More than one million tourists have flocked to the South for Mardi Gras, and hundreds of thousands of those revelers have settled in for a few days along the Gulf Coast. Those who decided to enjoy the festivities along the Gulf of Mexico might be in for something they didn't expect: oil tar mats.

On Thursday of last week, workers on Pensacola Beach, Florida spotted and brought to shore a 1,200 pound oil tar mat, which officials say accounted for about 90% of the total size of the mat. While the bulk of the mat was a mixture of sand and other debris, scientists ran tests and were quickly able to determine that the oil in the mat was a perfect match for the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, as the Pensacola News Journal explains:

The weathered oil from the tar mat was confirmed to be MC-252 oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Although the waters of the Gulf of Mexico were once scoured regularly for residual oil from the spill, physical searches were phased out as the number of sightings began to dwindle.

In the summer of 2013, BP pulled their cleanup crews from the Gulf Coast, assuring residents and tourists alike that the oil spill was all cleaned up. A few months later, the U.S. Coast Guard made similar claims to the public.

Marissa Alexander may face 60 years in prison for firing what she says was a "warning shot" at her abusive estranged husband, as the Florida State Attorney's office prepares to retry her on three counts of aggravated assault.

Alexander had been serving a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault when ajudge ordered she receive a new trial, finding that the jury instructions in her original trial were erroneous. Many of her supporters cheered the announcement, believing that the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence was overly harsh for Alexander, who tried unsuccessfully to use Florida's Stand-Your-Ground law in her defense.

Voice of Russia (VoR) is reporting that almost 80% of Russian citizens want to ban GMOs along with the legislative bill proposed by the United Russia Party which would make cultivating any GMO seed in the country illegal.

Russians understand that this corrupt technology can bankrupt farmers, poison people, and ruin the ecosystem. Their political and grassroots stance against GMOs is diametrically opposed to the World Trade Organization (WTO) which Russia recently joined, Monsanto, one of the largest GMO seed producers, and other powerful influences in the US and EU political landscape are trying to push GMO on the entire world.

If Russia wins their anti-GMO bill, this could sweep across the rest of Europe, single-handingly defeating GMO agribusiness. This could be the end of transgenic crops - and the powers who like to think they are running the food supply show would have to look for a new gig.

"The committee heard reports form scientists and representatives of the farming community, the Agriculture Ministry and related branches. We recommended suspending or, to be more exact, prohibiting the production and cultivation of GMO foods in Russia. We urged researchers to be more specific on GMOs and how they influence human health. Today, there is no need whatsoever for Russia to launch GMO production. I think that Russia should become a GMO-free country," the lawmaker told the Voice of Russia.

Russian law presently requires the labeling of all foods containing GMOs, and the country is principally considered to be GMO-free already due to the fact that Moscow, Belgorod, Kostroma, Nizhniy, Novgorod, Kurgan and many other cities have been declared GMO-free zones.

In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of all mortgages nationally remain underwater (meaning the balance owed exceeds the current value of the home), sapping homeowners' budgets, the housing market and the economy. Since the banks, the courts and the federal government have failed to give adequate relief to homeowners, some cities are taking matters into their own hands.

Gayle McLaughlin, the bold mayor of Richmond, California, has gone where no woman dared go before, threatening to take underwater mortgages by eminent domain from Wall Street banks and renegotiate them on behalf of beleaguered homeowners. A member of the Green Party, which takes no corporate campaign money, she proved her mettle standing up to Chevron, which dominates the Richmond landscape. But the banks have signaled that if Richmond or another city tries the eminent domain gambit, they will rush to court seeking an injunction. Their grounds: an unconstitutional taking of private property and breach of contract.

How to refute those charges? There is a way; but to understand it, you first need to grasp the massive fraud perpetrated on homeowners. It is how you were duped into paying more than your house was worth; why you should not just turn in your keys or short-sell your underwater property away; why you should urge Congress not to legalize the MERS scheme; and why you should insist that your local government help you acquire title to your home at a fair price if the banks won't. That is exactly what Richmond and other city councils are attempting to do through the tool of eminent domain.

In the following SOTT Talk Radio show from October 20th 2013, we discussed high drama in high places, the all-too-brief rise and fall of the Ride for the Constitution protest in Washingotn, DC, ongoing climate chaos and incoming meteor fireballs from space.

We took a look at the contrived theatre of Republicrats dogging it out on the political stage in the first US 'government shutdown' in 20 years, while a drama unfolded in which a mother with her young child in her car was accused of "ramming the White House gates" and ended up riddled with bullets near the Capitol building.

Meanwhile spectacular fireball sightings throughout the Fall produced some notable overhead explosions in the U.S. You know folks are noticing that something is 'up' when Anderson Cooper dedicates an episode of 60 Minutes to the topic of "cosmic roulette"...

Running Time: 02:09:00

Download: MP3

Sometimes I look at how NYC has been transformed in recent years and I just shake my head. It has become so similar to one of those elite communities in Huxley's Brave New World. Just a haven for cry baby bailed out bankers running amok, tossing their Fed provided fiat all over the place.

As I have said before, the city of my birth has become Disney Land for Wall Street, with the NYPD basically a private enforcement arm of JP Morgan and the TBTF banks.

To scared Manhattanites everywhere, fear not. The departure of Mayor Bloomberg has apparently done nothing to stop the city's evolution into full blown nanny-state.

The latest thing New Yorkers can't do is jog in Central Park early in the morning. Just to keep you peasants safe...

From the Daily News:

The police took a back seat when the Kharkov administration building was seized by armed nationalists from Western Ukraine and let pro-Russian demonstrators liberate it instead, the mayor of Kharkov Gennady Kernes told Kommersant.

The political tensions in the largest city in eastern Ukraine, Krharkov have reached a pivotal point on Saturday during a peaceful rally "For protection of the city" at which tens of thousands, including children gathered.

Someone threw an explosive package at the crowd from the administrative building held by a group of pro-Maidan protesters.

No one was injured by the blast, but a group of pro-Russian activists broke through the cordon of Maidan supporters in order to recapture the building.

Scuffles erupted resulting in injuries of more than 100 people. Gun shots were also heard from inside the building, as well as several more blasts. Eventually, the people have retook the building, raising a Russian flag over the administration for a few hours.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday handed out the keys to a fleet of brand new Mercedes as prizes for the country's Olympic medalists at the Sochi Winter Games.

Russia finished a wildly successful home Olympics, which closed Sunday, at the top of the medal table with 13 golds, 11 silver and nine bronze for a historic high tally of 33.

This was not the headline that the Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics gave its recent release of provisional fertility data for 2012. However, if you compare the most recent CDC data with Rosstat data on Russian births you see that, for the first time in a very long time, in 2012 Russia's birth rate actually exceeded that of the United States. This is, to put it mildly, a significant reversal from the not too distant past when the US had a birth rate that was as much as 75% higher than Russia's. As you can see, the speed and scale of the convergence is impressive

The droughts currently ravaging California, which will likely send food pricesgh soaring down the road, have highlighted the importance of available freshwater supplies. As 17 communities in California are within 60 days of running out of drinking water, the ability of companies like Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) and Nestle (NASDAQOTH: NSRGY) to effectively privatize water supplies feels awfully disconcerting. While the rains that just began to fall out west may bring some measure of relief, the fact remains that the world is coming up hard against a water crisis.

Water, water, everywhere ... right?

Most people view water as an infinite, inexhaustible resource, much like air. After all, it's part of a whole natural cycle, right? For most practical purposes, though, water -- especially clean, safe drinking water -- is resolutely finite and exhaustible. It's getting worse as the global population hurtles toward the 9-billion mark, as agricultural and fuel extraction guzzle more and more water, and as climate change adds growing stress to existing supplies.

Consider a few alarming indicators:

• One in seven people around the world lack access to safe drinking water.
• The Global Economic Forum identifies water crises as the third most serious risk the world faces in 2014.
• The poorest 20% of households in El Salvador, Jamaica, and Nicaragua spend up to 10% of their income on water.
• From 2003 to 2010, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran lost 144 cubic kilometers of stored freshwater -- about the same amount of water as there is in the Dead Sea. Many scholars draw a solid line between water scarcity and the recent conflicts in those regions, and the U.S. director of national intelligence sees global water overuse as a potential threat to national security.
• NASA data from Jan. 17 showed California's backup groundwater reserves to be so depleted that the losses could be detected from satellites 400 kilometers above the earth's surface.