White House

"House" star Kal Penn's much-heralded road from the Fox series to the White House seems to have hit a pothole, or at least taken a turn into a cul-de-sac. Since the start of the year, two senior Google (NSDQ: GOOG) executives have joined the Obama administration—and CEO Eric Schmidt has been appointed to the president’s advisory board on science and technology. Concerned in part over the company’s growing influence, two consumer groups are publicly opposing the appointment of a third Google executive to the White House.

The groups emphasize that they are not opposed to McLaughlin’s appointment solely because of his ties to Google, noting that “it would be just as inappropriate for a lobbyist from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) or any similar technology company to be appointed Deputy Chief Technology Officer.” However, the letter mentions two antitrust investigations the Justice Department has launched against Google as well as the already prominent presence of other Google executives in the Obama administration.

In a letter to the president dated Wednesday, Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy call for Obama not to move forward with the appointment of Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin as the nation’s deputy chief technology officer. “Given ... your commitment to a new standard for ethics in government, it would be a mistake to put Google’s top global policy person in a key leadership position with critical technology decisions for the federal government,” they write.

Malaak Compton Rock

Malaak Compton-Rock, wife of Chris Rock, covered by Soledad O’Brien today on CNN. Malaak Compton-Rock does exceptional work for impoverished children of South Africa. And what Malaak Compton-Rock says will inspire you. In the O’Brien report, she reflects on last August when she and 30 students from Brooklyn went to South Africa to serve orphans.

The 30 New York students were linked with with students 12 to 16 in South Africa. They were brought to South Africa by Malaak Compton-Rock. “I believe by traveling you open up your life. You don’t think locally, you start to think globally and internationally and I think it gives you a sense of confidence.”

Air France Crash Update

Air France crash data may be be lost at sea, but Brazil hopes to find the jet under the ocean sea. Brazil's president believes it will be technically possible to find the wreckage of the Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic earlier this week, and salvage the black box. However, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was quoted by the Globo daily as saying: "I think that a country that can produce oil at a depth of 6,000 meters will be able to find an airplane at a depth of 2,000 meters."

France has said the flight recorders from the plane, which went missing en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 passengers and crew on board early on Monday, are unlikely to be found due to the extreme depth. He said Brazil would continue "doing everything possible and impossible" to find the black box and the passengers' bodies. Brazil's Air Force said on Tuesday it had found fragments of the wreckage floating in the area where that the plane last made contact.

The French Bureau for the Investigation of Air Accidents said the black boxes would probably not be found due to insufficient information the mountainous terrain of the ocean floor, and that the wreckage could have sunk to a depth of 3,000 meters. The debris was discovered around 650 kilometers (390 miles) north of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago. Before losing contact, Air France Flight 447 had sent an automatic signal to airline maintenance computers from the area, indicating several technical failures.