PNN - 7/27 - Bees, and Sea Turtles Native Plants and the Big D

PNN -  7/27/14

Stacy lee Sherwood - 7:17pm

Pam Treadwell -          7:33pm

Mary Higgins -             7:54pm

Ray Seamans -            8:15pm

Karina Veaudry -        8:36pm

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1.USED ON DETROITS WATER ACTIVISTS

A LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) was used to disperse a rally at Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit on Friday, July 18, 2014 at 2:43pm. There has been previous use of an LRAD in Detroit on May 1, 2012 when Occupy Detroit gathered on the public sidewalk outside Grand Circus Park after park closing hours of 10pm. The use in 2012 was as a public address. The use in 2014 was to cause distress to those hearing the sound.

You can hear the sound emitted in the video footage at 50 minutes into this clip (the final minute of the clip). Those who were on the platform to speak felt vibration throughout their body and some clutched at their chest during the deployment which last about 2 minutes.

The sound dispersed the crowd which had a peaceful assembly with speakers discussing the human right to water, and the hypocrisy of Michigan's Emergency Manager Law (PA 436 of 2012), which was brought forth after the public voted down the Emergency Manager Law (PA 4) during the November elections. Rally speakers brought the position of Detroit is being ruled by an implanted dictator who is dismantling sections of local government. Those assembled resist the interest of Kevyn Orr, the EM of Detroit, in moving the public water to a privatized service. They also resist privatization of all public services placed in the trust of our local government to provide for the well-being of our citizens. Detroit has seen public lighting turned over to a new authority which has darkened major streets such as Gratiot, Grand River, and Woodward - streets where pedestrian deaths have occurred at night in the past year.

{LRAD Corporation has received an order worth $550,00 from the Air National Guard to ship LRAD 100X devices this quarter.

“With this order, LRAD systems will be in use by every major force of the Department of Defense,” Tom Brown, president and CEO of LRAD told Government Security News. “The Air National Guard will be deploying the LRAD 100X systems throughout the country to support and assist civil authorities in the event of severe natural or man-made disasters. LRAD systems have proven highly effective in communicating warnings, instructions and commands over wide areas before, during, and in the aftermath of catastrophes.”

As well as being powerful communication devices, LRADs emit piercing sounds that amount to nothing less than auditory torture, and serve to disperse people from geographical areas, breaking up demonstrations and other gatherings.

Larger versions of the LRAD, previously used against Somali pirates and insurgents in Afghanistan, are increasingly being deployed inside America. In 2009, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department deployed an LRAD against people going to a town hall meeting.

}

2. Senator Elizabeth Warren took her fight against a rigged system

Senator Elizabeth Warren took her fight against a rigged system to the Netroots Nation gathering in Detroit Friday morning, saying that she is fighting back, and if We the People "push back and fight hard, we can win."

Outside the hall, people were passing out "Ready for Warren" hats and signs. Inside the hall, the hats and signs were everywhere.

Fighting back against a rigged system was the theme of Warren's rousing speech to Netroots. She began by briefly telling the story of how the about Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) came to be. She had the idea for the agency, started talking about it, people told her it was a great idea and badly needed, but said to her, "Don't do it because the biggest banks in the country will hate it and you will lose."

She said they had that half right. "They spent more than a million dollars a day for more than a year lobbying against financial reforms. But we fought back and we won. We won because you and a zillion other people across the country got in the fight. We said we the people will have this agency and we won."

And now we have the CFPB and it has already returned $5 billion to people that the big financial firms tried to steal, she said.

Warren's message was that we should "never miss the central point of this story. The CFPB is proof of how democracy can work in the 21st century. It is proof that if we push back against the biggest, strongest, most ruthless lobbying effort in the country, if we push back and fight hard we can win. We can't win every time and we are still trying to figure out how to make it all work. We don’t win every time but we’re learning to win. We will keep at it; we will fight and we will win that’s my message today."

A Rigged System

Warren moved from there to what is happening in the country today. She said companies naturally look for profits. "But many of them have another plan – they use their money and their connections to try to capture Washington and rig the rules in their favor ... That’s what we’re up against that’s what democracy is up against."

She compared what happens to regular people with what happens to wealthy elites at the top, saying, "A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail but a big bank launders drug money and no one gets arrested."

Not Just Big Banks

Warren said, "But it's not just the big banks." She called on the audience to look at the choices the federal government makes, such as piling debt on students. Then she went straight after Republicans as the enablers of the rigging and corruption. "Instead of building a future, this country is bleeding tax loopholes. Billion-dollar corporations squeeze out deals with foreign countries, renounce their citizenship and pay no taxes. How does this happen? They all have lobbyists and Republican friends in Congress to protect every loophole and every privilege. The game is rigged and it isn’t right."

Rigged Trade Deals

"Take a look at what happens with trade deals. Trade negotiations are like Christmas morning for the biggest corporations," she said.

Warren described how corporations can bypass pollution and wage laws. "The corporations can get special gifts through trade negotiations they would never get from Congress," she said, because trade negotiations are secret, held behind closed doors. The corporations are "all smacking their lips at the possibility of rigging the upcoming trade deals."

"Stop and ask yourself, why are trade negotiations secret? I have had people involved in the process actually tell me, If people knew what was going on they would be opposed. My view is if people would be opposed then we shouldn’t have those trade deals."

It's Everywhere

Warren said the tilt in the playing field is everywhere. "When conservatives talk about opportunity, they mean opportunity for the rich to get richer and the powerful to get more powerful. They don’t mean do something about student loan debt or help someone unemployed to get back on their feet."

The Fight

"Deep down, this is a fight over values. Conservatives and their powerful friends will continue to be guided by their internal motto 'I got mine and the rest are on your own.' "

"My motto we all do better when we work together and invest in future. The country gets stronger when we invest in helping people succeed. ... These are progressive values and these are the values we are willing to fight for."

She then went into a refrain:

We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement.
And we're willing to fight for it.

We believe in science and that means that we have a responsibility to protect the planet.
And we will fight for it.

We believe the Internet shouldn't be rigged to benefit big corporations.
And we will fight for it.

We believe no one should work full time and still live in poverty. That means raising the minimum wage.
And we will fight for it.

We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage.
That means we will fight alongside them.

We believe students are entitled to get a good education without being crushed by debt.
And we will fight for it.

We believe after a lifetime of work people are entitled to retire with dignity. That means protect Social Security and Medicare.
And we will fight for it.

We believe – I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014 – in equal pay for equal work.
And we will fight for it.

We believe equal means equal and that true in the workplace and at home and everywhere.
And we will fight for it.

We believe immigration has made country strong and vibrant.
And we will fight for it.

And we believe that corporations are not people. (The crowd was on its feet making a lot of noise so I don't know what she said next.)
And we will fight for it.

Right here in this room this is where it happens. This is 21st-century democracy. This is the future of America. This is where we decide that We the People will fight together and do that, we will fight together and we are going to win.

And the crowd went nuts.

3. Over a Million Messages calling for Net Neutrality

Companies should not be able to pay Internet service providers so that their sites reach users faster. That’s the general consensus of the 1,067,779 comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission before the initial comment period of the open Internet proceeding came to a close on Friday.

Issue-related comments on the government agency’s site rarely surpass 100, but a proposal that could threaten Internet equality has united many Americans and prompted them to speak out. Even former Daily Show correspondent John Oliver took up the issue. Oliver’s 13-minute rant about net neutrality on his HBO show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver inspired so many people to comment on the FCC website that the government entity announced on Twitter that it was having “technical difficulties.”

“I urge you to maintain net neutrality and not give into the forces of big money, special interests, and self-interested partisanship,” commenter Gregory Robe, a retired captain of the United States Air Force Reserve, wrote to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “I depend on free access to information that could be blocked if you change the rules.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights advocacy group, recently spoke out in defense of net neutrality as well.

“[The FCC’s] practices pose a dire threat to the engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, companies, and kids in their college dorm rooms to make the Internet that we know and love today,” staffer April Glaser wrote on the EFF’s website.

FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said in a statement that the agency would make sure to account for all submitted opinions, according to the blog E Pluribus Unum. Users are now able to reply to submitted comments on the FCC website through Sept. 10. After that date, the agency will make a decision about whether it will regulate the way Internet service providers manage Web traffic.

4. dan a hughes - ready to FIGHT

NAPLES, Fla. - State authorities may have pulled the permits of the Dan A. Hughes Co. in Southwest Florida, but the Texas-based company isn’t leaving without a fight.

"We’re pulling out except for the Collier Hogan well," said Kristin Kremers, landman for the Hughes Co., during a Thursday morning media tour of the now-dormant well. "We haven’t decided whether to produce it."

Long delayed, the media tour of the Collier Hogan site was the latest episode in a litigious battle between the company and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

Conducted by Kremers, Hughes attorney Tim Riley, spokesman David Blackmon and contractor Ryan Berger, the tour showed a largely cleaned up site. There were no traces of oil sprays shown in aerial photos taken early this spring. Flocks of herons hid in tall grass as cows mooed softly in the background. A 10-foot alligator, which workers have dubbed "Fred," often lumbers by, said security guard Judy Morris.

But the bucolic tour was somewhat moot: On Friday, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had pulled all of the Hughes Co.’s permits — including the permit on the Collier Hogan well — and filed a lawsuit, asking for enforcement of a consent order that the Hughes Co. agreed to in April, and civil penalties and injunctive relief of $100,000.

Hughes countered the contest it isn’t over, as it intends to file its own suit.

The brouhaha started when Hughes leased 115,000 acres of Southwest Florida land from Collier Resources. It planned to drill three test wells, to see if enough oil could be produced to be commercially viable.

That turned out to be true in the case of the Collier Hogan well, the only one it was able to drill before public protests and litigation hit it like a tsunami.

So while Hughes has relinquished its leasehold to other sites, it still plans to fight for the right to pump from Collier Hogan’s scant three acres.

But it’s not just the well’s production potential that’s causing Hughes to take a stand; the company already has spent $25 million for all the costs related to the well’s drilling, completion and ongoing operations, according to Blackmon. Overall, Hughes has spent $57 million on its exploration program in the area, including lease costs.

DEP and Hughes now communicate mostly through lawyers and news statements, the Hughes group said. But they say communications were good until the end of 2013, after the company did an acid stimulation procedure.

Kremers said the acid stimulation was done because oil flow from the well, which started out robust, had slowed to nearly nothing.

Although she would not quantify how much oil has been produced since the well was granted an operational permit in August 2013, early production was "extremely promising," she said.

During the stimulation, Hughes injected a cocktail of chemicals down the well’s steel tubing to dissolve rock around the horizontal sections of the well’s pipe. It propped open the fractures with sand.

That technique had been in other states before, but not Florida, the DEP later said, and it was done without the regulator’s permission.

The DEP issued a cease-and-desist order on Dec. 31, and started negotiating consent order terms with the Hughes Co. to address worries about possible groundwater contamination.

But Kremers said the DEP "never expressed concern about the procedure" before it occurred, and that the company answered all the questions it was asked before beginning the procedure.

"It’s an understatement to say we are disappointed with the DEP," she said.

She added the company only agreed to the consent order because it had wanted to preserve good relations with the regulator.

Kremer said environmentalists’ continuing concerns that contaminated water or deadly hydrogen sulfide gas could migrate up through the narrow steel tubing is unfounded, because the tubing is encased in four layers of cement.

"Whatever is put in the well, stays in the well," she said.

Blackmon added contaminants are unlikely to migrate up from oil reservoirs because there are 30 layers of impermeable rock between them and the aquifer.

The DEP declined to respond to the Hughes Co.’s comments on the Collier Hogan well because of the pending litigation.

However, DEP spokeswoman Tiffany Cowie said any new driller at the site near Golden Gate Estates, part of the leasehold Hughes has relinquished, would have to start afresh in the permitting process.

While its lawyers draw swords with the DEP, the Hughes Co. is keeping its options at the Collier Hogan well open — literally.

Instead of plugging the well permanently with cement, it is using small balls to block flow temporarily.

But a towering pump stands nearby, ready at the flick of a switch to pull up black gold again.

5. Congresswoman Says Migrant Children Should Be Placed In ‘Americanization Facilities’

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has an unusual solution to the crisis of unaccompanied migrant children coming across America’s southern border: put them in camps and put them to work.

KCTV7 News in Kansas City reported last week that Bachmann proposed the idea of “Americanization Facilities” where the children would be put to work to pay off the costs of their past, present and futures care. In exchange, the children would also be fast-tracked on a path to citizenship. “I’m calling on all of us, Obama and Congress and everyone, to chip in and build special new facilities… ‘Americanization facilities,’ if you will,” Bachmann told Minnesota’s Twin Cities News Talk. “And we’d send these kids to these facilities, in Arizona and Texas and wherever else. And we’d get private sector business leaders to locate to those facilities and give these children low-risk jobs to do. And they’d learn about the American way of life, earn their keep, and everyone wins in the end.”

When pressed by conservative radio host Jason Lewis about what life would be like in the camps, Bachmann elaborated that the purpose would also be to inculcate the children into English-speaking American culture. “Well, we’d of course want these facilities to be ideal, you know, for the children to work and learn,” Bachmann continued. “They’d spend half of their day working, and the other half learning what every child should learn, and that’s English, you know, English and American history. And as soon as they learn English with some degree of fluency, they can attend local schools, maybe with a voucher program, or something like that. And then they could work when they aren’t in school.”

The flow of migrant children across the southern border has almost doubled since last year, and an estimated 60,000 will cross by the end of fiscal year 2014 — without any accompanying parents, guardians, or papers. Most are fleeing violence from drug cartel conflicts in their home countries — such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — where they face “severe intrafamilial abuse, abandonment, exploitation, deep deprivation, forced marriage, or female genital cutting. Others are trafficked to the United States for sexual or labor exploitation.” Others are trafficked across the border to be exploited as labor or in the sex trades.

Most of the children turn themselves over to the border guards, at which point they’re usually either in migrant detention centers — sometimes for as long as a year — or often reunited with family members in the United States. Meanwhile, they are placed in immigration proceedings where they must defend themselves just as any adult would have to.

President Obama has proposed a $3.7 billion package to deal with the border crisis, though lawmakers in Congress have offered competing aid packages.

Despite the hardships they already face, Bachmann argued her plan would rebound to the benefit of the children by allowing them to take advantage of job opportunities in the states. “I think this is a great way to bring businesses into the Texas and Arizona areas, and maybe other states struggling with low employment opportunities, thanks mostly to Obama’s policies,” Bachmann said. “It’s about opportunity, not just for these kids but for the American people.”

“It helps the businesses, and if we can raise fifty-thousand God-fearing, English-speaking Americans, who understand real American values, then I’d say it’s a job well done.”

According to a recent report in the New York Times, 60,000 immigrants in detention facilities across the country are already used as low cost labor — often making only a dollar a day, or being paid in credits to detention facility stores. Officials insist the programs are voluntary, but immigrant advocates point to cases in which detainees were threatened with solitary confinement and other punishments if they refused to work.

6. Obama Finally Reads the Riot Act to Corporations Who Abandon the US to Save Taxes

It took six years, but President Obama finally used his bully pulpit to chastise US corporations who abandon this country to save taxes. Apparently the president, who has been rather cozy with Wall Street and US corporations for six years, felt a rare gust of populist disdain for businesses that abandon the US to decrease their taxes. He robustly expressed his scorn on July 24, first in a speech at a technical college in Los Angeles and then in a CNBC interview. Obama specifically cited Ireland as a country that has encouraged US corporations to use the process known as 'inversion' to legally move their headquarters for purposes of tax avoidance. In his interview with CNBC about the inversion tax avoidance strategy, Obama almost sounded as if he were channeling Elizabeth Warren.

Obama specifically cited Ireland as a country that has encouraged US corporations to use the process known as "inversion" to legally move their headquarters for purposes of tax avoidance. The Irish Times reported on the president's remarks:

In his administration’s most high-profile attack on a practice known as “inversions” that more and more US companies have recently used to reduce their taxes, Mr Obama said in a speech in California that US corporations were exploiting an “unpatriotic tax loophole” by moving their head offices overseas in takeovers of smaller foreign companies....

“What we are trying to do is to say that if you simply acquire a small company in Ireland or some other country to take advantage of the low tax rate [and] you start saying, ‘we are now magically an Irish company’, despite the fact that you might have only 100 employees there and you have got 10,000 employees in the United States, you are just gaming the system,” he said. “You are an American company.”

In his speech at a Los Angeles college, he said that these companies were technically renouncing their US citizenship, even though most of their operations were in the US.

“I don’t care if it’s legal – it’s wrong,” he told an audience. “You don’t get to choose the tax rate you pay. These companies shouldn’t either.”

The Irish Times also noted, "In an extraordinarily strong rebuke of US multinationals, he said some have called these firms 'corporate deserters.'

That may be the strongest rhetoric that Obama has uttered concerning the pseudo-patriotism of US corporations who love to wrap their marketing in the flag while re-incorporating overseas to boost profits and stock prices. The BuzzFlash commentary about Walgreen's included an estimate from a stock analyst, as quoted in The Chicago Tribune, that if the Walgreen company proceeds with overseas inversion incorporation, it "would cost U.S. taxpayers $2.35 billion in the first three years after the transaction."

Because US companies avoid paying their fair share of taxes, using the inversion and other tax schemes, the US debt - which pro-corporate elected officials complain about - rises.

In his interview with CNBC about the inversion tax avoidance strategy, Obama almost sounded as if he were channeling Elizabeth Warren:

What I'm saying is that companies thrive in the United States in part because they benefit from the best university system in the world, the best infrastructure-- although I'd like to see us do a little better on infrastructure. 

You know, there are a whole range of benefits that have helped to build companies, create value, create profits. For you to continue to benefit from that entire architecture that helps you thrive, but move your technical address simply to avoid paying taxes-- is neither fair-- nor-- is it-- something that's going to be good for the country over the long term. And this is basically taking advantage of tax provisions that are technically legal-- but I think most people would say if you're doing business here, if you're basically still an American company, but you're simply changing your mailing address in order to-- avoid paying taxes-- then you're really not doing right by the country-- and by the American people.

During Warren's campaign for the Senate, one of her most noted comments emphasized that corporations are built on an infrastructure of services, transportation and education, among other hidden subsidies provided by the public commons. - Apparently, President Obama finally got the message.

7. Act of Love? Jeb Bush, ‘Moderate Republican,’ Calls for Deportation Of Migrant Children

Jeb Bush called for nearly all of the 50,000-plus immigrants in limbo on our Southwest border to be sent home. Bush doesn't sink to blaming the victims outright. Instead, he blames President Obama, claiming that the massive influx of immigrants into America is 'the latest consequence of the failure of President Barack Obama and Congress to overhaul America's broken immigration.' If all Jeb Bush brings to the table is a meeker version of Tea Party ideology, he's not much better than Rick Perry and Ted Cruz. After all, speaking crazy ideas a little more softly doesn't make them less crazy.

Remember when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the consummate “moderate Republican,” shocked everyone by calling immigration an “act of love?” It looks like he’s changed his mind. On Thursday, he called for nearly all of the 50,000-plus immigrants in limbo on our Southwest border to be sent home. That is, “except for those deserving few who may demonstrate a true case for asylum.” Deserving few? Someone should ask Bush which of the children fleeing impoverished and violent countries (where they have a 1 in 15 chance of being murdered) like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “deserve” to be sent home. Someone should also ask him whether the children at our border deserve to live under atrocious conditions in America, the country Republicans constantly praise and never stop disgracing. Someone should ask Bush if this is how we respond to “acts of love.”

To be fair, Bush doesn’t sink to blaming the victims outright. Instead, he blames President Obama, claiming that the massive influx of immigrants into America is “the latest consequence of the failure of President Barack Obama and Congress to overhaul America’s broken immigration.” Apparently, the House GOP’s refusal to even vote on an immigration bill drafted by a bipartisan “Gang of 8″ and passed in the Senate is due to Obama’s lack of leadership. How about John Boehner’s lack of leadership? Why not place some blame with the man so utterly weak and spineless that he cannot bring his caucus to vote on one of the most important pieces of legislation of the past eight years. Bush does not suggest what Obama could have done differently, or how “Congress” as a whole should have functioned better. He simply adopts a smug, superior tone, gets on his high horse and lectures the President about leadership, just like other Republican governors who want to pass themselves off as “outsiders” while offering no solutions of their own.

Jeb Bush’s empty, partisan rhetoric is particularly galling because he, in contrast to his brother, is meant to represent the brains of the GOP. He is a policy wonk and eccentric intellectual who stands apart from the rabid populism of the Tea Party. It is discouraging that, at least in this case, his rhetoric is “Tea Party-lite,” offering none of the substance his reputation would suggest. If all Jeb Bush brings to the table is a meeker version of Tea Party ideology, he’s not much better than Rick Perry and Ted Cruz. After all, speaking crazy ideas a little more softly doesn’t make them less crazy, even when you try and fail to justify them in Wall Street Journal Op-Eds. It appears that the GOP’s search for sane leadership, of which the future of America may depend on, must continue. And, if Jeb gets his way, so must the misery of 50,000 poor children languishing at our border.

8. Thank you - New York Times

The editorial begins:

    It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.

    The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana. 

As to the dangers:

    Moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults. Claims that marijuana is a gateway to more dangerous drugs are as fanciful as the “Reefer Madness” images of murder, rape and suicide. Thank you, New York Times.

9. ‘Ex-Chief of C.I.A. Shapes Response to Detention Report’

George Tenant - back at work

A tentatively titled and reported New York Times article glimpses former agency director George Tenet’s efforts to suppress and discredit a report accusing “former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House” about the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

The article is tentative because the enormous question at its center—whether CIA officials tortured people in the course of the agency’s counterterrorism work—appears only in passing and well into the piece.

    Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.

    … The detention and interrogation program was conceived on [Tenet’s] watch and run by men and women he had put in senior positions. After virtually disappearing from public view since leaving the C.I.A. in 2004 except for a brief period promoting his memoir, Mr. Tenet is working behind the scenes with many of the same people to develop a strategy to challenge the report’s findings. And he is relying on his close relationship with Mr. Brennan to keep him apprised as the report moves through a glacial declassification process. Mr. Brennan rose to the C.I.A.’s senior ranks during Mr. Tenet’s tenure, and served as one of the former C.I.A. chief’s most trusted advisers during the post-9/11 period.

    Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report. After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”

Officials are plainly nervous about what the report will show. At a meeting held in April, the current head of the counterterrorism center asked how CIA Director John Brennan planned to defend in public roughly 200 people under his leadership who had participated in the interrogation program. They are concerned about “accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy,” the Times states.

10. Journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux reported Wednesday:

    The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

    … The rulebook, which The Intercept is publishing in full, was developed behind closed doors by representatives of the nation’s intelligence, military, and law-enforcement establishment, including the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Emblazoned with the crests of 19 agencies, it offers the most complete and revealing look into the secret history of the government’s terror list policies to date. It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity.

    The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous” to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.

    This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and might go unnoticed.

11. Infectious Monkey's damaged by Fukushima Radiation 70km away

Scientific Reports (Nature.com), July 24, 2014: In April 2012 we carried out a 1-year hematological study on a population of wild Japanese monkeys inhabiting the forest area of Fukushima City. This area is located 70 km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant […] Total muscle cesium concentration in Fukushima monkeys was in the range of 78-1778 Bq/kg, whereas the level of cesium was below the detection limit in all [monkeys from 400 km away.] Fukushima monkeys had significantly low white and red blood cell counts, hemoglobin, and hematocrit [...] These results suggest that the exposure to some form of radioactive material contributed to hematological changes in Fukushima monkeys. […] low hematological values in Fukushima monkeys could have [...] been due to the effect of other radioactive materials. […] The hematological changes in the Fukushima monkeys might likely be the result of exposure to some form of radioactive material, but only radiocesium concentration was measured in this study. […] We therefore plan to investigate in a future study the underlying mechanism in detail with the aim of detecting other radioactive materials, such as 90Sr. […]

PNN's Guests this week:
Join News Director Rick Spisak with this weeks guests:

Pam Tredwell - BEE LADY - Will give us the News on Florida Bees, the untold story. She wants us to know the many ways we can help the pollinators.

Mary Higgins Candidate for House of Representatives, DISTRICT 82

Ray Seamans Online Director at Progress Florida - Evangelist for Awake the State

Karina Veaudry - Native Plant Activist

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