US record keepers looking at uncounted law enforcement homicides realized that previous official tallies severely undercounted numbers. The new estimate put it at an average of 928 people each year over the most recent eight years, compared to 383 in published FBI data.

The numbers compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the research institute RTI International found that FBI statistics covered only 46% of law enforcement homicides and doesn't even include data from several key states, including Florida. The FBI tallies, the report says, are "anything but hugely misleading."

Another problem with the FBI numbers is that they are based on voluntary submissions by local law enforcement. Since law enforcement agencies are not required to submit the data, many do not for officer-involved shootings.

A federal standard for regulating explosive gas in oil-transporting trains was rejected in the higher levels of the White House, according to a new report. It instead opted to allow new industry-backed regulations crafted in North Dakota to suffice.

In September 2014, according to a Reuters exclusive report, Anthony Foxx, secretary of the US Department of Transportation, took to the White House to express concern over the increasing "bomb train" derailment disasters occurring amid the oil and gas boom in places such as the Bakken Shale region around North Dakota.

Foxx was specifically focused on new rules for "light ends," an industrial term for the mixture of combustible gas that is a high risk for DOT-111 crude-oil tanker trains, which haul 60 percent of the 1.2 million barrels of oil produced daily just in North Dakota.

Eight train cars filled with crude oil veered off the tracks in the south of Galena, Illinois. At least two of them caught fire after the 105-car-long BNSF Railway train derailed.

The train derailed around 1:20 pm (19:20 GMT) in a rural area where the Galena River meets the Mississippi, according to railroad officials.

Galena city fire crews responded to the reports as soon as the emergency calls went through.

"The report that came back to me from them is that eight tanker cars had left the track," Galena City Administrator Mark Moran told reporters. "Two of those were still upright, the other six were not. They observed at least one of those tankers smoking."

No reports of injuries have so far surfaced, and no evacuations have been necessary, Moran said, adding that there are "no structures and no houses in that area."

It was a typical little news story on Washington's drone wars -- six paragraphs from Yemen, the sort of minimalist report that, in these years, has also regularly come out of Pakistan or even, from time to time, Somalia. "A U.S. drone attack in Yemen killed four suspected al-Qaeda militants on Saturday in the southern province of Shabwa, local Yemeni security officials told Reuters." Who those "militants" really were we seldom know; there's rarely follow-up in the mainstream media. It's just another barely noticed mini-triumph in Washington's ongoing "covert" drone wars in the Greater Middle East.

Those wars have been secret and yet strangely public for years now. The White House has seemingly been filled with pride over its ever-updated "kill list" and the regular CIA strikes on terror targets it green-lights for a small fleet of Predator and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles. As a result, it eagerly leaks information about its drone wars that it considers flattering. Meanwhile, its top officials don't hesitate to discussor even brag about the program. In this, it follows in a tradition established in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan in which "covert wars" -- in his case, in Central America -- were fought in remarkably open and publicity-conscious ways. Meanwhile, their supposedly secret nature kept them from serious oversight. In this way, covert and overt were wedded in a process intended to free the White House and the CIA to do as they wished.

As a result, in the post-9/11 years, at least in the mainstream media, drone assassination campaigns have generally gotten a remarkably free ride. While those "militants" always seem to go down for the count, it's rarely mentioned in the same reports that, in places like Yemen, the local terror outfits that Washington means to crush from the air, militant by militant, terrorist leader by terrorist leader, only seem to grow.

More than a decade of intense experience with drones teaches us at least one salient lesson: our robot warriors make war in the usual sense of the term, but in another way as well. In places that are not officially American war zones, their operations also regularly generate war. They are, that is, not a military solution to a problem, but a significant part of that problem. And let's add a second lesson from these droning years into the mix. The U.S. has pioneered the drone as a weapon for a new kind of war. In the process, it has opened drone flyways down which many countries and undoubtedly terror organizations, too, will one day travel. The recent decision of the Obama administration to spread drone technology by selling armed drones to its allies will only hasten the process. The crash of an over-the-counter commercial drone on the White House grounds and mysterious drones of a similar nature flying by night over tourist sites (and the U.S. Embassy) in Paris, a city already on edge, only emphasize the way in which such technology has now been let loose everywhere. (Even the Secret Service is about to start experimenting with drone flights in Washington.)

However, as TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War, suggests today, a new and important critique of Washington's drone wars is emerging from a thoroughly unexpected place: the drone pilots themselves. Explain it as you will, they are taking their hands off the joysticks and voting against drone war with their feet -- and possibly, though the subject couldn't be murkier, their consciences. Tom

Police Killings Grossly Underreported

We previously reported that Americans are 9 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

But it turns out that our numbers were incorrect ...

This isn't surprising, given that:

"Reliable estimates of the number of justifiable homicides committed by police officers in the United States do not exist." A study of killings by police from 1999 to 2002 in the Central Florida region found that the national databases included (in Florida) only one-fourth of the number of persons killed by police as reported in the local news media.

The Guardian reports today:

An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country's most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted "law enforcement homicides" exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate - an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data - amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government's failure to track how many people police kill.

The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totalsof "justifiable homicides by law enforcement" - tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.

As shown below, that means that you're 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

Arkansas Republican state representative is facing serious scrutiny after he apparently "rehomed" his adopted daughters to a household where one of the girls, age 6, was raped by the father. Furthermore, Rep. Justin Harris is accused of continuing to take state funds intended for the girls' care even after his family had given them away.

Wonkette reported on an Arkansas Times exposé about Harris and the Christian pre-school he runs with his wife, a school that employed the sexual predator who raped the 6-year-old girl.

When the Times asked Harris why he handed over his adopted daughter to a sexual predator without ever consulting state authorities or the foster care system, the legislator quoted the Christian Bible's Book of Isaiah, saying, "No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you."

He then said, "You don't know what we've been through this past year. You have no idea what my family has been through. I don't care what the people of Arkansas think about me. I don't care if I lose my position. I care what my wife thinks about me, and I care what my three sons think about me."


The situation has reopened scrutiny of the Harris family's Christian daycare center, Growing God's Kingdom Preschool. The pre-kindergarten has run afoul of authorities in the past for taking state and federal subsidies intended for non-religious institutions. Now, as some in Arkansas are pointing out, Harris is making headlines for trying to eliminate government benefits to immigrants, benefits that his preschool heavily relies on.

It appears, the Times said, that Harris and his wife Marsha took in two little girls in September of 2012. The girls were sisters and in foster care because a male relative had sexually abused the older girl and left her traumatized.

The Harrises formally adopted the girls six months later in March, 2013. By October of 2013, something had gone seriously wrong in the home. The Harrises — who had three older biological sons — handed off the two girls to Eric and Stacey Francis, essentially abandoning them.

An Israeli tourism brochure depicting the Old City of Jerusalem has been banned by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for presenting a "misleading" image, which suggests the Palestinian enclave is Israeli.

The ASA banned the leaflet on Wednesday after consumers lodged complaints.

Its headline, "Israel: Land of Creation," showed a photograph of the walled Old City and Muslim Dome of the Rock against more modern buildings of West Jerusalem.

The caption read "Israel has it all," adding "everyone falls for the Old City, with its narrow (and car-free) alleys, teeming pilgrims and bazaar-like buzz," AFP reported.

The ASA issued a statement saying consumers had complained the advertising presented a "misleading" image of the Old City as a widely accepted part of Israel.

Sharpstown is a Texas community, located just southwest of Houston, and the way they maintain security in this community has gotten our attention.

In 2012, they fired their cops.

The Sharpstown Civic Association then hired S.E.A.L. Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

The statist fearmongers will have you believe that "privatizing" anything would result in mass chaos and a Mad Max scenarios of warlords and rampant crime. But they are wrong.

"Since we've been in there, an independent crime study that they've had done [indicates] we've reduced the crime by 61%" in just 20 months, says James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL.


Government police, despite not acting like it, are still part of the government. This means that any progressive change for the better takes ten times longer than it would in the private sector; if it happens at all. Government police are not driven by efficiency and threats from liability, as neither one of these things are needed when you have a tax farm to rob when things get tight.

Contrary to the government apparatus, private police, must be efficient as well as safe, for one small mistake or claim could end their entire operation. If an inefficiency is spotted within the system, changes must be implemented swiftly to avoid the loss of revenue.

The reason for the success rate of SEAL Security is that they can see a problem and quickly adapt versus trying to spin the rusty cogs of the bureaucratic process. And that is exactly what SEAL did in Sharpstown.

According to guns.com, Alexander cites the continuous patrol of SEAL's officers in their assigned neighborhoods as opposed to the strategy of intermittent presence that the constable embraced. "On a constable patrol contract, it's either a 70/30 or an 80/20. Meaning they say they patrol your community 70 percent of the time, [while] 30 percent of the time they use for running calls out of your area or writing reports."

At least 45 people were killed on Tuesday by suspected Boko Haram militants in a remote village in the north-eastern Borno state of Nigeria, according to sources from the military and authorised vigilante groups.

The insurgents started shooting into houses in Njaba at about 5.30am, local time, a military source in Maiduguri told Reuters on Thursday. The village is close to the town of Damboa and about 60 miles south of the state capital, Maiduguri.

"The attack was not immediately known because the village is very remote and our men couldn't access the area," the source said.

Media regulator to launch investigation into views expressed during Crosstalk programme on Kremlin-backed broadcaster

Russia Today is to be investigated by media regulator Ofcom over anti-western comments in a late-night discussion on Ukraine - its sixth ongoing inquiry into the Kremlin-backed news channel following complaints by viewers.

The regulator, which threatened Russia Today, or RT, with statutory sanctions after repeated breaches of broadcasting regulations on impartiality last year, faces a new investigation over its Crosstalk programme broadcast on 23 December last year.

The programme is understood to have featured a number of anti-western views in the discussion between the presenter and three studio guests, prompting one viewer to complain.