbank's bid for Sprint.

"If Masa doesn't figure out how to regain control of the Clearwire process he may have a much harder time convincing Sprint shareholders that his Sprint offer is superior to Ergen's," Piecyk said.

SoftBank gained clearance to go ahead with its Sprint offer earlier this week from a key U.S. government committee but needs more regulatory approvals.

Dish, which had tried to buy Clearwire in January, appeared to strengthen its case with Clearwire by excluding conditions from the new bid that had made it very difficult for Clearwire to accept the previous offer.

Clearwire had said it could not act on the January offer from Dish for $3.30 per share because some of the bid conditions went against previous agreements that Clearwire had with Sprint.

Since Dish removed some of the conditions in its new bid, another source said that Ergen appeared to have "made a serious offer that is actionable" and that the board and its special committee will have to review the proposal carefully.

"This is a much improved offer from Dish, not just the dollar amount," said the source who asked not to be named. "He's got himself in the game now."

A money manager at one big Clearwire shareholder sounded happy with the latest offer from Dish on Thursday even as the person declined to comment specifically on the price.

Five months ago, when Dish made its first bid for Clearwire, "I don't think anybody on the special committee would have thought that we would be where we are today," the money manager said. "That's largely because of the resolve of Clearwire independent shareholders."

Clearwire shares closed up 29 percent at $4.50 on Thursday, above Dish's latest offer of $4.40, after Ergen started advertising his tender offer to Clearwire shareholders.

Any purchase of Clearwire would need approval from more than 50 percent of Clearwire's majority shareholders.

Before the latest Dish offer, many shareholders had said they were unhappy with Sprint's bid for Clearwire - even after it recently raised the price per share to $3.40 from $2.97. Crest Financial has been leading a proxy battle against the deal.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Additional reporting by Zeba Siddiqui; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Leslie Adler and Richard Chang)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dish-puts-sprint-bid-clearwire-under-pressure-003112847.html

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Jamstar, Real Racing 3, and More

Regretting that you never had time to pursue your rockstar ambitions? What about childhood fantasies of being a race car driver? Interior designer? Well, whatever your secret dreams may be (well, assuming they're one of the above), this week's slew of Android apps want to make them become a reality?a virtual one, but a reality nonetheless. Sort of.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/0Z-Hslu1TGg/jamstar-real-racing-3-and-more-510753420

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With Chemical Tweaks, Cement Becomes A Semiconductor

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. In 2011, a group of researchers in Japan made a surprising discovery: With the right process, they could turn cement, in fact a component of the Portland cement you can find in the hardware store, they can turn that into a metal, and in its metallic state they could coax the cement to act as a semiconductor.

Now researchers report on why it can happen, work that could help fine tune the process and make semiconducting cement more widespread. Think light, cheap electrodes, battery components, a concrete computer screen. Well, we'll ask the scientist involved. Chris Benmore is a physicist in the X-ray Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. He's one of the authors of a paper on the research published this week in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

CHRIS BENMORE: Thank you.

FLATOW: When you say, you really mean the cement like we can buy a bag at the lumber yard?

BENMORE: Well, a component of that cement, one called mayenite. Yes, they've managed to treat that in such a way that you can turn it from an insulator into a metal. And what we've done is we've used very powerful experiments or in theoretical probes to explain why that happens. And so this opens up a whole new area for designing new materials.

FLATOW: When you say turning it into a metal, this is something that was discovered, as I said, a few years ago. Does it - is it hard - does it harden into concrete like cement does when it's finished?

BENMORE: It turns a different color. It's actually a glass. So it's basically a liquid that's quenched to form a solid glass, not unlike the one you would drink out of, but it's actually black, and it has very different properties once it's in that state to what it would normally have basically in the bag at the hardware store.

FLATOW: So once it's in this glass form, it becomes a metal, a semiconductor like transistor material, stuff like that?

BENMORE: Yes, the conductivity increases massively, and it acts as if it were a metal, that's right.

FLATOW: And you have discovered why that happens?

BENMORE: Yes, what we've done, the initial discovery was by the Japanese, and they have lots of applications for it already, but what we've managed to do is figure out how it happens and why it works. So we've used very powerful X-rays to look into where the atoms are and how they're arranged and how they can trap the electrons to make this massive conductivity change.

FLATOW: So they have to make - electricity is the flow of electrons. So you have to find a way of having excess electrons to flow around, and you trap them there, and that's how you made concrete into - cement into a metal.

BENMORE: That's right. The cement is actually reduced with titanium, and so it takes the electrons from that, but the actual structure traps those, traps those electrons, and they're sort of free electrons, and they create the - that's where the conductivity comes from.

The trick, as it turns out, is how this structure arranges, how the different atoms in the cement arrange themselves and the charges they take to actually trap those free electrons and increase the conductivity.

FLATOW: So you could turn, then, cement into sort of semiconductor electronic parts?

BENMORE: That's right. It's been proposed that you could use this technology for tutable(ph), lightweight metal oxides or electrodes or fuel cells or mainly actually for flat-panel displays because it's a glass. You could make a big glass sheet of it.

FLATOW: Wow, and I bet you since it's an abundant item, right, you can buy it in a hardware store...

BENMORE: Yes, it's basically in slag. It's basically a very common material, a calcium aluminate that's called mayenite that you can - that's very readily available so very cheap.

FLATOW: So you can engineer it and design it into almost any shape, size, form you want to, then?

BENMORE: It's - you have to heat it up pretty high to make it liquid, but since it's a glass you can mold it into various different forms, that's right. So it's very versatile in that way.

FLATOW: Is this - does this - this explanation of how it works, does this offer you and other scientists an opportunity to study other materials or find out other ways things might work and become semiconductors?

BENMORE: Absolutely. I think the reason we were able to figure it out is because we have these very powerful probes like this very high-energy, very powerful X-ray source and these supercomputers where we were able to look at the atomic level of how the atoms are arranged and when they're arranged in a certain way why they exhibit this behavior.

And we can try and reproduce that in other materials and maybe even enhance it in design from the bottom up, new types of materials that have very strange properties.

FLATOW: And I think it's quite fascinating the tools that you use. One of the tools you used was an aerodynamic levitation furnace. It sounds like out of a science fiction movie.

BENMORE: It sort of is magical. It's basically a gas jet, like you might have a hairdryer, and you can float a ping-pong ball on it. I think we've all done that as kids. And in that same way we can basically float a little chunk of cement, and we can fire a laser at it to melt it.

And in that way when it cools from the melt, it will glass. It won't hit a surface and crystallize. So it's a part of the way of getting a pristine sample that we could do our experiments on without any contamination to make this material.

FLATOW: If it forms in - you know, my chemical engineering, my civil engineering purists always say you're confusing cement with concrete.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: When it solidifies, is it a concrete, or is it a glass or somewhere in between?

BENMORE: It's a glass. Well concrete itself, or even cement, are both very complicated hydrates. This is just one component of the cement, calcium aluminate, and when you actually quench it, it forms a pretty hard glass. It does have voids in it, in fact that's part of the structure that allows it to conduct the way it is, but it's basically for all intents and purposes like a solid piece of glass.

FLATOW: So where do you go now with your work? What - how do you move this on further?

BENMORE: Right, well, we think we can probably find this phenomenon in lots of other materials that could exhibit the same behavior if we arranged them in the same way. So we're in the sort of stage of saying, well, what else can this happen in? Can we enhance this effect? Can we make it better, or could we find even other effects that could have maybe slightly different properties that we could tune for other applications?

FLATOW: Using this same cement or looking through other materials?

BENMORE: Looking at other materials, looking at different atoms within the cement, the ones that actually cause the phenomenon, looking at those and seeing if there are other ones, whether it's a widespread phenomenon or whether it's just associated with those ones in particular. That's quite an important thing, to see how it can be exploited for future applications.

FLATOW: You've got to be working on some other stuff, some other materials right now.

BENMORE: Oh, we're always working on lots of other materials, that's right. I mean, we work on everything from cement to spider silks to batteries, battery research. So we have an array of ideas and things going on at the lab.

FLATOW: Yeah, you guys at Argonne are always very busy.

BENMORE: That's true.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Well, and thank you very much for taking a little bit of time to talk with us today.

BENMORE: Oh, well thank you for having me on the show.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Chris Benmore is a physicist in the X-ray Science Division, that's at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois.

Copyright ? 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/31/187534465/with-chemical-tweaks-cement-becomes-a-semiconductor?ft=1&f=1007

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Jon Wellinghoff, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman, Announces Resignation

Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, speaks in Houston, Texas on Thursday, March 10, 2011. (F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON -- The head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is resigning.

A spokesman says FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff submitted his resignation letter to President Barack Obama on late Tuesday. Wellinghoff will remain at the commission until a replacement is nominated and confirmed by the Senate. He will continue as chairman and vote on matters before the commission.

Wellinghoff, a former Nevada utility regulator, has served as chairman of the energy panel since 2009 and has been a commission member since 2006.

FERC is an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon says that Wellinghoff launched important investigations to protect consumers from manipulation of energy markets and pushed to increase renewable energy supplies.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/jon-wellinghoff-federal-energy-regulatory-commission_n_3354163.html

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