Monday, February 10th, 2014
PETER HECHT, - The Sacramento Bee
Stephan: This report spells out very clearly what Marijuana Prohibition is really about: It is essential to justify the budgets of law enforcement, judges, prosecutors, and a vast array of corporate interests, all of whom live on the money that comes from the insanity of the War on Drugs.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In 2010, as Colorado lawmakers were creating America’s first state-licensed and regulated medical marijuana industry, fellow police officers at a Colorado Drug Investigators Association conference jeered a state law enforcement official assigned to draft the legislation.
Some of the sharpest barbs came from visiting narcotics officers from California.
“I was told that we hadn’t learned anything from California — that you can’t do anything to regulate marijuana,” said Matt Cook, a retired Colorado Springs police officer who became the first director of Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, a policing agency that now regulates state-licensed marijuana workers, pot stores and commercial cannabis producers.
While Colorado moved forward with pot industry oversight, the narcotics officers who berated Cook were right — at least about California, where trying to regulate America’s largest marijuana economy has become a perennial political loser. A key factor has been intense law enforcement opposition itself.
In California, police have forcefully opposed any legislation seen as legitimizing a marijuana industry. Their opposition reflects a belief by many police officers that medical marijuana businesses are profiteering shams that were never authorized by California voters.
Training seminars offered for police by the California Narcotic Officers’ Association suggest there is no such thing as medical […]
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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
PETER MOSKOWITZ, - Al Jazeera America
Stephan: It is to the great shame of American corporate media, that their coverage of what has happened in West Virginia and North Carolina -- with the exception of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC -- has been so superficial and scanty. This is seriously criminal behavior on the part of both the corporations and the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Americans are having their health threatened and, instead of digging into that, the media is spending time on a more than two decade old story about Woody Allen, the truth about which will never be known. I had to go to Aljazeera to get a good story on this disaster.
Energy officials and environmentalists are making conflicting statements about the human and environmental safety of water in North Carolina’s Dan River, in which tens of thousands of tons of coal ash spilled from a defunct energy plant earlier this week.
Test results released late on Thursday by plant owner Duke Energy and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources showed slightly elevated levels of arsenic and other toxins, but not at levels that would be harmful to human health.
But testing done closer to the spill site by a lab hired by environmental group The Waterkeeper Alliance showed arsenic levels almost nine times above the state’s results, and far above levels considered safe for human consumption.
Asked by The Associated Press why the state didn’t test closer to the spill site, Tom Reeder, head of North Carolina’s Division of Water Resources, said the results further downstream would provide more accurate results.
“Obviously, if we took it directly underneath where the discharge is entering the water, particularly in a case like this, you might find some exceedances,” Reeder said. “But what we’re really interested in is finding out what the actual impact is in the environment, and in order to do that you […]
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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
EMILY ATKIN, - Climate Progress
Stephan: This shows you clearly how utterly compromised and deceitful has been the behavior of the company responsible for the toxic spill in West Virginia. This whole story is a disgusting example of how seriously co-opted the government regulatory agencies charged with keeping us safe have become, and how uninterested the carbon energy industry is in facing up to what they have done. This is a tale of a legal dance to avoid accountability.
Faced with mounting lawsuits over West Virginia’s massive chemical spill which contaminated the water supply of some 300,000 people, the company responsible filed for bankruptcy. But within that bankruptcy, another fight is looming.
According to U.S. Department of Justice bankruptcy trustee Judy A. Robbins, Freedom Industries is seeking to be represented by a law firm that may be too close to the company and its dealings. Specifically, Robbins said in a filing with the bankruptcy court on Wednesday, McGuireWoods LLP has represented both Chemstream Holdings, Inc. – the company that acquired Freedom Industries just weeks before the spill – and J. Clifford Forrest, who is both the owner of Chemstream and the owner of WV Funding LLC. WV Funding is the company that might be loaning Freedom Industries money to pull it out of bankruptcy, a fact some have said ‘smells of collusion.”
In addition to McGuireWoods representing Forrest and Chemstream, the firm has also represented Rosebud Mining – the third-largest coal producer in Pennsylvania, which is also controlled by Forrest. Chemstream Holdings owns Freedom, and has the same exact address as Rosebud Mining. Freedom’s peculiar company tie-ups make it hard to determine who, exactly, will be held accountable for its losses.
The […]
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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
PALLAB GHOSH, Science Correspondent - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: Another closed door into the past opens and, as is so often the case, things that we thought we knew must be discarded.
Click through to see pictures and the maps.
Scientists have discovered the earliest evidence of human footprints outside of Africa, on the Norfolk Coast in the East of England.
The footprints are more than 800,000 years old and were found on the shores of Happisburgh.
They are direct evidence of the earliest known humans in northern Europe.
Details of the extraordinary markings have been published in the science journal Plos One.
The footprints have been described as “one of the most important discoveries, if not the most important discovery that has been made on [Britain’s] shores,” by Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum.
“It will rewrite our understanding of the early human occupation of Britain and indeed of Europe,” he told BBC News.
The markings were first indentified in May last year during a low tide. Rough seas had eroded the sandy beach to reveal a series of elongated hollows.
I walked with Dr Ashton along the shore where the discovery was made. He recalled how he and a colleague stumbled across the hollows: “At the time, I wondered ‘could these really be the case? If it was the case, these could be the earliest footprints outside Africa and that would be absolutely incredible.”
Continue reading the main story
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Sunday, February 9th, 2014
CHRISTINE SARICH, - Nation of Change
Stephan: Here is what I consider to be excellent news. As opposed to the Keystone pipeline which will create a few thousand jobs in the construction phase but only 35 -- yes count'em -- 35 jobs on an ongoing basis, solar is creating thousands of jobs, and will for decades to come.
Welcome to the future, its already here. Solar employs and nuclear destroys; we have ample evidence of that now, and with the annual U.S. solar jobs census we now have proof that solar power isn’t just providing energy, without destroying our oceans and contaminating the earth and air with strontium, caesium and barium, among other chemicals, it is providing more than 143,000 Americans a paycheck.
Since 2012, that’s nearly a 20 percent increase, says The Solar Foundation, which conducts the census. An additional 23,682 jobs have been added-10 times the rate of employment growth as the national average of just 1.9 percent. In the past four years, 50,000 well paying jobs were added-many of them building and installing solar panels and this employment rate is expected to continue growing at a steady pace.
Solar installers also make an average of $20 to $23.60 an hour compared to the wages of a coal miner; that isn’t bad especially considering the payout to workers with black lung disease amount to billions and the detrimental affects to a worker’s health are almost irreversible.
Comparatively, during the last two years, fossil fuel jobs declined by 8.7 percent leaving 8,500 positions void, according to the Bureau of […]
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