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Still early days Capable on road Smooth & stable, linear power. More road focussed riding now. Will know more later. pic.twitter.com/RnegLgylpx — MCN Sport (@MCNSport) December 4, 2015

First taste of road and off road done. Quality, comfortable, easy to use electronics and sweet handling off road. pic.twitter.com/mlZIscOsaC — MCN Sport (@MCNSport) December 4, 2015

The time has come. Africa twin launch... pic.twitter.com/yqDO9m7mII — MCN Sport (@MCNSport) December 4, 2015

At the Presentation for the new Honda Africa Twin in Cape Town. Massive emphasis towards off road capabilities. pic.twitter.com/E6pr4RmyDy — MCN Sport (@MCNSport) December 3, 2015

Well it’s taken, months, years in fact it’s well over a decade, but today is the day we get to ride Honda’s long overdue Africa Twin.

The original bike, which arrived in the market back in 1988 was a popular choice for 15 years before being discontinued in 2003. Now nearly another 15 years has passed, but the new bike is finally here.

We’ve all seen the promotional videos, which got more and more dramatic, culminating in MotoGP man Marc Marquez and Dakar stage winner Joan Barreda thrashing the bikes off-road, so its fair to say expectation for the new bike is high.

In last night presentation by Honda’s engineers, designers and marketing staff the overwhelming message, was not only of new technology – the bike comes with 32 new registered patents, but also to its clear off-road capabilities.

Today’s riding takes place north of Cape Town and includes a 280km loop of mainly tarmac so we’re going to get to find out very shortly how well this talked about off-road capabilities and DNA transfers to the road.

Given that we are testing the bikes over two hours north of Cape Town, comms could be an issue but we’ll be doing our best to bring you an update to give first impressions with more information to follow this evening.0258367-c731196011c28963d49746f5e10f9428.txt0000644000000000000000000000230300000000000014476 0ustar 00000000000000Thieves apparently digging for buried relics have desecrated a Civil War battlefield in Virginia, causing damage to a field where more than 1,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed.

The National Park Service is calling the looting at the Petersburg National Battlefield an affront to the memory of those who fought and died on that field during the Siege of Petersburg 151 years ago.

Park officials said the field had been excavated in a number of spots.

“This kind of aberrant behavior is always disgusting, but it is particularly egregious as Memorial Day weekend arrives, a time when we honor the memories of our friends and family,” NPS superintendent Lewis Rogers said in a press release Friday, according to WRIC-TV.

The looted area has been designated a crime scene, the station reported. It was closed to visitors but the rest of the 2,700-acre park was still open.

WRIC spoke to park visitors Friday who said they were appalled looters would disturb such a historic site.

“This is a place we should all commemorate and honor our history as a nation,” Tom Philabaum, of Charlottesville, Virginia, said.

The looting at Petersburg is a federal crime punishable by up to two years in prison.0258232-1f7e3cc5e01a886dfb46e16f4725b436.txt0000644000000000000000000000365000000000000015123 0ustar 00000000000000The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case from Amazon that challenges a New York law requiring it to collect sales tax within the state, reports Bloomberg News. The law was passed in 2008 and requires that any out-of-state retailer collect taxes if it uses an in-state company to attract business. Amazon and Overstock challenged the law, but New York's highest court — the New York State Court of Appeals — upheld it. Though the law is meant to create a level playing field between in-state retailers and internet retailers like Amazon, which can advertise lower prices by not collecting sales tax, Amazon reportedly argued that the law "subjects internet retailers to significant burdens" in doing so.

Amazon can't avoid sales tax if it wants to build more distribution centers

Despite Amazon's protest against the law, the retailer has been increasingly willing to embrace sales tax lately as it opens distribution centers in more states. Traditionally, Amazon has only had to collect sales tax in states where it has a business presence — usually through one of its fairly limited number of distribution centers — but as states press harder for tax collection, it's shown a willingness to open in more locations.

After last night's announcement that Amazon plans to begin delivering packages within 30 minutes by small drones, adding distribution centers appears to be more necessary than ever. While there are likely bigger hurdles in Amazon's path than dealing with tax collection — namely, the FAA — the announcement suggests that Amazon will eventually have to give up on more of its state exemptions from collecting sales tax. That's something that many states and lawmakers would be excited to see: according to Bloomberg News, states are losing an estimated $23 billion each year in uncollected taxes because of internet retailers. Amazon has reportedly begun to change that by collecting taxes in 16 states — New York included.0258386-fec33cf916d6c881f13b2db345068b17.txt0000644000000000000000000002400200000000000015123 0ustar 00000000000000Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration is using federal security regulations written to thwart terrorism to deny public access to records that experts say could guide repairs to the Oroville Dam and provide insight into what led to the near catastrophic failure of its emergency spillway.

The administration also is blocking public review of records that would show how Brown’s office handled the February crisis at Oroville Dam that led to the two-day evacuation of nearly 200,000 Northern Californians.

Days after the evacuation orders were lifted in February, The Sacramento Bee filed requests to the state under the California Public Records Act. In one request, the newspaper sought design specifications, federal inspection reports, technical documents, the results of rock sampling and other information. Outside engineers told The Bee such records would likely provide an accounting of what caused a gaping chasm to form in the dam’s main concrete spillway on Feb. 7 and the near collapse of the dam’s emergency spillway a few days later.

The Bee also sought internal communications and emails from Brown’s office. Those records could show how Brown and his top staff members were coordinating the ongoing crisis with each other, with outside agencies and with members of the public.

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The administration denied the request for technical information about the dam and provided a limited response to the request for internal communications. Its secrecy has outraged state and federal lawmakers representing the people living below the dam, who frantically fled the area after officials warned of a “30-foot wall of water” cascading down the Feather River when the dam’s emergency spillway nearly gave way on Feb. 12.

“This is very, very disturbing to me,” said Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City. “We just want transparency. We want to know what happened up there and why this happened in the first place.”

Oroville resident Beth Bello said the state owes it to residents to provide full disclosure of what happened. Bello’s cellphone video of concrete debris and water blasting off the crumbling spillway in February went viral during the crisis. She said Tuesday she is far more concerned about state officials’ inability to maintain their facilities than she was about terrorism.

“The terrorist issue is irrelevant – completely irrelevant – to what happened to the spillway and the damage to it,” she said. “The structural integrity of it is much more of a threat than ever a terrorist, especially at this point in time.”

In denying the request for information about the dam itself, Brown’s Department of Water Resources cited provisions in state and federal law that allow government officials to block certain records because of security concerns.

“There is going to be a level of security over certain types of information,” acting DWR Director Bill Croyle said last week.

As for the internal discussions at Brown’s office, state lawyers cited exemptions to the public records law that allow the Governor’s Office to hide from public review any records centered around attorney-client discussions, “the records of correspondence of or to the governor’s staff,” and records that would show how officials were coming to a decision.

Brown’s office did provide The Bee a copy of 1,827 emails that didn’t fall under those exemptions, but they reveal next to nothing about how the state officials were discussing the crisis. Most of the emails consisted of electronic links to stories about Oroville in The Bee and other media outlets, copies of DWR news releases and memos summoning officials to the Governor’s Office or the State Operations Center at Mather airport.

The Bee requested an interview from Brown or a senior member of his staff on Monday. Brown spokesman Evan Westrup said he would check but he did not “anticipate an interview will be doable.” DWR didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The denials from Brown and his staff came after The Bee used public records to reveal that a team of consultants overseeing repairs at Oroville harbored serious doubts that state officials could complete repairs in a single season. The records, filed by DWR with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in March, also noted disturbing design flaws that could have caused the main spillway’s failure.

Until that point, DWR officials had been saying they believed they could completely repair the spillway by Nov. 1, the start of the next rainy season. They also said they still didn’t know the likely reason for the spillway’s failure.

Croyle, the acting DWR director, later said the report “shouldn’t have been made public” and defended the decision to file subsequent reports with the federal agency under seal. Those include two more recent reports from the outside consultants, one of which was filed Tuesday, as well as a pair of reports last month on the spillway gates and “project safety compliance.”

DWR also defended the decision to keep under wraps the bid documents that have been circulated among the four contracting firms that are bidding to do the repair work. “Because these designs are sensitive, the contents of those bid documents have been considered critical electrical and energy infrastructure … so they’re not made public,” said Jeanne Kuttel, DWR’s chief engineer.

Croyle said he has been consulting with Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea on keeping information under wraps. “We’re here to help with that balance between transparency and also security,” Honea said last week. “There are security issues associated with the design of these structures. If they were to be made public or fell into the wrong hands, they could be used to create havoc or harm.”

Although the design plans are still being finalized, and no price tag has yet been established, Croyle said he hopes to have signed contracts by next Monday. The tentative plan calls for leaving in place the giant chasm that’s been carved out of the adjacent hillside by misdirected water flows since the main spillway fractured Feb. 7. The chasm would be used next winter as a kind of safety valve for handling excessive outflows of water over the partially repaired spillway.

Croyle said DWR also plans to partially line the adjacent emergency spillway with concrete. That structure currently consists of a concrete lip and an unlined hillside.

The fracture of the main spillway led to a near disaster five days later, after Lake Oroville filled up and water flowed over the dam’s never-before-used emergency spillway. When it looked like the emergency spillway would falter because of severe erosion, unleashing a wall of water out of the dam, Honea ordered the evacuations of 188,000 downstream residents.

By no means are the Oroville documents the only records sealed under FERC’s “critical energy infrastructure information” regulations, or CEII. According to the commission, each year about 7,000 documents are filed under the CEII rules by pipeline operators, hydro-plant operators, electric utilities and others. DWR has to file the documents with FERC because the federal agency is in charge of the dam’s operating license.

Environmentalists and others have chafed under these rules, saying the regulations give dam operators and others too much leeway to keep documents sealed. “As a government entity, you shouldn’t be able to hide information when the information doesn’t have anything to do with critical infrastructure,” said Rupak Thapaliya of an environmental group called Hydropower Reform Coalition.

The regulations date to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when FERC was concerned about terror groups obtaining information that could be used to undermine the nation’s energy infrastructure. The regulations were toughened last year in response to the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, signed into law in 2015 by former President Barack Obama, which is designed to strengthen energy infrastructure security during emergencies.

“The Commission’s current Critical Energy Infrastructure Information process is designed to limit the distribution of sensitive infrastructure information to those individuals with a need to know in order to avoid having sensitive information fall into the hands of those who may use it to attack the Nation’s infrastructure,” FERC wrote in its update to the regulations last fall.

Among other things, the revised regulations say FERC employees who make unauthorized disclosures of critical infrastructure documents could lose their jobs or face criminal prosecution. Members of the public can sometimes be allowed to review the records if they sign a nondisclosure agreement – a requirement that apparently also extends to members of Congress.

U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, said he was told he’d need to sign one if he wanted to review the reports the state sent to federal regulators.

“Keeping these documents sealed further undermines what’s left of the state’s credibility and does nothing to assure residents that the situation is being addressed responsibly,” LaMalfa said in a written statement. “As the Representative of the area in Congress, the concept of signing a nondisclosure agreement which could prevent me from alerting my constituents and neighbors to potential dangers is not just inappropriate, but offensive.”

Wayne Dyok, former project manager of a major hydroelectric facility in Alaska who now lives in Rocklin, said he understands the need to keep sensitive dams and other facilities safe, so he supports some secrecy on the government’s behalf. But he said officials can use their ability to block all records to avoid legitimate outside scrutiny.

He said he believes the state and federal officials could redact some of the most sensitive information while also giving outsiders the ability to review documents that offer insights.