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Landmark precedent: Families win lawsuit over fracking contamination of groundwater


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 01:49 UTC
fracking
© Les Stone / Reuters A man places an anti-fracking sign outside his house in Dimock, Pennsylvania



Comment: This is a hopeful development, but we can expect a huge push-back from the O&G industry which will continue to bury the overwhelming evidence that fracking poses huge risks to human health and the environment.


A federal jury has ordered Cabot Oil & Gas to pay more than $4.24 million in damages to two families in Dimock, Pennsylvania, who claimed the company's fracking operations contaminated their groundwater with methane.

The jury reached its verdict on Thursday in the lawsuit that accused the company of polluting the families' well water as a result of its natural gas drilling operations, according to Reuters. Cabot Oil & Gas said it will appeal the verdict.

Six jurors in federal court in Scranton awarded $1.3 million each to Scott Ely and Monica Marta-Ely, and $50,000 to each of their three children.

"This has been an exhausting six and a half years," Scott Ely said after the verdict, according to Reuters.

Comment:

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People

'Made in the USA': Companies are making a killing by using prison labor

Brianna Acuesta
True Activist
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 18:16 UTC
Prison labor
© Buycott
The prison-industrial complex: some may have heard of it, but this term is still widely unknown amongst the masses despite it's huge effect on the American economy. This complex is described as "the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems." The interests of the government are their efforts to increase their policing of people rather than solving the root of the problems, which leads to over-incarceration. The interests of industries are their financial holds over privately-owned prisons and their exploitation of prison workers who are underpaid and overworked.

How does this affect America? First of all, outsourcing, which is frowned upon by those who know about it because of its economic effect on American citizens, is replaced with "insourcing," which is when corporations employ prisoners for as little as $0.23 per hour. Outsourcing affects the American economy by choosing to employ workers in foreign countries rather than displaced workers in America itself, thus causing a rise in unemployment and poverty.

Comment: See also:

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Nuke

Nightmare without end: Japanese authorities want to pretend that 'nothing happened' at Fukushima


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 17:18 UTC
fukushima
© Carlos Barria / Reuters



Comment: There has been a massive cover-up of the scale of the devastation caused by Fukushima and the ongoing human and ecological disasters. Japan is restarting nuclear reactors, in spite of ongoing safety issues and public protests, and at the same time is trying to convince people that it is safe to return to the areas near Fukushima by 'normalizing' radiation standards when clearly, there is no medical or scientific evidence to support this.


Five years ago a killer tsunami knocked out the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, spewing radiation and forcing 160,000 people to flee their homes. Authorities in Japan want locals to think "nothing happened," documentary director Jeffrey Jousan told RT.

"The government prints the number of people who died as a result of the 2011 disaster in the newspapers every day. [In some other prefectures], the [death toll] amounts to 300-400 people in each prefecture, but in Fukushima it is over 8,000 people," Jousan, a US director and producer who has been living and working in Japan since 1990, said.

It is very telling about the situation in Fukushima. It is hard for everyone who is affected by the tsunami, who lost their homes and lost their families. But [in Fukushima], people are not able to go back home, they are unable to work because people won't buy food from Fukushima, farmers cannot farm anymore. It is affecting people, and more people are dying because of that.

It is shocking... to see [how] many people have died in Fukushima," the co-director of the documentary film 'Alone in the Zone' told RT.

Comment:

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Cell Phone

What's next? Apple warns that FBI demand they turn on iPhone cameras and microphones next

Nadia Prupis
Common Dreams
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 17:47 UTC
cell phone
© Mariah Dietzler/flickr/ccWhen they can get us to create a new system to do new things, where will it stop?
If the FBI successfully manages to force Apple to unlock the suspected San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, the government could use the precedent to require the tech company to remotely turn on users' iPhone microphones and cameras, Apple's senior vice president warned this week.

Eddy Cue, speaking to Univision in a Spanish-language interview, reiterated Apple's argument that its case against the FBI is not just about one phone or one suspect, but rather an issue of user privacy.

"When they can get us to create a new system to do new things, where will it stop?" Cue said, according to a translation provided to Business Insider. "For example, one day [the FBI] may want us to open your phone's camera or microphone. Those are things we can't do now. But if they can force us to do that, I think that's very bad."
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Heart - Black

Aboriginal town declares state of emerency and asks for aid over high rate of suicide


Press TV
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 17:37 UTC
Cross Lake First Nation office
Cross Lake First Nation is declaring a state of emergency after six suicide in the past two months.
An indigenous community in Canada has asked the federal government for health support amid a rising suicide rate among its people over the past months.

The Cross Lake Community appealed for federal aid on Thursday, a day after it declared a state of emergency over the increasing number of suicides among its 8,300 members.

The community, also known as the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, is located some 500 kilometers north of Winnipeg, Manibota Province, and is the third largest aboriginal community in the area.

The appeal for aid comes as six people in the community have committed suicide in two months, while 140 others attempted to kill themselves in the last two weeks.

Comment: It's not just their mental health needs that should be addressed, but also their desperate living situation. These people are not attempting suicide because they are mentally ill. They are seeking to escape the plight of 80% unemployment and no assistance from anyone outside of the community. If the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada really wants to address the problem, then some serious efforts need to be taken to help strengthen the community economically.

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Magnify

'Blunt force injuries of the head,' not heart attack, killed Russian media tycoon Mikhail Lesin


RT
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:14 UTC
Mikhail Lesin
© Iliya Pitalev / SputnikMikhail Lesin
Four months after the death of former Russian press minister and prominent media figure Mikhail Lesin in a DC hotel, Washington's chief medical examiner has revealed forensic data indicating that Lesin died of injuries to the head.

While initial reports following Lesin's death in DC's Dupont Hotel on November 5, 2015 indicated that a heart attack had been to blame, no conclusive official forensic data has been released until now.

A joint statement by the District of Colombia's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and Metropolitan Police Department said that the former minister's death had been a violent one, as cited by RIA Novosti on Thursday.

"The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has released the cause and manner of death for Mikhail Lesin...Cause of Death: blunt force injuries of the head," the statement said.

It added that "blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities" contributed to the 57-year-old's death.

Nevertheless, the manner of death was still classified as "undetermined" in the official release.
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Heart - Black

65yo diabetic amputee wrongfully accused of his wife's murder, dies in jail


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 15:26 UTC
Oakland Police
The family of Melvin Stubbs is preparing to sue the Oakland Police Department over the death of the 65-year-old diabetic amputee charged with murdering his wife. Stubbs was proven innocent by a coroner's report, but not before he died in police custody.

Oakland police made the arrest on Saturday when they entered the home of Stubbs and his wife Terry Cameron. Cameron lay dead and Stubbs was in an exhausted state. Officers observed signs of trauma on Cameron and scratch marks on Stubbs, and combined with the fact that the home was disheveled, police presumed it was a murder scene and took Stubbs to jail, according to a police spokeswoman, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Upon arriving at the jail, however, Stubbs' blood sugar was so high that police were first forced to take him to a hospital. The following day, Stubbs was admitted to Santa Rita Jail, where he was later found unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital two hours later.

The Alameda County Coroner's Bureau confirmed to the Stubbs family on Monday that 58-year-old Cameron had, in fact, died from acute bacterial meningitis, exonerating the deceased Stubbs.
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Eye 2

'Erdogan destroyed our world': Kurds report Turkish forces have beheaded & burned to death hundreds of civilians


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2016 11:24 UTC
Turkey Kurds
© REUTERS/ Sertac Kayar
Harrowing accounts of an alleged massacre of dozens of Kurdish civilians in the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre have been collected by RT's William Whiteman, who traveled to the area following reports of a brutal military crackdown on the population.

Reports of Turkish troops slaughtering hundreds of civilians trapped in the basements of Cizre, which is located in Turkey's Sirnak province, first surfaced in February. Some 150 people were allegedly burned to death in one of them.

That particular claim was made by Turkish MP Feleknas Uca from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, who spoke to Sputnik agency. These and other trapped people were reportedly denied access to food and medical supplies. However, until now, the alleged atrocities committed by the Turkish forces could not be substantiated on the ground.

Comment: The Turkish elite have successfully used the refugee crisis to both extort the EU and begin a systematic destruction of the Kurds. If terrorism is defined as:

1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes,
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization,
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government,

then Turkey, and indeed NATO as a whole, are terrorists without equal.

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Video

Oliver Stone reveals fears of NSA interference, things he had to do to make Edward Snowden film

Stephen Galloway
The Hollywood Reporter
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 21:31 UTC
Snowden film
© Open Road Films'Snowden'
"We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S.," the director says about his upcoming movie about government whistle-blower Edward Snowden, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Fears of interference by the National Security Agency led Oliver Stone to shoot Snowden, his upcoming movie about government whistle-blower Edward Snowden, outside the United States.

"We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S.," Stone said on March 6, speaking before an audience at the Sun Valley Film Festival in Idaho, in a Q&A moderated byThe Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Galloway. "We felt like we were at risk here. We didn't know what the NSA might do, so we ended up in Munich, which was a beautiful experience."

Even there, problems arose with companies that had connections to the U.S., he said: "The American subsidiary says, 'You can't get involved with this; we don't want our name on it.' So BMW couldn't even help us in any way in Germany."

Comment: Just goes to show how far in lock step (or cowardly) Hollywood is with US intelligence agencies these days that Stone had such a difficult time producing this film.

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Camcorder

Caught on Video: Drumpf supporter punches protester in the face at a rally, charges filed

Eric Levitz
New York Magazine
Thu, 10 Mar 2016 22:45 UTC
Donald trump rally
© Sean Rayford/Getty ImagesIncitement, by Trump
A Donald Drumpf supporter sucker-punched a protester at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. Police then pulled the protester to the ground and handcuffed him, allowing his assailant to continue enjoying the GOP front-runner's speech. It may shock you to learn that, in the videos documenting the altercation, the Drumpf supporter appears to have white skin, while the protester is black.

Happily, many hours and viral videos later, the Fayetteville police have brought charges against the attacker, a 78-year-old man named John McGraw, according to local station WRAL.


Comment: And it gets worse: reporters caught up with 78-year-old McGraw after the rally, and this is what he had to say:
"Next time, we might have to kill him. We don't know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization."


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