Environment group calls for fracking procedure to be banned after safety concerns over minor earthquakes in Lancashire A company using “fracking” to drill for gas in Lancashire has had to suspend operations following a 1.5 magnitude earthquake near Blackpool on Friday. It is the second earthquake to strike Lancashire since April, and experts say it may be a result of the controversial practice, a process of drilling for natural shale gas which involves injecting water and rock-dissolving fluids underground at extremely high pressure to break apart hard shale rocks and release gas. Cuadrilla Resources, the company carrying out the fracking at Preese Hall, Weeton, close to the Fylde coast, said it had suspended operations to examine data collected by the British Geological Survey before deciding whether it was safe to resume. Neither quake was large enough to cause any structural damage. Mark Miller, the company’s chief executive, said: “We take our responsibilities very seriously and that is why we have stopped fracking operations to share information and consult with the relevant authorities and other experts. “We expect that this analysis and subsequent consultation will take a number of weeks to conclude and we will decide on appropriate actions after that.” Drilling is likely to be suspended for a long time as Cuadrilla investigates the cause of the quakes with the help of outside experts. The BGS said it could not say conclusively if the first earthquake, on 1 April, was linked to the fracking but the organisation’s website stated: “Any process that injects pressurised water into rocks at depth will cause the rock to fracture and possibly produce earthquakes. “It is well known that injection of water or other fluids during the oil extraction and geothermal engineering, such as shale gas, processes can result in earthquake activity.” The BGS said that last week’s 1.5 magnitude earthquake was very similar to a larger 2.3 quake that centred on nearby Poulton-le-Fylde at the beginning of April. “It seems quite likely that they are related,” said Brian Baptie, the survey’s head of seismology. “The recorded waveforms are very similar to those from the magnitude 2.3 event last month, which suggests that the two events share a similar location and mechanism.” WWF Scotland has repeated its call for fracking to be banned, following news that a company was seeking permission for Scotland’s first shale gas exploration at Aith, near Falkirk. Its director, Dr Richard Dixon, said: “Whether the shale gas drilling and the earthquake are linked certainly needs investigated. However, we already know enough about the environmental problems associated with fracking to know that it should be banned in Scotland.” “Shale gas would be a disaster for the climate and its production could contaminate groundwater. Scotland should follow France’s example and ban it before it even gets going. Scotland should become the home of clean energy not another dirty fossil-fuel. Shale gas projects in Scotland would quickly tarnish our global claim to green credentials.” Pollution fears Fracking has been heavily criticised by environmentalists in the US, who say the process can end up polluting drinking water in the surrounding area. In a case l. Last year in Pennsylvania, a natural gas company was banned from drilling for at least a year because methane from a faulty well polluted drinking water. This April, the New York Times reported that Congressional Democrats had found that “oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009″. Despite this, a report last month by the Commons energy and climate change committee found there was no evidence that fracking was unsafe, saying a ban on shale gas drilling was not necessary in the UK as there was no evidence that it posed a risk to water supplies from underground aquifers. “There appears to be nothing inherently dangerous about the process of fracking itself and as long as the integrity of the well is maintained shale gas extraction should be safe,” said Tim Yeo, the committee chairman. Gas Energy Fossil fuels Jonathan Paige guardian.co.uk
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Alleged mastermind of 2001 attacks and four other suspects to be tried by military court and could face death penalty US military prosecutors have refiled terrorism and murder charges against the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks and four other men under a revamped trial process at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others allege that they were responsible for planning the attacks that sent hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people in 2001. Prosecutors have recommended that the trial be a capital case, which could bring the death penalty. The five men were charged previously in connection with the attacks, but those charges were dropped in 2009 when the Obama administration hoped to close the US detention facility at Guantánamo and do away with Bush-era military commissions for trying terror suspects. The other four alleged co-conspirators are Waleed bin Attash, better known as Khallad, a Yemeni who allegedly ran an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators and timetables; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, accused of helping nine of the hijackers travel to the US and sending them $120,000 for expenses and flight training; and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi accused of helping the hijackers with money, western clothing, traveller’s cheques and credit cards. All five men were charged with conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking aircraft and terrorism. The men initially were charged with the same offences in February 2008, but that plan stalled in 2009 as President Barack Obama ordered a review of the military commission system. That November, the attorney general Eric Holder announced that the five would face trial in a civilian court in New York. That plan, however, was widely opposed by Republicans in Congress, as well as some New York Democrats, and Congress passed legislation prohibiting any move to bring Guantánamo detainees to the US. About two months ago, the Obama administration bowed to political pressure and backed off the plan, saying it would instead prosecute them before a military commission. And the chief prosecutor in the office of military commissions, Captain John Murphy, said he would recommend a joint trial at Guantánamo for all five. C Dixon Osburn of Human Rights First said it was regrettable that the administration had to shelve its plans to prosecute the cases in civilian courts. Federal courts, he said, “have successfully convicted more than 400 persons of terror-related crimes since 9/11, have more criminal laws to incapacitate possible terrorists and have more than 200 years of precedent to guide them”. Dominic J Puopolo Jr, a Miami computer consultant whose mother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, attended the trial in Germany of a Moroccan man accused of aiding the plotters and had hoped to attend the trial of Mohammed and the others held at Guantánamo. He had been frustrated by the lack of apparent progress and said he was “pleasantly surprised” to receive notification on Monday from the defence department that charges would be filed again. “Just to get this started back in Guantánamo Bay is a big deal,” said Puopolo, whose mother was on board the American Airlines flight that the hijackers crashed into one of the twin towers. “I have every intention of making a stand and going there if offered.” Under the military commission’s process, the charges will be forwarded to the convening authority, Bruce MacDonald, who will decide whether to refer any of the charges for trial by military commission. Guantánamo Bay Cuba United States September 11 2001 Global terrorism guardian.co.uk
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Staff suspended from a Castlebeck care unit after footage shows patients being kicked, slapped and drenched with cold water Inspectors have been called in to private hospitals that care for people with learning disabilities after exposure of a regime of shocking abuse by staff at a unit run by one of Britain’s leading care companies. The chief executive of the company, Castlebeck, said he was ashamed of what had gone on at the unit. Thirteen employees have been suspended and police have arrested three men and one woman as part of an ongoing investigation. Care services minister Paul Burstow said he was shocked by the revelations and had authorised a series of random, unannounced inspections of similar units by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the sector regulator which has itself apologised for failing to act on earlier tipoffs about the Castlebeck facility. Critics of the government’s NHS reforms will seize on the implications for the proposal to allow “any qualified provider” to supply healthcare in the same way as in social care, where private companies and charities dominate the market. The regime of abuse at the Winterbourne View unit, in Hambrook, near Bristol, was exposed by the BBC Panorama programme. An undercover reporter was taken on as an unqualified support worker and filmed secretly for four weeks as some of his fellow workers routinely slapped and kicked patients,, knocked them over to pinning them to the floor and drenching them with cold water. The unit is purportedly an assessment hospital for adults with profound learning disabilities or autism, but most of the patients had lived there for more than a year – each at a cost to the public purse of £3,500 a week – and there appeared to have been little activity or stimulation. In one scene in the programme, a male support worker seems to goad a female patient to throw herself out of a second-floor window. He says: “Go on, do it now I’m here. I’d love to see you try it: you will go flying. … When you hit the floor, do you reckon you will make a thud or a splat?” In another scene, a second male support worker is seen to act as a Nazi camp commandant, repeatedly slapping a patient across the face with a pair of leather gloves and saying: “Nein, nein, nein!” Staff, sometimes with qualified nurses watching, used forms of restraint that an expert described as closer to martial arts rather than any approved technique. A female patient is seen pinned beneath a chair for more than 30 minutes with one support worker sitting in the chair and keeping his foot on her wrist, while a second worker kneels on her legs. Panorama focused on Winterbourne View after being approached by Terry Bryan, a former senior nurse at the unit who had tried and failed to raise his concerns within Castlebeck and with the CQC. The regulator said it recognised that “there were indications of problems at this hospital which should have led us to taking action sooner”. Lee Reed, Castlebeck’s chief executive since January, said he was “personally ashamed” to be part of an organisation that had allowed such abuse to occur and had apologised unreservedly to the patients and their families. Castlebeck specialises in care of people with learning disabilities and has 56 units and a £90m turnover. Steps have been taken by safeguarding agencies to protect the patients at Winterbourne View, some of whom have been moved elsewhere, and the unit is barred from taking any further admissions. Disability Long-term care Health Social care David Brindle guardian.co.uk
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One part of the liberal media’s Obama re-election effort is well under way: trying to destroy the reputation of Fox News and its president, Roger Ailes. Two long new magazine “exposes” have attempted to demonize Ailes and his allegedly brain-dead minions as the antithesis of good journalism. The funnier one came from Rolling Stone magazine, which ran the title “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory.” How little does this rag understand good journalism? It took only a few lines before staff writer/fantasist Tim Dickinson fell on his face. After painting a picture of employees loyally cheering the boss at a holiday party, Dickinson entertained comparisons to…Mao Zedong. “It was as though we were looking at Mao,” said disgruntled ex-employee Charlie Reina. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” added “a former executive” with News Corporation. Dickinson also said Ailes runs “the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside the communist bloc.” Put aside that Ailes isn’t responsible for 70 million deaths and mass cannibalism, and that his politics are essentially the philosophical opposite of communism – and OK, he’s Mao.
Continue reading …You and what army? Surely President Karzai understands the rules of the game by now. Anything we do while “saving” his country from the scourge of terrorism is a mere “oops” and he really should be too polite to mention these things. Via Raw Story: KABUL (AFP) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the US military on Sunday to avoid operations that kill civilians, saying it was his “last warning” to Washington after 14 people allegedly died in an air strike. Reacting to the alleged deaths of 10 children, two women and two men in an air strike on Saturday in the southern province of Helmand, Karzai said such incidents were “murdering of Afghanistan’s children and women.” “The president called this incident a great mistake and the murdering of Afghanistan’s children and women, and on behalf of the Afghan people gives his last warning to the US troops and US officials in this regard,” his office said, adding that he “strongly condemned” the killings. Citing initial “reports and heartrending pictures published on media” Karzai’s office said 10 children, two women and two men were killed in the raid. Adopting an unusually angry tone, Karzai said the US-led operations were “arbitrary” and unnecessary”. “The president said that US and NATO troops have been repeatedly told that their arbitrary and unnecessary operations cause the deaths of innocent Afghans and such operations violate human and moral values but it appears that (we) are not listened to,” the statement said..
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enlarge Another day of turmoil. Click here to view this media Kind of a mess on this particular May 31st in 1978. The world was distracted with finances and violence. On the domestic front it was disclosed that Consumer Prices had hit an all-time high for everything from beef to lettuce. Inflation was skyrocketing and homeowners were taking the worst of the drubbing. Internationally, the NATO summit concluded with stinging denunciations of Communist involvement in Africa, the Soviets and Cubans being singled out. In return, Soviet Premier Brezhnev condemned the action by taking to the airwaves and offering a long and lengthy dirty laundry list of Imperialist contretemps as rebuttal. Meanwhile, the Civil War in the former Belgian Congo, now renamed Zaire (and since re-renamed Congo) got the ire of the French and Belgians who sent in troops to quash the uprising, but not without wholesale massacres of Europeans still living there. On this day Morocco sent in its first contingent of troops to act as peacekeepers while French and Belgian forces withdrew. The UN decided to extend its peacekeeping mission in the Golan Heights, since it was deemed a success. Egyptian President Sadat pledged to keep Middle East peace negotiations alive, despite qualms and rejections from the Israelis. On Capitol Hill a proposal was put forth by Congress to offer Tuition Tax Credits to students and Senator William Proxmire concluded the all-volunteer Army wasn’t going to be a success if it didn’t encourage recruitment and training of more females. For scandals, it was Italy’s turn and specifically the Italian Opera Houses, as a financial scandal triggered the arrests of over 29 people, mostly prominent figures from such institutions as the La Scala, Turin and Naples Operas. And the age-old Sicilian tradition of knee-capping finally went international with the first such case reported from the streets of Berlin. What a day, as reported on The CBS World News Roundup for May 31, 1978.
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File this one under: Imagine If The Partisan Tables Were Turned. On her MSNBC show this evening, Rachel Maddow repeatedly mocked Republican Senate leader as “little Mitch, the rodeo queen.” Maddow was miffed over McConnell's arranging a Senate vote on the raising of the debt ceiling, and by extension the Republican position on Medicare reform.
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Mutilated body of Hamza al-Khatib given to family as state TV says injuries were faked by conspirators The new face of the Syrian revolution is chubby, has a winning smile and belongs to a 13-year-old named Hamza al-Khatib. The boy, from a village called al-Jizah near the southern city of Deraa, has become the most famous victim yet of Syria’s bloody chapter of the Arab spring. Hamza was picked up by security forces on 29 April. On 27 May his badly mutilated corpse was released to his horrified family, who were warned to keep silent. According to a YouTube video and human rights activists, Hamza was tortured and his swollen body showed bullet wounds on his arms, black eyes, cuts, marks consistent with electric shock devices, bruises and whip marks. His neck had been broken and his penis cut off. Like Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot dead in street protests after Iran’s disputed presidential elections two years ago, Hamza has come to symbolise the innocent victims in a struggle for freedom against tyranny and repression. In the YouTube video, a picture of Hamza is held above his coffin. It shows his angelic grin and thick head of black hair. He is dressed in a polo shirt. Below the gold-framed photo lies his body. “He was taken alive and he was killed because he called for freedom,” says the voice-over. Other grainy clips show crowds holding a banner saying: “The martyr Hamza al-Khatib, killed under torture by Assad’s gangs.” Cries of “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) were heard at his funeral and pro-democracy protesters have designated this Friday as “Children’s Friday” in his memory.” Hamza’s violent death is being discussed all over Syria as citizens struggle to come to terms with the brutality that has accompanied the two-month uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The official media are focusing on troops and police who have been killed by “armed terrorist gangs”. Videos of protests on Saturday show crowds chanting for Hamza in towns as far away as Latakia, home to the Assad clan. “The case has upset all of us,” said a former security officer and father of four from Homs. “The brutality, especially to children, is only causing more people to come out – as it did in Deraa at the start of the protests.” Several Facebook pages have been started, including one with more than 61,000 followers called “We are all Hamza al-Khatib”. “Hamza has become a poster boy for the Syrian revolution,” said Malik al-Abdeh, whose London-based Barada TV broke the story by broadcasting the YouTube clip last Thursday, before it went global on al-Jazeera Arabic on Friday. “It’s the same thing that happened with Mohammed Bouazizi [the vendor who burned himself to death in protest] in Tunisia and Khaled Said [who was killed by police] in Egypt. But this was not another young man. He was just a boy.” Syria’s official media have accused al-Jazeera and other satellite channels of peddling propaganda. State television aired an hour-long programme on Tuesday night on the death of Hamza. Accompanied by a doctor, Akram Shaar, and a psychological doctor, Majdee al-Fares, the presenter promised to expose the “whole truth” of the affair. The doctors said the marks on Hamza’s body were not signs of torture, as activists have alleged, but were faked by conspirators. The doctors said Hamza died from bullet wounds but that conspirators created the marks on his body, trying to give the people a Syrian equivalent to Bouazizi in order to agitate them. The programme also showed a pre-recorded conversation with Hamza’s father and an uncle who said they trusted a pledge made by Assad to look into the circumstances of Hamza’s death. The interior ministry said it would set up a committee to look into the tragedy. None of Hamza’s relatives could be reached for comment. Hamza’s father, Ali, 65, was detained on Saturday, according to activists in Damascus. Wissam Tarif, the director of the human rights group Insan, said Hamza’s uncle was picked up on Monday and his brother had also been detained. The Syrian government has not allowed foreign journalists into the country since the uprising began in March. Demands for UN access have been rebuffed. Syrian activists and rights organisations say more than 1,100 people have been killed and thousands rounded up and tortured in the past 10 weeks, but Hamza’s is the most brutal case yet. The fact that the body was returned to the family rather than disposed of was intended to warn off other people, they said. “This is a message from the state to all protesters,” said a human rights expert who runs the Monitoring Protests Facebook page which focuses on abuses during the protests. “They are trying to say, ‘We don’t spare anyone and if you continue protesting this what we are going to do to you and your kids.’
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Click here to view this media Rolling Stone has done a great piece about Fox News and its impact on this country. I love this excerpt: The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization. “ What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame ,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.” Much of the article is similar to what John and Dave wrote about in “Over the Cliff”, but the Rolling Stone article reaches even farther. For example, Fox News has created a “fundraising juggernaut” for Republicans, which is what enabled Republicans to bounce back so hard after being trounced in 2008: But Ailes has not simply been content to shift the nature of journalism and direct the GOP’s message war. He has also turned Fox News into a political fundraising juggernaut. During her Senate race in Delaware, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell bragged, “I’ve got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money.” Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who tried to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, praised Fox for letting her say on-air, “I need $25 from a million people – go to SharronAngle.com and send money.” Completing the Fox-GOP axis, Karl Rove has used his pulpit as a Fox News commentator to promote American Crossroads, a shadowy political group he founded, promising that the money it raised would be put “to good use to defeat Democrats who have supported the president’s agenda.” Just this morning, Fox and Friends ran four separate segments over their 3-hour time slot about Sarah Palin. They didn’t stop there, though. There were 3 segments on Chris Christie, and an interview with Michele Bachmann where she got to play coy about her upcoming “major announcement” in Waterloo, Iowa. Then they pivoted to a Palin vs. Bachmann narrative for the last hour. Anyone with half a brain knows Sarah Palin isn’t going to run for President. She is just the next Donald Trump lined up to keep wingnut engagement high while the candidates jockey for funding and position. Kaili Joy Gray at Daily Kos has it right: So you can all hop off the Palin Paparazzi Tour of 2011, go back to your air-conditioned offices, sit back, and let her show off her savvy “new social media” skills on Twitter and Facebook—and Fox “News”—and then mock the holy hell out of her for being a fucking idiot. That’s all. That is the sum total of the amount and kind of attention she deserves. You don’t have to treat her like a serious presidential candidate, or even a serious person. Despite her protestations that she doesn’t want media attention, she’s starving for it. Hell, she quit her job as governor just so she could devote herself full-time to getting you to give her attention in the pages of your Very Serious papers. This is our Very Serious Political Media. The Beltway Boys. Today’s hot stories include more Breitbart mania, Palin, Bachmann and Christie. This is because they do not really want anyone to think about how Republicans are trying to force a financial crisis on this country by holding a faux debt ceiling vote today which will fail without Very Serious Spending Cuts, or how cynical it is to cry wolf over the national debt while refusing to raise revenues to cover it. They don’t want us to keep talking about the Paul Ryan plan to destroy Medicare, or how they’d love to kill Social Security and Medicare with one smooth debt ceiling stone. So instead we get Palin, Bachmann, and a world turned upside down over absolutely…nothing.
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Electoral commission launches case review into claims Huhne failed spending as Essex police conclude speeding inquiry Chris Huhne is facing a second potentially damaging inquiry after the elections watchdog announced it was reviewing all his expenses from the general election in response to allegations he broke the rules. The electoral commission has launched a case review into the energy secretary’s election expenses after receiving detailed claims that he failed to declare all his spending. The matter, which could be referred to the police, comes as Essex police prepares to conclude its inquiry into allegations that Huhne broke the law by asking his wife to take points he incurred for speeding. Last week, the electoral commission rejected a complaint due to insufficient evidence from two Liberal Democrat councillors in Huhne’s Eastleigh constituency that he made false declarations in his election expenses. But on Tuesday an official case review was launched after more detailed allegations were made by the Sunlight Centre for Open Democracy, which is run by Paul Staines and Harry Cole, who also writes for the rightwing Guido Fawkes blog. The allegations are that Huhne spent not only more than he declared but above the legal limit in election campaigns. The Sunlight centre is claiming: • Huhne failed to declare all spending on letters to constituents. • Items that were marked as national campaign spending did not subsequently show up on the national returns. • Huhne claimed £85 for a new website, which the Sunlight centre is alleging could not reflect its true cost. This week, police are expected to hand a dossier of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service relating to the allegations that Huhne asked his wife to take points for a speeding offence to avoid losing his licence. The electoral commission review, and potentially a second police inquiry, adds to the pressure on Huhne. The police can launch an inquiry into alleged expenses irregularities only up to 12 months after the event. That deadline expires on 10 June, and the commission will not report until 24 August. Cole has been advised that he can personally make a complaint to the police, which he said on Tuesday he was “actively considering”. Huhne said in a statement: “I have full confidence that my agent has declared my election expenses correctly and I look forward to this complaint being rejected as roundly as the last one.” An electoral commission spokesman said: “The commission received an allegation regarding Chris Huhne MP’s 2010 general election expenses on 25 May. Following an initial assessment of the information, we have now started a case review into the matter. The review will look to establish the facts of the case, firstly for the purposes of transparency and also for possible future guidance.” Chris Huhne MPs’ expenses Liberal Democrats House of Commons Polly Curtis guardian.co.uk
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