French senators voted to outlaw hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, making France the first country to pass a law banning the technique for extracting natural gas and oil.
“We are at the end of a legislative marathon that stirred emotion from lawmakers and the public,” French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said late yesterday before the vote. Hydraulic fracturing will be illegal and parliament would have to vote for a new law to allow research using the technique, she said.
France Vote Outlaws ‘Fracking’ Shale for Natural Gas, Oil Extraction
Why Do the Police Have Tanks? The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police For
Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post's Radley Balko, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
Oil and gas spills in North Sea every week, papers reveal
Serious spills of oil and gas from North Sea platforms are occurring at the rate of one a week, undermining oil companies' claims to be doing everything possible to improve the safety of rigs.
Shell has emerged as one of the top offenders despite promising to clean up its act five years ago after a large accident in which two oil workers died.
5 Facts About Fluoride to Give Your Water District
The prolonged ingestion of fluoride may cause significant damage to health and particularly to the nervous system… It is important to be aware of this serious problem and avoid the use of toothpaste and items that contain fluoride, particularly in children as they are more susceptible to the toxic effects of fluoride. Fluoride can be toxic by ingesting one part per million (ppm), and the effects are not immediate, as they can take 20 years or more to become evident. Most fluoridating U.S. public drinking water suppliers add fluoride chemicals to deliver 1 ppm fluoride.
Federal court orders immediate end to "don't ask, don't tell"
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered the U.S. government to immediately cease enforcing the longstanding ban on openly gay members of the military.
In a brief two-page order, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said “don’t ask, don’t tell” must be lifted now that the Obama administration has concluded it’s unconstitutional to treat gay Americans differently under the law.
The Lies That Sold Obama's Escalation in Afghanistan
A few days after Barack Obama's December 2009 announcement of 33,000 more troops being sent to Afghanistan, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert Gates advanced the official justification for escalation: the Afghan Taliban would not abandon its ties with al-Qaeda unless forced to do so by US military force and the realization that "they're likely to lose."
Gates claimed to see an "unholy alliance" of the Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban emerging during 2009. Unless the United States succeeded in weakening the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would have safe haven in Afghanistan, just as they had before the 9/11 attacks, according to Gates.
President Obama to recognize military suicides with condolence letters
Reversing a longstanding policy, the White House has decided to send condolence letters from President Barack Obama to the families of service members who commit suicide while deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and other combat zones.
The president had been weighing a change in the policy since December 2009, and it took effect this week. “The president feels strongly that we need to destigmatize the mental health costs of war to prevent these tragic deaths, and changing this policy is part of that process,” a senior White House official said in a statement to POLITICO.
FDA unleashes end game scheme to outlaw virtually all dietary supplements formulated after 1994
In 1994, after years of armed raids, oppression and censorship by the FDA, Congress passed a law known as DSHEA. This is the law that essentially forced the FDA to stop regulating dietary supplements out of existence, and groups such as the Life Extension Foundation (www.LEF.org) were instrumental in helping get this law passed in 1994.
Now, suddenly, the FDA has decided it wants to enforce NDI, and its enforcement of this technicality would essentially amount to the FDA denying permission to use nearly all dietary supplement ingredients introduced since 1994. So last Friday, the FDA proposed its new rules on NDI -- on the Friday before a long weekend, no less, which is a common tactic government uses when it wants to do something that nobody notices -- and these new rules run the risk of being adopted as active regulations, threatening virtually the entire dietary supplement industry with an eventual shutdown.
Obama Has Finally Become Dick Cheney
The Obama administration wants to jail James Risen, a reporter who exposed Bush-era wrongdoing, if he doesn't reveal one of his sources.
In Barack Obama's rise to national prominence, when he criticized the Bush Administration for its false claims about WMDs in Iraq, its torture of detainees, and its illegal program of spying on American citizens without warrants, he owed a particular debt of gratitude to a New York Timesnational security reporter. In a series of scoops as impressive as any amassed during the War on Terrorism, James Risen reported in 2004 that the CIA failed to tell President Bush about relatives of Iraqi scientists who swore that the country had abandoned its weapons program; the same year, he was first to reveal that the CIA was waterboarding detainees in Iraq; and in 2005, he broke the Pulitzer Prize winning story about the secret NSA spying program.
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