Saturday, August 25th, 2012
PATRICIA DONOVAN, - Guttmacher Institute
Stephan:
Recent studies indicate that at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.1 In addition, there is a widespread perception that these young mothers account for the large increase in welfare caseloads over the last 25 years. As a result, a growing number of policymakers are embracing the notion that adolescent pregnancy rates can be lowered and welfare costs reduced if states more rigorously enforce statutory rape laws prohibiting sex ual intercourse between adults and minors.
In the last year, several states have taken steps to punish men who violate these laws. Meanwhile, the new federal welfare law urges that ‘states and local jurisdictions…aggressively enforce statutory rape laws’ and requires state welfare plans to outline an education and training program for law enforcement officials, counselors and educators that focuses on ‘the problem of statutory rape.’ It also directs the attorney general to implement a program to study the connection between statutory rape and adolescent pregnancy, with particular attention to ‘predatory older men.’2
Concerns about statutory rape are particularly acute in regard to the youngest adolescents. Although relatively small proportions of 13-14-year-olds have had intercourse,* those who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely […]
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Friday, August 24th, 2012
CHARLES ARTHUR, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Yet another report on the growing soft police state in the United States. I find this one of the most amazing trends in the country. Not because it is happening, the elite of the State always want maximum information and control. What amazes me is how easily Americans have surrendered virtually all of their civil liberties.
It sounds like something from the film Minority Report: a CCTV surveillance system that recognises people from their face or walk and analyses whether they might be about to commit a terrorist or criminal act. But Trapwire is real and, according to documents released online by WikiLeaks last week, is being used in a number of countries to try to monitor people and threats.
Founded by former CIA agents, Trapwire uses data from a network of CCTV systems and numberplate readers to figure out the threat level in huge numbers of locations. That means security officials can ‘focus on the highest priorities first, taking a proactive and collaborative approach to defence against attacks,’ say its creators.
The documents outlining Trapwire’s existence and its deployment in the US were apparently obtained in a hack of computer systems belonging to the intelligence company Stratfor at the end of last year.
Documents from the US department of homeland security show that it paid $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and Seattle.
Stratfor describes Trapwire as ‘a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning’, and cites the Washington DC police chief mentioning it during a Senate committee hearing. It serves […]
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Friday, August 24th, 2012
JULIET EILPERIN, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here, clearly outlined, you can see the struggle to protect the earth and the beings who live on it. Could it be any clearer that old energy has no long range interest in national or planetary wellness if it conflicts with their short term profits? I keep thinking about the Eastern Islanders who cut down the trees upon which their culture depended. They clearly must have understood that deforestration would destroy their society; they could see what was happening. They did it anyway. What did the men who cut down the last tree think, I always wonder.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned one of the Obama administration’s hallmark air-quality rules Tuesday, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its authority in sharply curbing pollution from power plants.
The 2 to 1 ruling by the appeals court represents a major victory for utilities and business groups, which fought the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule on the grounds that it was costly, burdensome and arbitrary. Environmentalists, who had hailed the rule as a major improvement over a George W. Bush-era regulation, bemoaned the decision as a blow to public health.
For years, federal regulators have struggled with how best to cut harmful sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants in the eastern half of the country. Those emissions blow downwind and contribute to forming smog and acid rain in the East. The EPA issued regulations – which were to take effect Jan. 1, 2011, but were delayed by the court – which would have required utilities in 28 states and the District of Columbia to install new pollution controls. It also established a limited cap-and-trade system that would have allowed utilities to buy and sell pollution credits in order to […]
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Friday, August 24th, 2012
DAVE GUTKNECHT, - Co-operative News
Stephan: This report suggests that finally American farmers are tired of being steamrolled by the industrial agriculture juggernaut. I take this as very good news.
A major lawsuit against Monsanto was denied in at the district court and has been appealed. On July 5, 2012, seventy-five family farmers, seed businesses, and agricultural organizations representing over 300,000 individuals and 4,500 farms filed a brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., asking the appellate court to reverse a lower court’s decision from February dismissing their protective legal action against agricultural giant Monsanto’s patents on genetically engineered seed.
The plaintiffs brought the pre-emptive case against Monsanto in March 2011 in the Southern District of New York (Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association et al. v Monsanto) and specifically seek to defend themselves from nearly two dozen of Monsanto’s most aggressively asserted patents on GMO seed. They were forced to act pre-emptively to protect themselves from Monsanto’s abusive lawsuits, fearing that if GMO seed contaminates their property despite their efforts to prevent such contamination, Monsanto will sue them for patent infringement.
Lead plaintiff in the suit (and the main source for this report) is the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (www.osgata.org), a not-for-profit agricultural organization made up of organic farmers, seed growers, seed businesses and supporters. OSGATA is committed to developing and […]
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Friday, August 24th, 2012
REBECCA J. ROSEN, - WIRED/The Atlantic
Stephan: Here is what climate change looks like. Click through to see the remarkable pictures. Note particularly the economic implications that are becoming clear.
Last year, the Mississippi River flooded. Major storms combined with melting snow brought the waterway more than 56 feet above river stage in May. The Army Corps of Engineers lifted the floodgates of the Morganza Spillway, deliberately inundating some 3,000 square miles of rural Louisiana to spare worse damage in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In August of last year, NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite took a picture of the swollen river (above).
This year it’s an entirely different story. At the end of last month, more than 60 percent of the lower 48 states were in drought, and the mighty Mississippi was running low. An 11-mile stretch of river has been closed on and off since August 11, and earlier this week nearly 100 boats lined up near Greenville, Mississippi, waiting to pass. Water levels near Memphis are ranging from 2.4 to 8.3 below river stage, compared with 11.7 feet above at this time last year. To make matters worse, the floods of last year deposited huge amounts of sediment on the river bed, reconfiguring the existing channels..
Officials from the Army Corps of Engineers say that the low water levels – and attending barge traffic jams, closed ports, and closed river […]
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