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Good Morning!
Gargoyle and topiary gardens, Longwood Gardens. July, 2012 by joanneleon
I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent - I remember this number - one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will - some of them will disappear.
~Steven Chu
Jimmie Buffet - Tryin to Reason with Hurricane Season
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News
Anxiously waiting for more news about the flooding and safety of the people of southern Louisiana.
Isaac pounds Gulf Coast, pushes water over levee
(CBS/AP) NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Isaac knocked out power, flooded Gulf-front roads and pushed water over the top of an 18-mile section of a rural Louisiana levee before dawn Wednesday as it began a slow, wet slog across the state with a newly fortified New Orleans in its path.
[ ... ]
Water pushed by the large and powerful storm flooded over an 18-mile stretch of one levee in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans, flooding some homes in a thinly populated area. No injuries were reported.
[ ... ]
Isaac came ashore at 7:45 p.m. EDT Tuesday near the mouth of the Mississippi River, driving a wall of water nearly 11 feet high inland and soaking a neck of land that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico. Its next major target was New Orleans, 70 miles to the northwest, where forecasters said the city's skyscrapers could feel gusts up to 100 mph.
Hurricane Isaac tops Louisiana levee on Katrina anniversary
(Reuters) - Hurricane Isaac drove water over the top of a levee on the outskirts of New Orleans on Wednesday, triggering life-threatening flooding seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, authorities said.
Emergency management officials in low-lying Plaquemines Parish reported the overtopping of the 8 or 9 foot (2.4 or 2.7 meter) high levee between the Braithwaite and White Ditch districts southeast of New Orleans.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said about 2,000 residents of the area had been ordered to evacuate but only about half were confirmed to have gotten out before Isaac brought driving winds and rain beginning late on Tuesday.
"On the east bank right now, we have reports of people on their roofs and attics and 12 to 14 foot of water (in their homes)," Nungesser told CNN.
HuffPo says they got a copy of the book from a bookstore. AP says they purchased a copy of the book yesterday. The book is being reviewed by the DoD (as of a few days ago) and the publisher just announced that they pushed the release date up from 9/11 to 9/4, six days from now (publishing a week early). It's not news that the official account of the raid was inconsistent and some of it seemed fictionalized, so I don't know how much political damage this book will do. Let the counterspin begin (and keep John Brennan away from any microphones). Maybe the campaign will decide to let the hurricane and the conventions dominate the news and not address this head on. The headlines today will be indicative and it depends on whether the media decides to hash it over for weeks or not. Only a few paragraphs are excerpted in this article. A Google News search for "bin Laden" shows hundreds of articles about the book and the circumstances around the movie.
I haven't read all the articles yet, but as far as I can tell, either the author doesn't reveal who shot bin Laden in the head or the media doesn't reveal that part of the book. So a lot of questions remain. And of course there is the question of how the media found out that the book was available and who sold it to them. Advance copies of books are not unusual but HuffPo says they bought it at a bookstore, AP says they purchased a copy. I don't think that is the usual advance copy process.
'No Easy Day,' Bin Laden Raid Book: Osama Was Unarmed
NEW YORK -- The much-anticipated firsthand account of the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden reveals the terrorist leader was unarmed and was already dead with a bullet to the brain when the SEALs entered his bedroom in the compound at Abbottabad, Pakistan.
As the SEALS ascended a narrow staircase, the team's point man saw a man poke his head from a doorway, wrote a SEAL using the pseudonym Mark Owen (whose real identity has since been revealed by Fox News) in “No Easy Day,” a copy of which was obtained at a bookstore by The Huffington Post.
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The book calls out inaccurate accounts of the assault. "The raid was being reported like a bad action movie," Owen writes. "At first, it was funny because it was so wrong."
"Apparently" was hit in the head -- another indication that the facts about who shot him are not revealed in the book.
SEAL book raises questions about bin Laden's death
WASHINGTON (AP) — A firsthand account of the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden contradicts previous accounts by administration officials, raising questions as to whether the terror mastermind presented a clear threat when SEALs first fired upon him.
Bin Laden apparently was hit in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top-floor hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction, according to former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen in "No Easy Day." The book is to be published next week by Penguin Group (USA)'s Dutton imprint.
Bissonnette says he was directly behind a "point man" going up the stairs. "Less than five steps" from top of the stairs, he heard "suppressed" gunfire: "BOP. BOP." The point man had seen a "man peeking out of the door" on the right side of the hallway.
Slain Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by a bullet to the brain before Navy SEALs had even entered his bedroom in a Pakistan compound, a new book reveals.\
Slain Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by a bullet to the brain before Navy SEALs had even entered his bedroom in a Pakistan compound, a new book reveals.
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Previous reports suggested Bin Laden was armed and had attempted to fight back in his final moments, but Owen describes the 9/11 mastermind as a coward.
“He hadn’t even prepared a defense,” he writes. “He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but didn’t even pick up his weapon. In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was.”
Politico speculates that maybe the "defense and intel communities" might be happy that the story is now even more confusing and the waters muddied.
SEAL book contradicts bin Laden narrative ...
None of the SEALs were fans of President Obama, according to the AP and HuffPo. Owen writes that he and his fellow SEALs believed the administration would take credit for ordering the raid and that one SEAL joked afterward that they had just secured Obama’s reelection. “We were tools in the toolbox, and when things go well they promote it,” Owen says. “They inflate their roles.”
Morning D’s take: Administration critics have faulted Obama for “leaking” information about the bin Laden raid, but in fact there are so many contradictory “facts” and accounts that it’s impossible to know what really happened. Maybe this is by design -- the defense and intel communities might quietly welcome the way Owen has once again muddied the waters. But the obfuscation started from day one, when the White House eagerly spun a narrative that included elements the Pentagon wouldn’t confirm, setting up parallel storylines that have never completely overlapped.
Judicial Watch Obtains Stack of ‘Overlooked’ CIA Records Detailing Meetings with bin Laden Filmmakers
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DOD) regarding meetings and communications between government agencies and Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy Award-winning director of The Hurt Locker, and screenwriter Mark Boal in preparation for their film Zero Dark Thirty, which details the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. According to the records, the Obama administration granted Boal and Bigelow unusual access to agency information in preparation for their film, which was reportedly scheduled for an October 2012 release, just before the presidential election, but the trailers are running now until the rescheduled release in December.
The records – which should have been produced months ago pursuant to a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on January 21, 2012 – include records from a “stack” of “overlooked” documents discovered by the CIA in July 2012. The following are highlights from the records, which include internal DOD, White House and CIA email correspondence with the filmmakers [ ... ]
NYT reporter leaked advance copy of Maureen Dowd column to CIA
Newly available CIA records obtained by Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group, reveal that New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti forwarded an advance copy of a Maureen Dowd column to a CIA spokesperson — a practice that is widely frowned upon within the industry.
[ ... ]
According to Judicial Watch, Mazzetti sent Harf an advance copy of Dowd's column, and wrote: “this didn’t come from me… and please delete after you read. See, nothing to worry about!”
No criminal charges to be laid against U.S. soldiers for burning Koran and urinating on corpses in Afghanistan
The U.S. is not laying criminal charges against soldiers responsible for burning Korans and Marines who urinated on enemy soldiers, a move that could alienate their Afghan allies at a time when “insider attacks” are on the rise.
Discipline against a Navy sailor in the Koran burnings was dismissed. The Marine Corps will announce discipline against other Marines in the urination case later.
Exact punishments were not disclosed. Administrative punishments can range from demotions to extra duty to a letter on their file.
U.S. arms sales nearly triple in 2011, researchers say
US arms transfers to other countries nearly tripled last year to $66.3 billion, giving America a market share of nearly 80 percent, government researchers said Monday.
The Congressional Research Service said the US figure for 2011 was the largest for a single year in the history of the arms export program.
Along with the Arctic Ice, The Rich World's Smugness Will Melt - The belief that Europe and America will be hit least by climate change is in ruins. Yet all we do is try to profit from disaster
What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet. Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007. The daily rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year. ... The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat that would previously have been reflected back into space is absorbed.
Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the Earth summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.
The companies that caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi republic into the Niger delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia wants to extend this industry into one of the world's most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.
Doctors fight “gag orders” over fracking chemicals
Under a new Pennsylvania law, natural gas companies must tell physicians the substances patients might have come into contact with. But doctors must sign confidentiality agreements promising they will use the information only for those patients’ treatment.
Some doctors say the agreements amount to gag orders that interfere with their ability to treat patients and to share information freely with colleagues and medical researchers. The conflict has led to a legal challenge by Pennsylvania nephrologist Alfonso Rodriguez, MD, against the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection. He claims that the law’s doctor-contract provision is vague and violates physicians’ First Amendment rights.
The issue is not limited to Pennsylvania. Across the nation, doctors are being drawn into the controversy over induced hydraulic fracturing, more commonly called fracking.
Rachel Corrie ruling ‘deeply troubling’, says her family
Corrie was killed on 16 March 2003, crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to obstruct the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border. ...
The lawsuit, filed by Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, of Olympia, Washington state, accused the Israeli military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence. The family had claimed a symbolic $1 (63p) in damages and legal expenses.
The judge said no damages were liable, but the family’s court costs would be waived. ...
Last week, the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, told the Corrie family that Washington remained dissatisfied with the the inquiry. Hussein Abu Hussein, the family’s lawyer, said: “This verdict is yet another example of where impunity has prevailed over accountability and fairness. Rachel Corrie was killed while non-violently protesting home demolitions and injustice in Gaza, and today, this court has given its stamp of approval to flawed and illegal practices that failed to protect civilian life."
U.S. consumer confidence plunges in August
US consumer confidence plunged in August to its lowest level in nine months, reflecting rising concerns over business and job prospects across the country, the Conference Board said Tuesday.
The board’s consumer confidence index dropped to 60.6 from 65.4 in July, though still well above the 45.2 index level of August 2011.
“A more pessimistic outlook was the primary reason for this month’s decline in confidence,” said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s economic indicators.
Blog Posts of Interest
Publisher’s Shock and Awe by emptywheel
The Diplomacy of Ambushes by emptywheel
Comrade Jindal now demanding MORE fed disaster aid than states normally get
Taylor Swift - Safe & Sound
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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