Ministers reject 40,000 objections to allow fracking below homes without owners' permission

Fracking will take place below Britons' homes without their permission after ministers rejected 40,000 objections to controversial changes to trespass laws.

The UK government argued that the current ability for people to block shale gas development under their property would lead to significant delays and that the legal process by which companies can force fracking plans through was costly, time-consuming and disproportionate.

There were a total of 40,647 responses to a consultation on the move to give oil and gas companies underground access without needing to seek landowners' permission, with 99% opposing the legal changes. Setting aside the 28,821 responses submitted via two NGO campaigns, 92% of the remaining responses objected to the proposals.

Jefferson county school board members proposed that "materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard for law"

Hundreds of students poured out of at least five Jefferson County schools on Tuesday to protest what they say is the Jeffco School Board's attempt to whitewash history. Protests also continued on Wednesday at two other schools.

About 200 students walked out of Pomona High School in Arvada at 8:30 a.m. gathering at Wadsworth Boulevard, 7NEWS Reporter Tyler Lopez observed.

"My daughter and her friends at 80th and Wadsworth. Fighting for education. Pomona High School," Robin Reed Johnson posted on the Denver Channel's Facebook page.

Around 9:40 a.m. about 300 students at Arvada West walked out, holding signs and chanting as they marched along the sidewalk and stood along the street.

At issue is a proposed curriculum review in Jefferson County that could revise AP U.S. History to promote positive aspects of U.S. history and heritage, while avoiding material on civil disorder and social strife.

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on the strength of one fact. As a US Senator in Illinois, he voted against George W. Bush's war against Iraq. Had Obama not done that, he would never have attracted the attention necessary to become a serious candidate for the presidency.

Disgust with Bush's wars and the financial crisis propelled Obama to the White House. A few months later the "anti-war candidate", now President, was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.

It would be difficult to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and "anti-war" candidate whose actions have been more warlike.

After proclaiming a "reset" in relations with Russia, Obama brought them to the worst point they have seen since the end of the Cold War. In January 2009 Obama said he would close Guantanamo. It remains open. He retained Bush's Defence Secretary Robert Gates. He left many of the staff appointed by Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney (including Victoria Nuland) in their posts. Not a single official from Bush's team who justified or ordered torture has faced legal action. Whenever it has been suggested, Obama has blocked it. By contrast, his administration pursues whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning relentlessly.

Fleets of drones have been dispatched around the world on a scale Bush had never dreamed. Assassinations of supposed opponents of the US have multiplied and become routine. Osama bin Laden was murdered when he could have been captured to stand trial. Obama has even given himself the right - unprecedented in US history - to order the execution of US citizens without trial. He has actually even exercised it against children. Apparently he approves of the lists of those doomed to die himself.

We have been sent video of an extraordinary speech made by the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, in response to widespread reports that Jewish citizens are leaving France in the face of rising anti-semitism.

M. Valls, wearing a skullcap while speaking in a synagogue and referring explicitly to it in his speech, spoke with passion of the role Jews played in the nation and in his personal life.

Ever since World War I, fear of foreign invasions has been an obsession in the American collective consciousness. It is no coincidence that major U.S.corporations have profited from this fear, at the expense of massive death and destruction worldwide.

"Every country , every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent.

The attacks of September 11 were not only a test for U.S. citizens' attitudes' toward minority/racial groups in their own country, but a test for our relationship with the rest of the world. We must begin not by lashing out at civilians in Muslim countries, but by taking responsibility for our own history and our own actions, and how they have fed the cycle of violence."

Dr. Zoltan Grossman

In the midst of all the fear-mongering that has been generated by the commercial media, what has not been reported are the CEOs of military contractors who are paid more than their overpaid counterparts in the financial sector. Of course, many of these so-called news outfits are heavily bankrolled by the same military contractors. Therefore, 'fair and balanced' journalism is totally out of the question.

What's even worse, is that all of these predatory companies are buying off politicians and 'retired' generals to systematically rob our national treasury and place our sons and daughters, once again, in the line of fire.." CNN pundit, Frances Townsend, a former Bush administration official, has appeared on television calling for more military engagement against the so-called Islamic State. As the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI) reported, Townsend holds positions in two investment firms with defense company holdings, MacAndrews and Forbes, and Monument Capital Group, along with serving as an advisor to defense contractor, Decision Sciences."

Remember that time the Supreme Court ruled that our DNA is basically just like our fingerprints, and cops can snatch it from us subsequent to arrest? Remember the giant biometrics project the FBI has been spending at least a billion dollars of our money building (with many of the details kept secret), called 'Next Generation Identification'? With those powers and monies combined, the FBI this week announced its plans "to accelerate the collection of DNA profiles for the government's massive new biometric identification database." Like with other biometrics collection schemes, the FBI aims to get local police to do the groundwork.

What could go wrong?

Mass graves with bodies bearing signs of violent death, and grieving relatives of those who were identified: That was the blood-curdling scene witnessed by an RT crew in a village near the city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.

Four bodies were found in two shell craters behind a burned-out coal mine near the village of Nyzhnia Krynka, 35 kilometers northeast of Donetsk. RT's Maria Finoshina reported from the burial site. "All the facilities you can see here were abandoned a long time ago. It's a very remote area and apparently those who did this didn't want these corpses to be found," Finoshina reported. Among the four victims was 21-year-old Nikita Kolomiytsev, a local resident, whose grieving mother arrived at the scene of mass graves to identify her son. "I couldn't stand for him to be killed and thrown like a dog somewhere - I had to come and identify him," Nikita's mother, Galina, told RT.

Galina said she fled to central Ukraine to take her younger 16-year-old son out of harm's way, but she felt she'd "failed to protect" her elder son. "The Ukrainian army took [Nikita] away... my husband went there and told them - take me instead of my son. But they said they had taken him for a further prisoner swap." Galina was waiting for him to be exchanged and brought home, but he never returned to his mother. "No one exchanged anybody for anybody. They just shot them dead here outside the village and threw them into the ground... like dogs," she added, sobbing.

President Obama's neo-Cold War is not about ideology or respect for borders. It is about money and global power. The current battle over control of gateway nations - strategic locations in which private firms can establish the equivalent of financial boots-on-the-ground - is being waged in the Middle East and Ukraine under the auspices of freedom and western capitalism (er, "democracy"). In these global gateways, private banks can infiltrate resource-rich locales fortified by political will, public aid and military support to garner lucrative market advantages. ISIS poses a threat to global gateway control that transcends any human casualties. That's why Congress decided to authorize funds to fight ISIS despite the risk.

The common thread of today's global gateway nations appears to be oil. But even more valuable are the multitude of financing deals that would accompany building new pipelines, arming allies, and reconstructing civil-war-torn countries. Indeed, hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake in America's wars of "principle."

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's first Chief of Staff - who also served as Obama's Israeli Mossad handler - famously said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

Individuals, groups, whole industries, even nations sometimes take advantage of crises and catastrophes. Big bankers, for example, love war because it forces governments to borrow vast sums of money at compound interest. Arms manufacturers also make huge profits. And the big government always gets bigger during wartime as it confiscates people's wealth and scales back their rights.

The current ISIL crisis is making certain people very rich. According to LiveLeak.com the US government is spending 200 million dollars per week to bomb Iraq and Syria. If the overall cost of the anti-ISIL campaign reaches its $500 billion projection, LiveLeak estimates that the US would be spending $30 million dollars per member of ISIL. It might be cheaper to simply pay them $20 million each to simply go away.

Since at least the end of the Second World War, the US has been directly and indirectly fostering, aiding, funding and training fighting militias and groups in different regions of the world to further its own interests. However, the irony of this policy is that in most of the cases, the US ended up fighting, in the name of establishing peace, these very forces of destruction. History is replete with such examples. As the 'sole' super power of the world, it has actually been fighting the war of its own survival, that is, to continue to survive as the 'sole' super power. As such, not only does it 'invent' enemies, but also reasons to fight them. Let's have a look at some of these 'invented' wars.

A number of examples can be given from history to justify this proposition. For example, the emergence of the Taliban is most directly the result of the CIA's involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War. Not only did CIA provide all possible funding, but also established camps across Pakistan-Afghan border which were extensively used to train people to do "Jihad" against the Soviet Union. And, the fact that the Americans joyfully disseminate information about different aspects of this war in the form of Hollywood movies shows the extent of acknowledgement the US has publicly made regarding once supporting the Taliban when they were hailed and glorified as the "defenders" of the "free world." Given that, now it looks remarkably amazing how that very Taliban later on turned into enemies and dragged the US into the longest war of its history.

Nothing can explain this fundamental transition except the fact that the US first needed the Taliban to use them against its cold war rival, and then to use, as a pretext to go to war, the Taliban's refusal to allow the US a free way to build oil and gas pipelines from the Central Asia to the India Ocean. The force that the US once 'proudly' created thus turned into the most pernicious enemy of the world - hence the war against "terrorism." In other words, the most important reason of this longest war is nothing but the US' own created group of fighters.

On the other hand, the US could still have 'invented' any reason to launch attack on Afghanistan even if the Taliban had not refused to accept American plans; after all, extensive militarization of the entire region around Afghanistan was, and still is, one of the cardinal policy objectives of the US' twenty-first century grand strategy. The fact that the US wanted to militarize the entire region in order for controlling the flow of energy from here to many parts of the world becomes quite evident when we look at the very location of the key military bases of the US in Afghanistan. All of the key bases have been built on the proposed route of the TAPI pipeline.