United States – Page 25

Drought ravages US after fracking

Some of the most drought-ravaged areas of the US are also heavily targeted for oil and gas development using hydraulic fracturing – a practice that exacerbates water shortages – according to a new report.

Three-quarters of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled in the US since 2011 were located in areas of the country facing water scarcity, according to research by the Ceres investor network. Over half of those new wells were in areas experiencing drought conditions.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in those wells required the use of 97 billion gallons of water, Ceres found.

“Hydraulic fracturing is increasing competitive pressures for water in some of the country’s most water-stressed and drought-ridden regions,” said Mindy Lubber, president of the Ceres green investors’ network.

Lubber warned that the fracking boom across the US puts the industry on a “collision course” with other water users.

Fracking is the highly controversial process of injecting water, sand, and various chemicals into layers of rock, in hopes of releasing oil and gas deep underground. Fracking in a single well can take millions of gallons of freshwater. Much of the drilling has occurred in areas mired in multi-year droughts.

Half of the 97 billion gallons of water used since 2011 for fracking have gone to wells in Texas, a state in the midst of a severe, years-long drought. Meanwhile, oil and gas production through fracking is on track to double in the state over the next five years, the Guardian reported.

The report also found that rural communities in the Lone Star State are being hit hard by the fracking bonanza occurring especially in the Eagle Ford Shale in south Texas.

“Shale producers are having significant impacts at the county level, especially in smaller rural counties with limited water infrastructure capacity,” the report said. “With water use requirements for shale producers in the Eagle Ford already high and expected to double in the coming 10 years, these rural counties can expect severe water stress challenges in the years ahead.”

Levels of vital aquifers that serve local communities near Eagle Ford have dropped by up to 300 feet in the last few years.

Many small communities in areas of heavy fracking in Texas are in dire need of water, as supplies have run out in some places or will dry up soon in others. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says 29 communities across the state could run out of water in 90 days, and that many reservoirs in west Texas are at around 25 percent capacity.

In December, the San Antonio Express-News found that fracking was using more water than previously thought. The newspaper reported that in 2012, the industry used around 43,770 acre-feet of water in 3,522 Eagle Ford fracking wells – about the same usage of 153,000 San Antonio households.

“The oil and gas boom is requiring more water than we have,” Hugh Fitzsimons, a Dimmit County rancher and a director of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District, told the Express-News. “Period.”

A separate study published this week found that the industry does a very poor job recycling fracking water in Texas. Researchers at the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology found that 92 percent of water used in 2011 to frack Barnett Shale in north central Texas was “consumed,” and not recycled. Only about five percent of all water used for fracking in that area has been reused or recycled in the “past few years.”

Other states do not fare well in the Ceres report, either. In Colorado, 97 percent of wells were in areas strapped for water, as demand for fracking water in the state is expected to double to six billion gallons – twice the annual use of the city of Boulder – by 2015.

In California, 96 percent of new wells were located in areas where competition for water is high. A drought emergency for the entire state – which has traditionally dealt with water-sharing and access problems – was declared last month.

The report found similar high percentages of wells built in other states – such as New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – where water shortages exist.

“It’s a wake-up call,” said Prof. James Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine, according to the Guardian. “We understand as a country that we need more energy but it is time to have a conversation about what impacts there are, and do our best to try to minimize any damage.”

Source: RT

US Delta Force covertly operating in Southern Libya

US special forces are involved on the ground in the South of Libya against tribes and the US presence worries France.

“Since the end of last year, Delta units disguised as nomads, frame members of the Libyan special forces in their hunt against al-Qaida in the south,” says Le Figaro a French military source. “The United States believes that the threat of disintegration South Libya is such that they can no longer be satisfied with a single aerial application of this threat.” These mixed teams are supported by drones and other means of recognition air, which locate convoys considered suspects. “Then aboard their 4 × 4, the commandos are approaching the target, and most of the time, the Americans leave Libyans treat the goal,” says the source.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and his defense minister gave the green light to these operations

These operations involve the use of a disused base in the south. Problem, the Libyan Ministry of Defence has always denied the allegations.

On the French and British participation, the French General Staff has already started to prepare the minds (Figaro: “France evokes an operation in Libya”: “An international operation to put an end to the instability prevailing in the southern Libya would be an ideal scenario, today said the Chief of Staff of the French armed forces, Admiral Edouard Guillaud “)

Note that the threat of disintegration South Libyan operations came from 2011 for which we should all congratulate ourselves. The Director of National Intelligence has made a bleak description at a recent hearing in the U.S. Senate (“incubator” for terrorists, weapons of mass flow, porous borders, jihadists biased against supporting countries in the region to French intervention in Mali …). I would add that the state of emergency was declared in the south on January 19.

The situation has changed since October 2013 when a controversy had arisen because the Americans had conducted a raid on Libyan soil to stop an alleged leader of Al Qaeda. Libyan Prime Minister had sought clarification from the U.S. who responded that they were aware.

We can see the grotesque situation in which we are now, gravely infringing on questions of international law.

Libya has seen intense fighting in several cities; the most intense was in the city of Sebha in the south.

Government has deployed air force and used heavy weapons to quell the uprising of the southern tribes.

Armed militias from different regions including Misrata and Zintan were also supporting government troops in their fight to regain control over the Mehint air base and the city of Sebha. Sources has estimated the number of dead at least 186 people including women and children.

Source: Le Figaro

Pentagon probes massive recruiting fraud

When a retired Army colonel and an enlisted soldier from Albuquerque, N.M. were charged last year with defrauding the National Guard Bureau out of about $12,000 the case drew little public attention. But it’s now become clear that the two men are among the roughly 800 soldiers accused of bilking American taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars in what a U.S. senator is calling “one of the biggest fraud investigations in Army history.”

The wide-ranging criminal probe centers around an Army recruiting program that had been designed to help the Pentagon find new soldiers during some of the bloodiest days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The program went off the rails, investigators believe, after hundreds of soldiers engaged in a kickback scheme that allowed them to potentially embezzle huge quantities of money without anyone in the government noticing. In one case, a single soldier may have collected as much as $275,000 for making “referrals” to help the Army meet its recruiting goals, according to USA Today, which first reported the story Monday.

The military’s failure to spot, or stop, the wrongdoing will be the focus of what is expected to be a highly contentious hearing Tuesday before the Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight. The committee’s chairwoman, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., has summoned several of the National Guard officials who were in power at the time the alleged wrongdoing was taking place.

The numbers of soldiers and money involved are staggering.

An Army internal audit has discovered that 1,200 recruiters had received payments that were potentially fraudulent. Another 2,000 recruiting assistants had received payments that were suspicious. More than 200 officers remain under investigation, according to McCaskill’s office. There are currently 555 active investigations involving 840 people.

Trouble in the recruiting program has been acknowledged previously, but the full scope and the results of the service’s own internal investigation of the program have not previously been disclosed. In the past, Army officials overseeing the program and a contractor who worked with the service on it, Docupak, insisted that accounts of potential fraud in it were greatly exaggerated, congressional officials said in a memo distributed to the media Monday. About 200 agents with the service’s Criminal Investigative Command are now examining the program’s records, and will review the actions of more than 106,000 people who received money through the program. That work will likely take until 2016, officials said.

A Defense Department official acknowledged that a lack of proper military oversight contributed to the problems.

“I think it was human greed, and I think it’s the cascading effects of contractors’ lack of supervision, as well as the Defense Department’s lack of supervision,” the official told Foreign Policy, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the probe.

Source: Foreign Policy

Debt up $6.666 trillion under Obama

The debt of the U.S. government has increased $6.666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.

When President Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt of the U.S. government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. As of Jan. 31, 2014, the latest day reported, the debt was $17,293,019,654,983.61—an increase of $6,666,142,606,070.53 since Obama’s first inauguration.

The total debt of the United States did not exceed $6.666 trillion until July 2003. In the little more than five years of the Obama presidency, the U.S. has accumulated as much new debt as it did in it’s first 227 years.

Source: cnsnews.com

NYC school cuts gifted class over lack of diversity

A popular gifted-student program at a New York City elementary school is getting the ax after school officials decided it lacked diversity.

PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald told parents in a letter Jan. 24 that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners, the New York Daily News reported.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” Miss McDonald said in the letter posted on Flickr.com.

One parent described SOAR as largely white.

Another conceded that the program had a lot of white students, but worried gifted students now won’t be challenged enough.

“Where are they going to put the higher-level students? Sometimes, there are different levels, and teachers can’t handle all the levels in one class,” she told the Daily News.

In a follow-up letter sent to parents Monday, Miss McDonald wrote: “At PS 193, we believe that all children can learn and achieve high standards. We also know that we want all children at PS 193 to have equal access to high quality, challenging curriculum, and to have ample opportunities to master complex material and build academic and personal self-confidence. We also want our classes to reflect the diversity of our community. We believe we can have both: classrooms characterized by rigor and diversity.”

Source: Washington Times

Black students angry about racial info in crime alerts

School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the racial descriptions given in crime alerts.

The letter, sent on Dec. 6, 2013, was issued by members of the African American and African Studies, Black Faculty and Staff Association, Black Graduate and Professional Student Association, Black Men’s Forum, Black Student Union and Huntley House for African American Males.

It was directed to University President Eric Kaler and Pamela Wheelock, the vice president of University Services.

Students and staff mailed the letter more than a month after the campus went on lockdown because of an attempted robbery at Anderson Hall on Nov. 11, 2013. University of Minnesota Police wrongfully identified a student as the suspect.

On Tuesday, school officials reported there have been 25 robberies in and around the University, an increase of 27 percent over the last few years.

The organizations wrote that while campus safety is crucial, the profiling can be devastating for black male students.

“[We] unanimously agree that campus safety should be of the UMPD’s utmost importance; however, efforts to reduce crime should never be at the expense of our Black men, or any specific group of people likely to be targeted. In addition to causing Black men to feel unsafe and distrusted, racial profiling is proven to inflict negative psychological effects on its victims.”

At Wednesday’s forum, Ian Taylor Jr., president of the Black Men’s Forum, said members of his organization feel threatened when the use of a racial description is given in the crime alerts.

“The repeated black, black, black suspect,” Taylor said. “And what that does it really discomforts the mental and physical comfort for students on campus because they feel like suspicions begin to increase.”

The letter then gave 12 recommendations to UMPD Chief Gregory Hestness on how to improve their response.

The recommendations include requiring officers to attend diversity training, and attach a link on crime alerts to the U’s no-tolerance policy on racial profiling.

On Jan. 27, 2014, a formal letter was issued by Wheelock.

“I firmly believe that a well-informed community is an asset to public safety…I believe that sharing more information in our Crime Alerts, not less, is most beneficial in terms of public safety, especially when that information is available.

The information we share can include a complete description of suspects, unique identifying characteristics such as an accent or a distinctive piece of clothing, or the description of vehicles involved.

We have reviewed what other Big Ten Universities and local colleges and universities include, and our practice of including the race of a suspect when it is available from a victim’s description is consistent with their practices.”

Source: CBS

Millions of fake dollars flooding New York

An international counterfeiting ring has been pumping millions of dollars in phony $100 bills into New York and other cities in the metropolitan area over the past several years, forcing the Secret Service to step up its operation to shut it down, sources told “On The Inside.”

Federal officials are tracking the mules who smuggle bogus bills into the country and distributing an alert to New York businesses, banks and security industry personnel that teaches how to detect the fake C-notes, a copy of which DNAinfo New York obtained.

The counterfeit cash appears to have been manufactured on offset printing machines using plates and ink, rather than on more sophisticated copiers, according to Michael Seremetis, the assistant special agent in charge of the New York Secret Service office.

The loot is produced in bulk and bundled into packages that are smuggled in luggage or carried on planes by couriers who get about 40 cents on the dollar to put the fakes into circulation.

If you have a phony $100 that is confiscated, you will lose the value of the money but can declare a tax loss at the end of the year, officials said.

“We are asking the public to let us know if they encounter these bills,” Seremetis said.

Source: DNAinfo New York

Obama’s gay pot dealer killed for flatulence

The leader of the free World, Barack Obama’s high school pot dealer who he thanked in his yearbook for the ‘good times’ was beaten to death by his lover after a series of fights over flatulence and drugs, MailOnline can reveal today.

Raymond Boyer, known as ‘Gay Ray’ to Obama and his marijuana smoking ‘Choom Gang’, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer seven years after he sold the future president and his friends drugs.

His lover Andrew Devere, a male prostitute, gave police a laundry list of reasons for the killing, including that Boyer, a surfer and unemployed chef, constantly put him down, made him beg for drugs and had a habit of breaking wind in his face.

Source: Daily Mail

Snowden says NSA involved in industrial espionage

The National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will take intelligence regardless of its value to national security, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has told a German television network.

In a lengthy interview broadcast on the public broadcaster ARD TV on Sunday, Snowden said the NSA did not limit its espionage to issues of national security and cited the German engineering firm Siemens as one target.

“If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said in the interview conducted in Russia, where Snowden has claimed asylum.

Source: The Guardian

Cigarette ads actor dies of smoking-related disease

Eric Lawson, who portrayed the rugged Marlboro man in cigarette ads during the late 1970s, has died of a smoking-related disease. He was 72.

The Marlboro Man is the macho cowboy in the Old West. This is how Phillip Morris markets its Marlboro cigarattes.

The Marlboro Man was conceived by the advertising firm, Leo Burnett in 1954.

Well, the advertising campaigns worked successfully, at least in the past. Due to heightened antismoking sentiment and health concerns, the public living in developed countries no longer yearn to be the Marlboro Man.

Lawson died Jan. 10 at his home in San Luis Obispo of respiratory failure, his wife, Susan Lawson said Sunday.

Lawson later appeared in an anti-smoking commercial that parodied the Marlboro man and an “Entertainment Tonight” segment to discuss the negative effects of smoking. Susan said her husband was proud of the interview, even though he was smoking at the time.

“He knew the cigarettes had a hold on him,” she said. “He knew, yet he still couldn’t stop.”

A few actors and models who pitched Marlboro brand cigarettes have died of smoking-related diseases. They include David Millar, who died of emphysema in 1987, as well as Dick Hammer and David McLean, who both died of lung cancer.

Wayne McLaren, an American actor who portrayed The Marlboro Man in Marlboro’s advertisements in the 1970s, also died of lung cancer in 1992.

Ancient Christian communities are being destroyed

The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East’s dictatorships would be succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The near-annihilation of the world’s most ancient communities of Christians.

The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West’s Kindle Single “The Silence of Our Friends.” The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well.

Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave.

The world’s most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed.

In Egypt, a rumor that a Muslim girl was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children were held in police custody for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted in Christian families leaving their homes behind.

In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista Pizzaballa reported that “of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh… no more than 10 people remain.”

Two Syrian bishops have been kidnapped by rebel groups. Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch says that out of a population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their homes in fear.

In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic. According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed, who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, was murdered in his home. The number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the invasion. The decline of Iraq’s Christian population since the first Gulf War is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion.

The U.S. and the U.K. bear the responsibility in this catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq’s postwar government and did little to protect minority faiths.

The clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes are obvious. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis. The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair toilets in them) without explicit permission from the head of state, almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time some of these militias were executing a pogrom against Christians.

A Christian shopkeeper in Ma’loula summed it up in a quote to the BBC: “Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us.”

Source: The Week

Pussy Riot in an unauthorized offensive show at the US Federal Reserve?

Before the make-over — Before the unusually expensive make-over

Is the American Federal Government into concert promotion?

Two members of the unusually lame Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, who seem to have a unusually strong media promotion team behind them, were recently released from prison and will appear at an Amnesty International concert in Brooklyn February 5th, WNYC reports.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are scheduled to appear during the Bringing Human Rights Home concert at the Barclays Center in New York.

It is not certain which human right they had wished to defend when they were caught trespassing in a church in Moscow. The whole episode has an air of being manufactured, as if they might appear alongside the US Federal Turds next.

Musically it is hard to understand their large global following, but politically less so.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were released from prison last month after serving 21 months for hooliganism after a March 2012 arrest for giving an unauthorized offensive performance in Christ The Savior Cathedral.

It is not known whether they might do an unauthorized offensive performance in front of the Federal Reserve.

Bashing the black city

The often outspoken Oakland County Executive is once again in hot water over comments he made about Detroit in a recent interview with “New Yorker” magazine.

L. Brooks Patterson is quoted in an article titled “Drop Dead, Detroit!” as saying he only has negative things to say about the Motor City. He made the controversial comments while giving reporter Paige Williams an extended tour of Oakland County last September.

“Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher,” he said. ”The truth hurts, you know? Tough s***.”

The 75-year-old Republican went on to say he warned his children never to travel to Detroit.

“I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. We’ve got restaurants out here.’ They don’t even have movie theatres in Detroit — not one,” he said.

Patterson said the one thing Detroit offers that the suburbs can’t is live sports – and even then a trip to the city is quite risky.

“For that, fine — get in and get out,” he said. “But park right next to the venue — spend the extra 20 or 30 bucks. And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.”

He’s also quoted as saying a prediction he made has come to pass. He said, “What we’re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.”

A statement from Patterson’s office said the seven-page article casts the executive in a false light, but didn’t dispute the quotes or apologize for his actions.

The National Action Network, an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, is calling for a public apology from Patterson. The group is holding a news conference at 11 a.m. Tuesday to request the apology.

In a statement, Rev. Charles Williams II, the National Action Network’s Michigan chapter president, said Patterson’s remarks were “repulsive” — not just because Detroit is mostly a black city, but “because it is also a direct slight to the American Indians who occupied the land before Detroit was Detroit, and Oakland County.”

Source: CBS Detroit

Obama blames his failing popularity on race

President Barack Obama said that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorker magazine’s website today.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said in the article by David Remnick.

Obama said this in his most direct comment on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office. His wife Michelle has spoken openly about race before.

Obama’s second term has been marked by controversies including a partial government shutdown in October, revelations that the National Security Agency has gathered personal mobile phone data and the troubled rollout of health-insurance expansion.

Obama’s approval rating among all voters is 39 percent and his disapproval rating is 53 percent, according to a Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 14-16. In the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, compared with Obama’s 39 percent, according to exit polling by a consortium of major news outlets. Obama won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008 against 55 percent for opponent John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona.

Source: Bloomberg