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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features blues and soul singer Johnny Adams. Enjoy!
Johnny Adams w/George Porter Jr. - Walking on a Tightrope
“History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.”
-- James Fenimore Cooper
News and Opinion
When the Academy Awards are handed out, history will be made
A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, tweeted for the hard of understanding, “FEATURE FILMS ARE NOT HISTORY. THEY ARE HISTORICAL FICTION.”
They are right — Hollywood is not a classroom. The problem, however, is that movies, despite the bonfires of distortion in many of them, can shape our understanding of political events just as much as think tank reports or Pulitzer-winning books. For instance, a lot of major movies are taught in schools. It is disingenuous for the screening room cognoscenti to pretend that films are of no political consequence and shouldn’t be critiqued for historical accuracy — and that’s particularly true for war films.
As Don Gomez, a soldier and blogger, wrote about “Zero Dark Thirty,” which portrayed torture as playing a crucial role in finding Osama bin Laden, “Filmmakers can always deflect criticism by saying ‘It’s a movie, not a documentary,’ which is true. But that ignores the reality of how it will be consumed — how they know it will be marketed and consumed.” And guess what — opinion polls show a majority of Americans think torture worked, just as ZDT said it did, even though an exhaustive Senate report concluded it did not.
A recent study conducted by Notre Dame researchers Todd Adkins and Jeremiah J. Castle indicated that movies are more effective in shaping political opinion than cable news or political ads. In the study, different audiences were exposed to different films and the evolution of their political beliefs was tested before and afterwards; there were statistically significant shifts. “Viewers come expecting to be entertained and are not prepared to encounter and evaluate political messages as they would during campaign advertisements or network news programs,” the authors wrote — meaning that viewers are not aware they are being targeted with political messages, so they are more likely to be persuaded by what they see on the screen. ...
When it comes to blockbuster tales about our ongoing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, the wrong lessons are deadly. If, as “American Sniper” suggests, people believe that Iraq was filled with crazed savages who had no reason to attack the foreign army in their midst, we risk engaging in more warfare in the region, because fighting sub-human Muslim fanatics is far easier to justify than killing and maiming innocent civilians, which is a lot of what actually happened.
John Boehner: Republicans will let Homeland Security funding lapse
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said on Sunday he was willing to let funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapse as part of a Republican push to roll back President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. ...
With a 27 February deadline near for funding Homeland Security, more than 40 Senate Democrats have voted three times this month to block consideration of the homeland security appropriations bill, which has already been approved by the House.
House Republicans have written their version of the bill so that it also blocks Obama’s actions on immigration. Democrats want to fund the department but oppose House amendments that strip funding from executive orders made in 2012 and 2014. Those orders lift the threat of deportation for millions of illegal immigrants.
Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, told CBS on Sunday Congress should fund Homeland Security, and said that though Congress would keep getting paid whatever happened, vital employees at the border and airports – among other places – would have to work without pay while the funding dispute lingered.
Copenhagen Attack Witness Inna Shevchenko Debates Scholar Tariq Ramadan on Religion and Free Speech
Netanyahu's calls for Jewish mass migration to Israel spark criticism
Repeated calls by Binyamin Netanyahu for Europe’s Jews to migrate en masse to Israel – the most recent following the attack in Copenhagen at the weekend – are increasingly attracting criticism from European political figures and Jewish community leaders.
The Israeli prime minister’s comments, which echoed remarks he made after the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, sparked irritation and suggestions the calls were being made for political reasons. ...
Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said he was disappointed by Netanyahu’s remarks. He said on Sunday: “Terror is not a reason to move to Israel. ...
His comments were echoed on Monday by Denmark’s ambassador to Israel, Jesper Vahr. “The Danish Jews’ solution is not to leave the country and, as our prime minister said, the attack on the Jewish community in Copenhagen is an attack on all the citizens of Denmark.
Curb Obama's endless war power, don't expand it
The Obama administration made news yesterday by requesting from Congress new authority to use military force against the Islamic State. ... The White House's proposal does not change or repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which launched the global war on terror.
The war has already started, and can continue regardless of what Congress authorizes if the 2001 AUMF is not repealed. If it seems absurd for a president to ask for permission to use military force six months after he already began bombing, it is. ... Since the president already believes he has full authority to wage this war, a new authorization that leaves the old one in place is simply political theater and not really an authorization. ...
This proposal goes against everything President Obama has said about his foreign policy intentions. In 2013 he stated a desire to "refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF's mandate." In a letter to Congress accompanying yesterday's draft proposal, he re-iterated the desire to work with Congress to narrow and repeal the 2001 AUMF. If that is indeed the president's goal, the only way to achieve it is to put an expiration date on the endless war authorization. And if that's going to happen, it has to happen now.
There has been a lot of talk about what to do with the forever war. This discussion has been going on since the AUMF was enacted in September 2001. Now is the time to stop talking, and start repealing. The 2001 AUMF is not going to fade out of use, it's not going to expire on its own, and there will likely never be a better vehicle to deal with it than through the exact debate that is happening right now. Nuanced discussions over the president's proposed force authorization are meaningless without a plan to once and for all put the 2001 AUMF in the dustbins of history. Let's hope Congress takes this rare window of opportunity to cancel the blank check for war it wrote nearly 14 years ago.
Egypt Launches Airstrikes Against Islamic State Targets in Retaliation for Beheadings
Egypt launched airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Libya on Monday morning, a day after the militant group released video purporting to show the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians.
Today's strikes were confirmed by Egypt's Armed Forces General Command, which said the goal was, "to avenge the bloodshed and to seek retribution from the killers." ...
The 21 people apparently executed in a video that was released by the Islamic State on Sunday were Egyptians who had been held as hostages, according to the state-run news agency MENA. A leader of the Coptic community confirmed their deaths to the network.
C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons
The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.
The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. ...
A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the government kept much of this information secret, from the public and troops alike.
These munitions were remnants of an Iraqi special weapons program that was abandoned long before the 2003 invasion, and they turned up sporadically during the American occupation in buried caches, as part of improvised bombs or on black markets.
The potency of sarin samples from the purchases, as well as tightly held assessments about risks the munitions posed, buttresses veterans’ claims that during the war the military did not share important intelligence about battlefield perils with those at risk or maintain an adequate medical system for treating victims of chemical exposure.
Has the IMF Annexed Ukraine?
Ukraine ceasefire in tatters as fighting escalates in east
Fighting has escalated in eastern Ukraine as government and pro-Russia forces struggle for control of the besieged town of Debaltseve, leaving the new ceasefire in tatters on its second day.
The Ukrainian military said on Monday that rebels had fired on its troops 112 times in the past 24 hours. At least five Ukrainian fighters have been killed and 25 wounded since the ceasefire began on Sunday, a military spokesman, Vladislav Seleznyov, told the Guardian.
Most of the fighting was concentrated around Debaltseve, where thousands of soldiers have been cut off from the main Ukrainian lines near Artemivsk by rebel artillery. Pro-Russia forces have been trying for weeks to take the town, which holds a rail junction connecting the main rebel centres of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The rebel leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, said this weekend his forces would observe the ceasefire everywhere except in Debaltseve. Kiev has repeatedly denied that Debaltseve is cut off, despite evidence to the contrary.
The continued fighting has stalled further implementation of the peace plan on both sides. Seleznyov said Kiev could not withdraw heavy weaponry until rebels stopped firing, while a military spokesman of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic said it would not pull back its weapons until there was a “full ceasefire”.
The Government Is Losing Territory In Eastern Ukrainians’ Hearts And Minds
KHANZHONKOVE, Ukraine — School was out for summer, and Ukrainian artillery fire was creeping ever closer, so, after lengthy deliberations with his parents, Sasha Vasin joined the rebel militia. He was 15 years old. “I wanted to do it from the first day. I couldn’t look at people dying anymore,” he said. ...
The stories of people like Sasha Vasin show how Ukraine’s central government has a far tougher task ahead than just winning back territory. In the very areas Ukraine is fighting to regain, near-constant artillery bombardment and a crippling economic blockade have hardened attitudes to the point of no return. Almost every day, shelling claims the lives of civilians: someone’s mother, husband, child. And every day, reconciliation between millions of Ukrainian citizens here and the Ukrainian government seems even further off.
A new cease-fire deal agreed on Thursday has raised hopes that Ukraine may be able to quell its war with Russian-backed rebels at last. In the last 10 months, the war has killed over 5,400 people, displaced a further million, and devastated large parts of Ukraine’s two easternmost provinces, once the country’s industrial heartland. ...
Officials in Kiev say that the rebels are doing all the shelling to discredit Ukraine. In Donetsk, that line has about as much credibility as Moscow’s denials its troops are fighting alongside the rebels do in Western capitals. “Everyone here is against Ukraine. When you hear the cannonade, you look at things differently,” said Ekaterina, a 20-year-old woman who declined to give her last name for fear of being expelled from the Ukrainian university where she is completing her studies online. “You don’t have to be a soldier to see where they’re firing from.”
The shelling is only one danger facing pensioners like Potemkina: They also face destitution and starvation. After it became clear last fall that Ukraine had little hope of regaining the rebel republics quickly despite a shaky cease-fire deal, Kiev cut off all state financial support for the area. The move was an attempt to call Russia’s bluff and force it to support the unrecognized rebel republics, whose leaders admit the region is not remotely economically viable alone. Instead, it disproportionately targeted the elderly, poor, and vulnerable. Potemkina must now travel to Ukrainian-held territory to get her pension. The trip can take days, thanks to an onerous new pass system instituted by Kiev — not to mention the frequent fighting that plagues the only four open exit points. Though the new cease-fire deal calls upon Ukraine to restore benefits and public workers’ salaries in the east, the uptick in fighting since its conclusion suggests things may well never come to that.
Mass Incarceration Has Been a Costly and Utter Failure: Report
Decades of mass incarceration have proven to be a costly and ineffective strategy to reduce crime, a groundbreaking report published Thursday found.
In fact, increased punishments and jailings have been declining in effectiveness for more than 30 years, according to the report, titled What Caused the Crime Decline? (pdf) and released by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Violent crime rates fell by more than 50 percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by 46 percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million. While incarceration may have initially had a positive outcome on the crime rate, it has reached a point of diminishing returns, the researchers said during a press call Thursday.
Mass incarceration is "a tragedy," writes Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Joseph Stiglitz in the foreword to the report. "With almost 1 in 100 American adults locked away behind bars, our incarceration rate is the world’s highest... nearly 40 percent of whom are African American. Yet lawmakers are slow to take action and public outrage is largely absent."
Hat tip mimi:
For Decades, Chicago Police Used City Jails as Torture Chambers
Meet American torture victim Darrell Cannon. On the morning of Nov. 2, 1983, Cannon, then 32 years old, was tortured while in the custody of the Chicago Police Department. Officers escorted him from his Southside home at 7:30am and took him to a local precinct where they shocked him in the testicles and the mouth with an electric cattle prod and struck his knees with a baton, trying to force him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. Cannon gave a false confession around 2pm that afternoon.
He spent the next 24 years in prison until he was exonerated and released in 2007. While serving his sentence, Cannon sued for damages in connection with the torture; he was awarded the paltry sum of $3,000 and left with $1,247 after costs and legal fees were deducted. ...
According to the Chicago-based People’s Law Office, members of the Chicago Police Department carried out hideous acts of torture against more than 120 Chicagoans, mostly African-American men. The abuse, which took place inside of police stations, lasted from 1972 until the early 1990s, and was instigated by police commander Jon Burge. Burge and his detectives subjected suspects to cattle-prodding of the mouth and genital areas, hours-long beatings, suffocation, and other forms of abuse to force them to confess to crimes of which they were often innocent. Most of the torture was carried out against residents of the city’s predominantly African-American Southside neighborhood.
Burge was fired from the force in 1993 for “mistreating a suspect” but it took until 2010 for him to be convicted on perjury charges for lying about using Chicago’s jails as torture chambers; as of 2015, he has not been convicted for torturing any of his victims. Burge was released from prison into a halfway house in Florida in October. Though the statute of limitations has expired for most of his victims to sue for damages, Burge still collects a $4,000-per-month pension and has cost the city and Cook County more than $100 million in legal fees and settlements. Approximately 20 of his victims have received $67 million in settlement money in connection with the torture they endured.
Despite Allegations of Starvation, Sex, and Maggots, Ohio Wants to Renew Privatized Prison Food Contract
Aramark Correctional Services, headquartered in Philadelphia, feeds more than 380 million meals to inmates at more than 500 detention facilities across America each year, according to its president, John Hanner. It also serves millions of more meals at 450 other venues across the US, including college campuses and hospitals. In Ohio, state authorities are recommending a renewal of its 24-month, $110-million contract with the company, despite allegations of prisoner starvation, food service workers having sex with inmates, and multiple maggot infestations.
The two-year contract allows a per-day meal cost of $3.71 an inmate, according to a state recommendation report obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday. This pricing is comparable to prisons in Indiana ($3.46 per day) and Michigan ($3.86), where Aramark also has contracts. ...
Ohio fined the food giant $272,000 for such "issues" in 2014. Since Aramark employees took over prison kitchens, replacing some 400 government workers, inmates across the state have logged thousands of complaints against Aramark, according to the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association (OCSEA), a union representing some 8,000 corrections employees.
"This is not about jobs and wages, it's about safety and security," OCSEA President Christopher Mabe, who has worked as a corrections officer for more than 25 years, told VICE News. "Food service is one of those issues on the top of the prison services list that either keeps the peace or can cause disruptions and possibly violence." ...
Last summer, "maggot-gate," as Mabe called it, gestated into a full-grown grub problem in a number of Ohio prisons. In August, fly larvae were found rising out of a kitchen floor drain at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) at Marysville, which houses the majority of female prisoners in the state, with roughly 2,500 inmates. Other incident reports at the prison revealed maggots were also found in a hotbox and crawling in a turkey roll, while larva were also uncovered beneath a stainless-steel food-serving line, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
FBI probes claim suspects in 1946 Georgia mass lynching may be alive
US authorities are investigating whether some of those responsible for one of the American south’s most notorious mass lynchings are still alive, in an attempt to finally bring prosecutions over the brutal unsolved killings.
FBI agents questioned a man in Georgia who was among several in their 80s and 90s newly named in connection with the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching of 1946 on a list given to the US Department of Justice by civil rights activists, he told the Guardian. ...
The Moore’s Ford incident, widely described as America’s last mass lynching, stands out as a particularly brutal case even in Georgia, where more lynchings were recorded between 1877 and 1950 than in any other state, according to the EJI study. The report was the result of almost five years of investigations into lynchings in 12 southern states.
No one was ever prosecuted for the killings on 25 July 1946 of two black couples in their 20s: George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Dorothy and Roger Malcom. According to unconfirmed claims from the time that are now asserted by campaigners, Dorothy Malcom was heavily pregnant and her unborn baby was cut from her body by the attackers.
An outraged President Harry Truman ordered a federal investigation and rewards totalling $12,500 – worth more than $150,000 today – were offered for information leading to a conviction. A grand jury was convened and heard evidence for three weeks. Yet no indictments were brought for the killings, which have long been linked to the Ku Klux Klan.
Krugman: Greece (and Europe) Deserve Democratic Ideals of Syriza
As leaders of the Syriza-led government of Greece participate in high-stakes meetings with their European creditors in Brussels on Monday, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is among those urging the so-called Troika negotiators—representing the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission—to do what is right by giving Athens the chance to unburden itself from the harshest austerity measures and reach a compromise deal on future lending.
Placing the current crisis in Greece in historical context as he compared it to the Weimar Republic of Germany following War World I, Krugman argues that Europe risks a much larger catastrophe if it continues to treat Greece as a defeated enemy.
Syriza's chief negotiator and finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has also made the comparison to post-war Germany and argued that debt forgiveness and reduction of austerity would insulate Greece from the rise of the nation's far-right forces, exemplified by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.
According to Krugman, Varoufakis' warning about what will happen to Greece if his government is not allowed to renegotiate the terms of the bailout program agreed to by the previous government should not be taken lightly. "More than ever," writes Krugman in his Monday column, "It is crucial that Europe’s leaders remember the right history. If they don’t, the European project of peace and democracy through prosperity will not survive."
Greece and eurozone partners still far apart as they go into talks
Greece and its European creditors began fresh talks on Monday over the country’s request to ease its bailout terms, but expectations for a quick deal are low despite a fast-approaching deadline.
Optimism was curbed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who said he's very skeptical that a solution can be found at the meeting in Brussels.
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the chairman of the 19-nation eurozone, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, declined to speak to reporters as they arrived at European Union headquarters in Brussels, some four hours ahead of the meeting’s scheduled start time.
Germany’s Schaeuble said Athens was in no position to make demands.
“I feel sorry for the Greeks,” he added. “They’ve elected a government that’s behaving pretty irresponsibly at the moment.”
In an Op-Ed in the New York Times Monday, Varoufakis said Greece is not looking to avoid paying its debts.
“We are asking for a few months of financial stability that will allow us to embark upon the task of reforms that the broad Greek population can own and support, so we can bring back growth and end our inability to pay our dues,” he wrote.
Time is short. If no deal is reached by February 28, Greece's banks could be cut off from affordable funding from the European Central Bank. A serious deterioration in Greek banks’ finances could cause depositors to withdraw money, potentially causing a collapse in the banking system. Ultimately, that could force the government to leave the eurozone — a move informally dubbed Grexit — so that it can print its own money and rescue its banks.
Yes we can: Spain’s Podemos party leads electoral pack
Founded just a year ago, Podemos has become a political phenomenon, breaking the dominance of Spain’s traditional parties with its grass-roots structure and horizontal style. Fueled by widespread disenchantment with the country’s political and economic leaders, it hopes to emulate Syriza and get into government by the end of the year. ...
Unlike Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus, Spain did not require a sovereign bailout from the EU at the height of the recent eurozone crisis. However, Spanish national debt has risen to about 100 percent of GDP. Podemos’ insistence that it would review those obligations and default on any it deems illegitimate could send financial shockwaves across Europe if the party follows through on that pledge, as could its plans to roll back austerity policies in place.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has accused Podemos of scaremongering with a vision of a “black Spain,” and he argues that the country’s economic crisis is now behind it. He points to the International Monetary Fund’s prediction that Spanish GDP will grow 2 percent this year — faster than the European average — as proof that a solid recovery is underway. But many Spaniards do not buy the government’s message.
Unemployment is falling, but at 24 percent, it is the second highest in Europe. Banks, seen by many as among the main villains of the economic crisis, are still evicting about 20,000 families from their homes each year because they are in arrears on their mortgages.
At one scheduled eviction in Madrid’s San Blas neighborhood, local residents gathered early in the morning to stop the authorities from foreclosing on an apartment belonging to a family that had fallen behind on payments.
“The economy is improving for some businesses, but a lot of families are still in a terrible way,” said Pedro Barragan, an economist who showed up to help his neighbors. “Podemos is going to get rid of the government this year, and there’s going to be a radical change.”
The Swiss Leaks - 60 Minutes Interviews HSBC Whistleblower Hervé Falciani
Blind hog, meet truffle...
Republicans seize on HSBC scandal to hold up Loretta Lynch's confirmation
Senate Republicans are seizing on the global tax scandal engulfing HSBC to delay the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general, the Guardian can reveal.
The Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Chuck Grassley, was on Friday preparing a fresh tranche of questions for Lynch about the huge cache of leaked data showing how HSBC’s subsidiary helped conceal billions of dollars from domestic tax authorities.
Grassley and another Republican senator are planning to investigate whether Lynch could have done more to stand up to the world’s second largest bank.
Lynch negotiated a controversial settlement with HSBC in 2012, after the bank admitted to facilitating money-laundering by Mexican drug cartels and helping clients evade US sanctions.
Now there are questions over why she did not also pursue HSBC over evidence that its Swiss arm helped US taxpayers hide their assets.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a story about a Federal Judge of West Virginia who is being investigated for alleged prejudice against the UMWA. Along with other statements of bias, it is alleged that he declared that it is a disgrace to American womanhood for Fannie Sellins*, an organizer, to be connected with the United Mine Workers.
*WE NEVER FORGET
Tune in at 2pm!
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Tens of Thousands Join North Carolina Moral March to Protest GOP Takeover, Racism & Islamophobia
Nicaraguans demand action over illness killing thousands of sugar cane workers
At least 20,000 people are estimated to have died of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Central America in the past two decades – most of them sugar cane workers along the Pacific coast.
In the municipality of Chichigalpa, the disease is responsible for almost half of male deaths in the last 10 years. Sick men hasten their deaths by continuing to work in secret to support their families. The town is fast becoming a land of widows. ...
The exploitation of Nicaragua’s landless rural poor by a handful of wealthy families working with US agribusinesses was one cause of the 1979 uprising against the dictator Anastasio Somoza. The country is now ruled by a former Sandinista revolutionary, President Daniel Ortega, and he faces accusations of abandoning the country’s campesinos in pursuit of a political pact with big business. ...
CKD was first documented in Costa Rica in the 1970s, and has since been detected throughout Central America. In Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti, CKD is officially recognised as an illness that can be caused by work. To qualify for limited state disability benefits and specialist healthcare, patients must prove they became sick while working. ...
There is a growing scientific view that CKD is linked to harsh work conditions, particularly long hours exposed to sun without sufficient shade, rest and water. Dr Catharina Wesseling, an epidemiologist based at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said that while other factors - such as pesticides, heavy metals and genetics – could also play a part, there was “absolutely no doubt” that CKD was an occupational disease. “It predominantly affects male workers exposed to excessive heat and dehydration – conditions which are most severe in the sugar cane industry,” she said.
Rats of Wall Street: Artist trains rodents to trade on forex markets
The Evening Greens
Victory Scored in Nebraska Landowners' Fight Against Keystone XL
Judge's injunction halts TransCanada from invoking eminent domain claims
Foes of the Keystone XL claimed a temporary victory on Thursday when a Nebraska judgeput a hold on TransCanada's use of eminent domain to seize land for its pipeline.
The temporary injunction issued by Holt County District Judge Mark Kozisek halts the energy company's eminent domain claims until the legal challenge is heard by the state supreme court.
Nebraska landowner Jim Tarnick previously called TransCanada's use of eminent domain "just another bullying move by the foreign corporation that swears they are going to be a good neighbor. From the Kalamazoo to the Yellowstone rivers and all across the United States, tar sands are a horrible danger and threat that the President must reject," he said.
'Unconscionable': New Federal Analysis Paves Way for Arctic Plunder
New environmental impact statement shows Interior Department willing "to cater to Shell’s drilling wishes," says environmental group.
The federal government on Thursday issued an updated assessment on fossil fuel activity in the Chukchi Sea that conservation groups fear paves the way for an Arctic disaster.
In January of 2013, conservationists claimed a "victory for the Arctic" when a federal appeals court ruled in favor of groups who had challenged the U.S. government's opening in 2008 of millions of acres in the Chukchi Sea to oil companies, called Lease Sale 193. The court found that the Bush administration hadn't adequately assessed environmental impacts of the sale.
In response to that court order, the Department of the Interior just issued its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) for the sale.
The FSEIS states that it is based on a scenario involving exploration and development of 4.3 billion barrels of oil and 2.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The "preferred alternative" stated in the assessment is allowing for leasing of 29.4 million acres in the area, which "would result in affirming the lease sale and all of the leases" offered in 2008.
Such a decision would welcomed by Shell, which indicated this summer that it was renewing its effort to search for Arctic oil.
Spy agencies fund climate research in hunt for weather weapon, scientist fears
A senior US scientist has expressed concern that the intelligence services are funding climate change research to learn if new technologies could be used as potential weapons.
Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has called on secretive government agencies to be open about their interest in radical work that explores how to alter the world’s climate.
Robock, who has contributed to reports for the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), uses computer models to study how stratospheric aerosols could cool the planet in the way massive volcanic eruptions do.
But he was worried about who would control such climate-altering technologies should they prove effective, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose. ...
Robock said he became suspicious about the intelligence agencies’ involvement in climate change science after receiving a call from two men who claimed to be CIA consultants three years ago. “They said: ‘We are working for the CIA and we’d like to know if some other country was controlling our climate, would we be able to detect it?’ I think they were also thinking in the back of their minds: ‘If we wanted to control somebody else’s climate could they detect it?’” ...
Asked how he felt about the call, Robock said he was scared. “I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that didn’t follow the rules. I thought that wasn’t how my tax money was spent,” he said.
Geneva talks: countries agree draft text for deal to fight climate change
Delegates from almost 200 countries adopt 86-page draft as basis for negotiations on deal to be agreed at Paris climate summit
Almost 200 countries agreed a draft text for a deal to fight climate change on Friday, but put off hard choices about narrowing down a vast range of options for limiting a damaging rise in temperatures.
Government delegates adopted the 86-page draft as the basis for negotiations on the deal due to be agreed later this year.
But the document includes radically varying proposals for slowing climate change – one foresees a phase-out of net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, for instance, while another seeks a peak of emissions “as soon as possible”.
“Although it has become longer, countries are now fully aware of each other’s positions,” said Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN climate change secretariat, referring to an earlier 38-page document which formed the basis of discussions.
Negotiators had to agree an official text in Geneva to meet a UN requirement that it is in place six months before a summit in Paris starting in November 2015.
Bomb train explodes in WV not far from Charleston on the Kanawha River:
State of Emergency declared in Kanawha and Fayette Counties
Firefighters with the Boomer Fire Department said that there have been at least six explosions in connection with the fire that started from a CSX train that derailed in the Powelltown Hollow area of Fayette County on Monday, Feb. 16, 2015. The derailment happened at around 1:30 p.m. As a result, the entire town of Boomer was evacuated by 4:30 p.m.
The train consisted of two locomotives and 109 rail cars. It was traveling from North Dakota to Yorktown, VA carrying crude oil. The scene extends along WV Route 61, near Armstrong Creek road. According to firefighters, the largest explosion happened near a house that was between the railroad tracks and the Kanawha River. They do not believe anyone was home at the time. State Troopers said there have been no fatalities reported. According to a release from CSX one person was being treated for potential inhalation, but no other injuries were reported.
3:00 p.m., UPDATE:
Water intakes in Montgomery and Cedar Grove have been closed because of the train accident along the Kanawha River. That is according to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Bureau for Public Health.
It is confirmed that the train was carrying crude oil, some of which spilled into the Kanawha River. While the intakes are closed, customers are urged to conserve water. The Montgomery Water System is part of West Virginia American Water Co. The company released a statement regarding the accident.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Pablo Iglesias: If the Greek olive branch is rejected, Europe may fall
Greenland’s hidden meltwater lakes store up trouble
Prison Dispatches from the War on Terror: Confessed Plotter Gives Insight into Radicalization
Choosing Happiness
A Little Night Music
Johnny Adams - Reconsider Me
Johnny Adams - Stand by Me + Body & Fender Man
Johnny Adams - I Won't Cry
Johnny Adams - Bulldog Break His Chain
Johnny Adams - Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You
Johnny Adams - Garbage Man
Johnny Adams - Life Is A Struggle
Johnny Adams - Up And Down World
Johnny Adams - Who Will The Next Fool Be?
Johnny Adams - Losing Battle
Johnny Adams - Feel Like Breakin' Up Somebody's Home
Johnny Adams - Come on
Johnny Adams - You're In For A Big Surprise
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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