Sunday, November 2, 2014


News Clips For The Day


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/31/1340696/-40kg-Of-Cocaine-Found-On-Mitch-McConnell-s-Father-In-Law-s-Boat?detail=email

"40kg Of Cocaine Found On Mitch McConnell’s Father-In-Law’s Boat"
By Man Oh Man
FRI OCT 31, 2014

James Chao, father of Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine, has a lot of questions to answer after 40 kilograms of cocaine (about $6.7 million worth) was found on the Ping May, a ship owned by the Foremost Group, a company James Chao founded and led to a tidy fortune. But was that fortune built on honest movement of legitimate bulk trade goods, or has Mr. Chao been trading in less than legal goods?

The cocaine, found in 40 separate packages, was discovered during a routine inspection hidden among a load of coal bound for Europe from the port of Santa Marta, Columbia onboard the Ping May, one of 15 ships Foremost currently operates, with another 8 under construction. The final destination for the ship was to be the Netherlands, likely one of the port cities surrounding Amsterdam. It is known that the Ping May has been witnessed at the port of Zaanstad, one of these cities, in the past.

Foremost Group is the source of most of Senator McConnell’s fortune through gifts and inheritance from his in-laws. It is a shadowy corporation, utilizing a complex scheme of shell companies to skip out on millions in taxes annually.

From The Nation:

Foremost acts as a shipping agent, purchasing vessels made primarily in China and coordinating shipment of commodities. Records reviewed by The Nation reveal that Foremost transports corn, chemicals and other goods to cities throughout the world. The company has offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.

The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost’s website FMCNY.com is blank. Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company’s vessels—with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May and Grain May—is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost’s vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost’s ships work under Liberia’s maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian “flag of convenience” allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the US flag. Maritime companies have increasingly used the Marshall Islands to register their vessels. The jurisdiction boasts of “no taxation, lax regulation, and no requirements for disclosure of many corporate details—even to the United States government,” according to a report in World Policy Journal.
(h/t Mogolori)



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/mitch-mcconnells-freighte_n_6076374.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green

Mitch McConnell's Freighted Ties To A Shadowy Shipping Company
The Nation
Posted: 10/30/2014

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about 90 pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.


http://www.thenation.com/article/186689/mitch-mcconnells-freighted-ties-shadowy-shipping-company

Mitch McConnell’s Freighted Ties to a Shadowy Shipping Company
After drugs were found aboard the Ping May, a vessel owned by his wife’s family’s company, Colombian authorities are investigating.
Lee Fang

Photograph – Mitch McConnell’s father-in-law, James Chao (second from right), at the christening of the Ping May in Shanghai (Image: Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation)

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about ninety pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.

The seizure of the narcotics shipment in the Caribbean port occurred far away from Kentucky, the state in which Senator Mitch McConnell is now facing a career-defining election. But the Republican Senate minority leader has the closest of ties to the owner of the Ping May, the vessel containing the illicit materials: the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a firm founded and owned by McConnell’s in-laws, the Chao family.

Though Foremost has played a pivotal role in McConnell’s life, bestowing the senator with most of his personal wealth and generating thousands in donations to his campaign committees, the drug bust went unnoticed in Kentucky, where every bit of McConnell-related news has generated fodder for the campaign trail. That’s because, like many international shipping companies, Chao’s firm is shrouded from public view, concealing its identity and limiting its legal liability through an array of tax shelters and foreign registrations. Registered through a limited liability company in the Marshall Islands, the Ping May flies the Liberian flag.

McConnell’s ties to the Chaos go back to the late 1980s, when James Chao began donating to the senator. In 1993, McConnell married James’s daughter, Elaine Chao, a Republican activist and former Reagan administration official who would later serve as secretary of labor in the George W. Bush cabinet. James Chao emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and founded the Foremost Maritime Corporation upon settling in New York. The company has grown significantly over the years, from acting as maritime agent during the Vietnam War to controlling a fleet of approximately sixteen dry-bulk cargo ships in operation today.

Foremost acts as a shipping agent, purchasing vessels made primarily in China and coordinating shipment of commodities. Records reviewed by The Nation reveal that Foremost transports corn, chemicals and other goods to cities throughout the world. The company has offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.

The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost’s website FMCNY.com is blank. Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company’s vessels—with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May and Grain May—is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost’s vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost’s ships work under Liberia’s maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian “flag of convenience” allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the US flag. Maritime companies have increasingly used the Marshall Islands to register their vessels. The jurisdiction boasts of “no taxation, lax regulation, and no requirements for disclosure of many corporate details—even to the United States government,” according to a report in World Policy Journal.

The recent seizure of cocaine on a Foremost coal ship came as authorities in Colombia have stepped up anti-drug trafficking enforcement in the region. The Nation spoke to Luis Gonzales, an official with the Colombian Coast Guard in Santa Marta, who told us that the Ping May’s crew were questioned as part of an ongoing investigation, but that no charges have yet been filed. His team found the cocaine in forty separate packages.

Contacted by telephone, a representative of Foremost said he is “obviously going to have no comment on this one.”

McConnell has benefitted in many ways from his relationship with his in-laws.

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to The Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by The New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

Last Friday, McConnell dipped into his personal fortune to lend his own campaign $1.8 million for the final week before the election. Members of the Chao family and employees of Foremost have also given over $90,000 in contributions to McConnell over the years.

Requests for comment to the McConnell team about the Ping May cocaine incident have gone unanswered.

McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.




HUFFINGTON POST – “Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about 90 pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.”

DAILY KOS – “Foremost Group is the source of most of Senator McConnell’s fortune through gifts and inheritance from his in-laws. It is a shadowy corporation, utilizing a complex scheme of shell companies to skip out on millions in taxes annually.... Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.... The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost’s website FMCNY.com is blank. Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company’s vessels—with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May and Grain May—is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost’s vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost’s ships work under Liberia’s maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian “flag of convenience” allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the US flag.”

Several liberal and independent news sources have reported this story, but no major outlets such as CBS or even NPR have run it. The Baltimore Sun had an article on it, but when I clicked on the site this morning the Net reported it “unavailable.” It does look as though McConnell has put pressure on them to sit on the story. Of course, since NPR is in the group, it may be that the facts are in question, so I have simply reported it from the two most reliable sources.

No one has accused McConnell of knowing about the cocaine yet, or of having any control over the shipping company's activities. If political contributions have to come from fully vetted companies, there may be more comments in the press later. The Daily Kos statement that the website for Foremost is blank, and that the company is obscured within “a byzantine structure of tax entities” is typical for big businesses, unfortunately. McConnell is involved in a very tight race in Kentucky with Democrat Alison Lundergan-Grimes, and in one article he has been charged with attempting to keep minority voters from coming to the polls. So what's new?







Payments Start For N.C. Eugenics Victims, But Many Won't Qualify – NPR
ERIC MENNEL
October 31, 2014

Debra Blackmon was about to turn 14 in January 1972, when two social workers came to her home.

Court and medical documents offer some details about what happened that day. Blackmon was "severely retarded," they note, and had "psychic problems" that made her difficult to manage during menstruation.

Her parents were counseled during the visit, and it was deemed in Blackmon's best interest that she be sterilized.

Blackmon is among the more than 7,000 people in North Carolina — many poor, many African-American, many disabled — who were sterilized between 1929 and 1976 in one of the country's most aggressive eugenics programs.

North Carolina passed a law to compensate victims of the state-run program last year. This week, the state sent out the first checks to qualified applicants. But Blackmon, like many others who are fighting for restitution, is not among them.

Blackmon, now 56, has a hard time with the details of that day in 1972 — but she does remember a few things from her trip to Charlotte Memorial Hospital. "My daddy said, 'Don't hurt this baby.' And he was crying," she recalls.

Latoya Adams, Blackmon's niece, grew up knowing her aunt had been sterilized. But, she says, "we didn't find out until recently the extent — exactly what all they did to her." After the compensation law passed, she went looking for documentation — and came back with a mother lode: a court order, names of social workers and the entire procedure, outlined from pre-op to discharge.

The doctor had labeled it a "eugenics sterilization." And while it was it relief to have the information, she says, it was also remarkably sad.

"They were telling my grandparents that the surgery was going to be minimally invasive. They told them it would be a tubal ligation. And they [wound] up doing a full abdominal hysterectomy — on a 14-year-old," Adams says.

With all this evidence, Adams and her family thought they had a case. They filed the paperwork, and waited to hear back. The news wasn't good.

"The denial letter, the only thing it really stated was that there were no records found and that her case was not approved by the North Carolina Eugenics Board," Adams says.

The problem lies in a technicality.

The new compensation law says, to be eligible, operations have to have occurred under the state's Eugenics Board. As it turns out, the board very likely wasn't aware of all the sterilizations taking place. Judges and social service workers were greenlighting sterilizations, as well.

"That's kind of become the fundamental problem here," says Bob Bollinger, an attorney representing Blackmon and a few other people who say they are victims.

"You have some old dusty filing cabinet in Raleigh that's full of Eugenics Board paperwork from decades ago, but yet you've got all these people who got sterilized involuntarily, where it was instigated at the local level and their paperwork didn't wind up being preserved in the eugenics files in Raleigh — if it was ever there to begin with," he says.

Graham Wilson, a spokesman for the North Carolina Industrial Commission, which decides who qualifies for compensation from the $10 million fund, says, "A lot of people may have had this done under the auspices of local county groups. They're not qualified," he says.

"They may think they're qualified, and obviously they had this procedure done to them," he says. "But if it was not done under the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, then they're not qualified."

Lawyers working with victims estimate hundreds of people — people like Blackmon — could fall into this category.

Blackmon's operation was ordered by a judge who was part of the state court system. That judge cited a state law.

When asked if that, then, makes the state responsible, Wilson says, "That's kind of hard to say. Again, it's just an unfortunate part of our history. It's just something that was done. So it's kind of hard to say that the state would be responsible when it was just kind of an accepted practice."

"It's frustrating sometimes. It really is," Blackmon says.

She's not the only one frustrated. Her niece, Adams, says the denial feels like a double blow.

"Everything is there, but because you can't find a piece of paper saying it got approved by the North Carolina board, you're not gonna be compensated. I think it's sad. I really think it's sad. It's like, you've hurt her once before, but then now I feel like you're turning around and hurting her once again."

There is an appeals process, and Adams and Blackmon are working through that right now. As for people who will be compensated, the first half of the money went out this week —220 checks for $20,000 each. The rest will be disbursed next summer, after the approval process is complete.




“North Carolina passed a law to compensate victims of the state-run program last year. This week, the state sent out the first checks to qualified applicants. But Blackmon, like many others who are fighting for restitution, is not among them. Blackmon, now 56, has a hard time with the details of that day in 1972 — but she does remember a few things from her trip to Charlotte Memorial Hospital. 'My daddy said, 'Don't hurt this baby.' And he was crying,' she recalls.... 'They were telling my grandparents that the surgery was going to be minimally invasive. They told them it would be a tubal ligation. And they [wound] up doing a full abdominal hysterectomy — on a 14-year-old,' Adams says.... 'The denial letter, the only thing it really stated was that there were no records found and that her case was not approved by the North Carolina Eugenics Board,' Adams says. The problem lies in a technicality. The new compensation law says, to be eligible, operations have to have occurred under the state's Eugenics Board. As it turns out, the board very likely wasn't aware of all the sterilizations taking place. Judges and social service workers were greenlighting sterilizations, as well.'... When asked if that, then, makes the state responsible, Wilson says, 'That's kind of hard to say. Again, it's just an unfortunate part of our history. It's just something that was done. So it's kind of hard to say that the state would be responsible when it was just kind of an accepted practice.'... There is an appeals process, and Adams and Blackmon are working through that right now. As for people who will be compensated, the first half of the money went out this week —220 checks for $20,000 each. The rest will be disbursed next summer, after the approval process is complete.”

I didn't hear about these eugenics cases until I got to college, and then heard that a large number of women of color and those who were considered “mentally deficient” were indeed sterilized. When I look back to the time period I lived through it seems sometimes like the Dark Ages in Europe. Our society simply hadn't developed beyond a primitive set of beliefs and practices. The poor were mistreated sometimes, and the laws didn't deal with it at all. “It was just kind of an accepted practice.'” Many things, from lynchings to wife beating to incest were simply not mentioned in polite society, so they went on unimpeded.

Though our modern culture is very open and therefore may be shocking at times, it is better than those dark secrets kept behind closed doors. In small Southern towns, from the family whose child was considered mentally deficient to the existence of black children born to white women were not acknowledged due to fear of the inevitable stigma, and were only mentioned by outsiders to the situation as they gossiped about everybody in the town as viciously as they could. It reminds me of a Tennessee Williams play, but it isn't a beautiful and elegant work of art.

The South is modernizing now, thank goodness. Even if not all who deserve a reparations payment will get one, at least some lawmakers have acknowledged the harm that such eugenics laws did in the past, and they will not I hope be enacted into law again by some misguided Tea Partiers. I hope we have grown beyond all that.





http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/26/millennials-godless-politics-religous-conservatives

The Guardian
Godless millennials could end the political power of the religious right
Adam Lee
October 26, 2014

The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they’re fighting on unfriendly territory – a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs.

But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia and Kentucky – which in the past would have been easy Republican holds - the races are unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups, despite an overall political climate that generally favors conservatives.

What we’re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that’s been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less Christian. In every region of the country, in every Christian denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile, the number of religiously unaffiliated people – atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith – is growing. In some surprising places, these “nones” (as in “none of the above”) now rank among the largest slices of the demographic pie.

Even in the deep South, the Republican base of white evangelical Christians is shrinking – and in some traditional conservative redoubts like Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, it’s declined as a percentage of the population by double digits. Even Alabama is becoming less Christian. Meanwhile, there’s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to vote more Democratic.

While the effect on evangelicals is new, the general pattern isn’t. The Catholic church, the largest single religious denomination in America, was the first to feel the pinch. Church leaders and Catholic apologists have been fretting for years over the problem of aging and shrinking congregations, declining attendance at Mass and fewer people signing up to become priests or nuns – although their proposals for how to solve the problem all consist of tinkering around the edges, or insisting that they need to try harder to convince people to believe as they do.

America’s next-largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, held out a bit
longer but has now come down with the same affliction. Membership has been declining for the last several years – to the point where half of SBC churches will close their doors by 2030 if current trends persist. And as with the Catholic church, the SBC defenders with the biggest platforms have insisted that they don’t need to change anything if they just double down on their existing policies and pray harder for revival.

What’s driving the steady weakening of Christianity? The answer, it would seem, is demographic turnover.

The so-called millennials (Americans born between 1982 and 2000) are far more diverse, educated and tolerant than their predecessors. They’re also the least religious generation in American history – they’re even getting less religious as they get older, which is unprecedented – and the majority of them identify Christianity as synonymous with harsh political conservatism. 

As older, more religious generations fade away and younger generations replace them, the societal midpoint shifts. And this trend is going to accelerate in coming years, because the millennial generation is big. They’re even bigger than the baby boomers.

The influence of the millennials showed in the (by historical standards) remarkably rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage, which in just a few short years has become legal in more than half the country. Millennials view religious demands for the oppression of LGBT people to be a bizarre and offensive anachronism. And as the major denominations vocally assert that opposing equal rights for LGBT people is a nonnegotiable condition of membership in the Church of Not-Gay, young people are driven away in greater and greater numbers. This may well be a self-reinforcing cycle, as people turned off by constant homophobic rhetoric leave the churches, which results in diluted power for religious conservatives, who then bear down even harder on the anti-gay message. The same arrogance and institutional blindness that got them into this spiral make it almost impossible for them to see the problem and pull out of it.

But even if this secularizing trend continues, it’s likely that there’s a hard core of believers who will persist no matter what: no one is forecasting the total extinction of the religious right in politics.

Still, for progressives, the eroding power of the churches is a most welcome development: the religions right can no longer claim to be the sole source of morality and virtue, nor can they expect to assert their will in political matters and be obeyed without question. Instead, they’ll have to muster evidence and make their case in the marketplace of ideas like everyone else.

In other words, the religious right will finally have to fight fair, and I’m willing to bet that, in the long run, that’s a fight they’ll lose.




“But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia and Kentucky – which in the past would have been easy Republican holds - the races are unexpectedly tight.... America is becoming less Christian. In every region of the country, in every Christian denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile, the number of religiously unaffiliated people – atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith – is growing.... Meanwhile, there’s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to vote more Democratic. ... The so-called millennials (Americans born between 1982 and 2000) are far more diverse, educated and tolerant than their predecessors. They’re also the least religious generation in American history – they’re even getting less religious as they get older, which is unprecedented – and the majority of them identify Christianity as synonymous with harsh political conservatism. ... And this trend is going to accelerate in coming years, because the millennial generation is big. They’re even bigger than the baby boomers.... Instead, they’ll have to muster evidence and make their case in the marketplace of ideas like everyone else. In other words, the religious right will finally have to fight fair, and I’m willing to bet that, in the long run, that’s a fight they’ll lose."

I am not a believer in the miracles scattered throughout the Bible, from the creation story to the dying and rising of Jesus. He did teach the Love doctrine, however, and he was in favor of helping the poor. He also saved a prostitute from being stoned to death by a righteous group of Jewish men. Life for women wasn't ideal under the Jews then, as it isn't now under Islam. I have always felt that Jesus would have welcomed government sanctioned poverty plans and he certainly didn't look down on the poor.

I feel when I vote Democrat that I am doing what I should be doing, and if I am not personally of the LGBT group, I empathise with them when they suffer discrimination and injustice. Likewise for other races and non-conforming religious groups. While I don't want Sharia Law to be enacted in this country, I don't want to see Islamic people treated badly or incarcerated either, unless of course they have committed a crime. (Honor killings and terrorist bombings are crimes.)

I am glad to see this trend in religious belief occurring, as the Evangelical Christian groups tend to disavow commonly accepted scientific information and sometimes things that I simply consider to be progress rather than reactionary thinking – like an end to the race war that is still going on in the South and other parts of the US. I welcome the millenials to our voting population. They will be an improvement.






Sen. Landrieu's remarks on race anger Republicans
AP
By MELINDA DESLATTE
October 30, 2014

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Republicans are calling on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to apologize after she suggested Thursday that President Barack Obama's deep unpopularity in the South is partly tied to race.

In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Landrieu was quoted as saying that the South "has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans."

The comments came after an NBC reporter asked the senator why Obama has such low approval ratings in Louisiana. Landrieu's first response was that the president's energy policies are deeply disliked by residents of the oil and gas-rich state.

She then added, "I'll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It's been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader."

Landrieu is locked in a tight re-election battle with Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, and is targeted by Republicans nationally in their efforts to retake control of the Senate. Republican and tea-party favorite Rob Maness is polling in a distant third place.

State Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere issued a statement late Thursday calling Landrieu's remarks "insulting to me and to every other Louisianian."

"Louisiana deserves better than a senator who denigrates her own people by questioning and projecting insidious motives on the very people she claims to represent," he said. "Senator Landrieu and President Obama are unpopular for no other reason than the fact the policies they advance are wrong for Louisiana and wrong for America."

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal issued a statement calling Landrieu's comments "remarkably divisive" and Maness issued a statement calling on the senator to apologize.

Landrieu's campaign declined to comment Thursday night.




“Republicans are calling on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to apologize after she suggested Thursday that President Barack Obama's deep unpopularity in the South is partly tied to race.” Imagine her telling such a scandalous lie. It's the elephant in the room in Louisiana and she dared to mention it. I can only hope there are enough Democrats with all their picture ID cards in hand to vote those Republicans out of office.




"There is no ambiguity" on climate change, U.N. concludes
CBS/AP November 2, 2014, 8:49 AM

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.

The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's giant climate assessment didn't offer any surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three earlier reports released in the past 13 months.

But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous. Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people, like altering the male-female ratio, and on the environment, the report said. Some impacts are already being observed, including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.

"Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report's launch in Copenhagen.

Climate scientists face an uphill battle convincing the American public of climate change's existence, let alone its urgency.

When asked if they agreed with the statement, "The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity," just 54 percent of Americans surveyed in a study this past summer said yes. Although this number indicates a majority, the United States still ranked last among 20 countries in the poll.

The U.S. number was ten points lower than the next lowest countries on the list, Britain and Australia, where 64 percent agreed that humans are causing climate change. China topped the list, with 93 percent of its citizens agreeing that human activity is causing climate change. Large majorities also agreed in France (80 percent), Brazil (79 percent), Germany (72 percent) and other countries.

Similarly, 91 percent of those from China agreed with statement, "We are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly." Only 57 percent of Americans thought so -- again, last among 20 nations surveyed.

A recent report from an American research institute delivered stark warnings about the immediate health risks of inaction.

Coupled with worldwide marches demanding action on climate change, that study warned that rising temperatures and altered weather patterns in the United States may soon exacerbate many existing health risks.

Heat stroke, cardiac arrest and other heat-related illnesses are expected to increase as the number of extremely hot days rises, said lead author Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

"Nearly every place east of the Rocky Mountains will see an increase in extreme hot days in the years to come," Patz said. "Urban areas like New York City and Milwaukee are expected to triple the number of extremely hot days they currently have."

For example, New York City by 2050 could experience as many as 39 days where the mercury tops 90 degrees, compared with the current average of 13 days, Patz said.

Respiratory diseases, infectious diseases, hunger and mental health problems also will likely increase in response to climate change, according to the analysis.

Amid its grim projections, the U.N. report also offered hope. The tools needed to set the world on a low-emissions path are there; it just has to break its addiction to the oil, coal and gas that power the global energy system while polluting the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas.

"We have the means to limit climate change," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. "All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change."

The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made.

Today only a small minority of scientists challenge the mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity.

Sleep-deprived delegates approved the final documents Saturday afternoon after a weeklong line-by-line review in Copenhagen that underscored that the IPCC process is not just about science. The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.

The rift between developed and developing countries in the U.N. talks opened up in Copenhagen over a box of text that discussed what levels of warming could be considered dangerous. After a protracted battle, the delegates couldn't agree on the wording, and the box was dropped from a key summary for policy-makers to the disappointment of some scientists.

"If the governments are going to expect the IPCC to do their job," said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the IPCC's second report, they shouldn't "get caught up in fights that have nothing to do with the IPCC."

The omission of the box meant the word "dangerous" disappeared from the summary altogether. It appeared only twice in a longer underlying report compared to seven times in a draft produced before the Copenhagen session.

But the less loaded word "risk" was mentioned 65 times in the final 40-page summary.

"Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts," the report said.

World governments in 2009 set a goal of keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) compared to before the industrial revolution. Temperatures have gone up about 0.8 C (1.4 F) since the 19th century.

Meanwhile, emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has already used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.

"This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal ... there is nowhere to hide," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. "You can't wait several decades to address this issue."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the report "another canary in the coal mine."

"The bottom line is that our planet is warming due to human actions, the damage is already visible, and the challenge requires ambitious, decisive and immediate action," Kerry said in a statement. "Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids."

Pointing to the solution, the IPCC said the costs associated with mitigation action such as shifting the energy system to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.

And Pachauri said that cost should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting "all species that live on this planet" at peril.

The report is meant as a scientific roadmap for the U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. That's the last major conference before a summit in Paris next year, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.

"Lima should be the place where we put the pieces together so we can move toward success" in Paris, said Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal.

The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what, with rich countries calling on China and other major developing countries to take on ambitious targets, and developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC carefully avoided taking sides in that discussion, saying the risks of climate change "are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development."

Over the summer, business leaders also decried inaction on climate change.

In a report called "Risky Business," business leaders including billionaire Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Henry Paulson compare climate change to an interest-only loan, a risky form of borrowing that helped trigger the housing crisis.

Future generations "will be stuck paying off the cumulative interest on the greenhouse gas emissions we're putting into the atmosphere now, with no possibility of actually paying down that 'emissions principal,'" the report says.

Those costs will be significant, according to the study's calculations. By 2050, as much as $106 billion worth of coastal property will be below sea level, while extreme heat could reduce average crop yields by as much as 70 percent in some states.

"Damages from storms, flooding and heat waves are already costing local economies billions of dollars -- we saw that firsthand in New York City with Hurricane Sandy," Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, said in a statement. The study "details the costs of inaction in ways that are easy to understand in dollars and cents -- and impossible to ignore."




“Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people, like altering the male-female ratio, and on the environment, the report said. Some impacts are already being observed, including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.... Respiratory diseases, infectious diseases, hunger and mental health problems also will likely increase in response to climate change, according to the analysis.... The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made. Today only a small minority of scientists challenge the mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity.... The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.... Meanwhile, emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has already used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.... By 2050, as much as $106 billion worth of coastal property will be below sea level, while extreme heat could reduce average crop yields by as much as 70 percent in some states.”

“Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.” Unfortunately, I don't believe it's possible even with the best international efforts to reduce the world emissions to zero. I am also depressed about the continuing battle by the Republican Party against science in general, and global warming in particular. The US is run by money – especially coal and oil – and Republicans control most of the money. I was unhappy to see that the US public, according to poll takers, are behind 19 other countries on belief that global warming is real, is present and is dangerous.

I am saddened by this article, as I imagine species dying out and famine, drought, dangerous storms and coastal flooding becoming the norm. I won't live to see it all, of course. I will simply continue to blog against the Republicans and try to choose enlightened news articles and other interesting research subjects as a daily project. It's fun, and I hope it does some good for the world.





IRAN AND WOMEN 2014

Iranian-British woman gets prison for going to volleyball game
CBS/AP November 2, 2014, 7:39 AM

TEHRAN, Iran - An Iranian-British woman detained while trying to attend a men's volleyball game has been sentenced to one year in prison, her lawyer said Sunday.

Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei told The Associated Press that a court found Ghoncheh Ghavami, 25, guilty of "propagating against the ruling system."

Tabatabaei said he was shown the text of the verdict but is still waiting to officially receive it. He declined to immediately comment further.

Ghavami was detained in June at a Tehran's Freedom Stadium after trying to attend a men's volleyball match between Iran and Italy. Women are banned from attending male-only matches in Iran and Ghavami tried to enter the match with other women to protest the ban, according to Amnesty International.

Women who sought to attend the World League match in June were reportedly turned away from the stadium. Female photographers inside the complex were ordered to leave though none were arrested.

Ghavami was held for a few hours and then released but she was detained again a few days later. She stood trial last month.

National police chief General Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam said it was "not yet in the public interest" for men and women to attend sporting events together, reports Agence France Presse.

"The police are applying the law," he said at the time.

Women are also barred from attending soccer matches in Iran, with officials saying this is to protect them from lewd behavior among male fans.

Since her detention, Ghavami has been held in solitary confinement at Tehran's Evin prison, according to Amnesty, which has criticized her detention. She began a hunger strike earlier this month over her detention, Amnesty says.

A statement on a popular Facebook page supporting her freedom that was posted after the verdict reads: "Ghoncheh has been in temporary detention for the past 126 days and her temporary detention expired 6 days ago and it is not clear to her family and lawyer as to what the current legal basis of her detention is. A fair and just legal process according to Iran's legal framework is the basic right of every Iranian citizen."

Iran's judiciary spokesman, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, has criticized reports linking Ghavami's arrest to volleyball, saying last month: "Her case has nothing to do with sports."



After Acid Attacks And Execution, Iran Defends Human Rights Record – NPR
By Peter Kenyon
November 02, 2014

Iranian officials attacked the latest United Nations report on its human rights record Friday, blasting what they called efforts to impose a Western lifestyle on the Islamic republic.

But for Iranians and others who hoped President Hassan Rouhani would begin to turn around his county's human rights record, the U.N. report provided a depressing but not surprising answer. It said executions in Rouhani's first year in office had increased to what U.N. Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed called "alarming" levels.

Coming days after a woman was executed for killing her alleged rapist, and after several acid attacks against women in the city of Isfahan, Shaheed's report portrayed Iranians as suffering from an opaque justice system, regular oppression of women and religious persecution.

Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, attacked Shaheed for including in his report people who had been charged as terrorists. He told state television that someone with "the high-flown title of U.N. rapporteur shouldn't act as a Voice of America showman."

"I think such words in this report devalue the entire report," Larijani says. "I strongly advise him to resign from this post conclusively, because his background as a rapporteur is very poor."

Shaheed and other rights advocates say Rouhani, who promised human rights reforms during his election campaign, is hampered by the country's fractured political system. With hardliners well-placed in parliament, the judiciary, the security services and religious establishment, Rouhani and his supporters can only try for improvements on the margins.

Faraz Sanei of Human Rights Watch says one good example is the case of Nasrin Sotoudeh, a well-known defense attorney who formerly worked with the exiled Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi.

Under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sotoudeh was arrested on what Sanei calls trumped-up national security charges and given a six-year prison term. After Rouhani took office, she was released halfway through her term. Then came the backlash: Sotoudeh was barred from practicing law, then briefly arrested again at a demonstration on behalf of the acid attack victims from Isfahan.

Sanei says it was as if security forces wanted to impress upon her that having Rouhani in the presidency would make no difference whatsoever.

"Since Rouhani's inauguration, things haven't actually gotten better in Iran, and in several areas we can argue that things have actually gotten worse," he says. "The acid attack issue, I think, is a good example to look at the state of freedom of expression in Iran, and also the situation of women in Iran, which has not improved since Rouhani's administration."

When Iranians look for a ray of hope, however, they say the reaction to the acid attacks against women and girls shows the kind of grassroots shock and revulsion that may someday force the conservative political establishment to rein in hardliners.

Reza Haghighatnejad, who left Iran to pursue a journalism career with the online news outlet Iranwire and other media, says major reforms right now are a "political dead end," but change isn't always visible on the surface.

In an Istanbul cafe, Haghighatnejad says at the street level in Iran, there are signs of change in perhaps surprising places.

"The people in Iran are engaged in a daily struggle on these issues," he says. "You can even see it in the kindergartens. The state is trying to implement Islamic rules in kindergartens, but mothers prefer to send their children to other schools, where they can learn English, they can be happy and they can dance."

For now, however, rights advocates say Tehran continues to ignore calls for the release of detainees such as Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. While Iran has arrested a number of suspects in the Isfahan acid attacks, it has also arrested a number of journalists covering the public protests to those attacks.




CBS – Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei told The Associated Press that a court found Ghoncheh Ghavami, 25, guilty of 'propagating against the ruling system.'... Since her detention, Ghavami has been held in solitary confinement at Tehran's Evin prison, according to Amnesty, which has criticized her detention. She began a hunger strike earlier this month over her detention, Amnesty says.”

NPR – “Iranian officials attacked the latest United Nations report on its human rights record Friday, blasting what they called efforts to impose a Western lifestyle on the Islamic republic. But for Iranians and others who hoped President Hassan Rouhani would begin to turn around his county's human rights record, the U.N. report provided a depressing but not surprising answer. It said executions in Rouhani's first year in office had increased to what U.N. Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed called 'alarming' levels.... Shaheed and other rights advocates say Rouhani, who promised human rights reforms during his election campaign, is hampered by the country's fractured political system. With hardliners well-placed in parliament, the judiciary, the security services and religious establishment, Rouhani and his supporters can only try for improvements on the margins.... When Iranians look for a ray of hope, however, they say the reaction to the acid attacks against women and girls shows the kind of grassroots shock and revulsion that may someday force the conservative political establishment to rein in hardliners. Reza Haghighatnejad, who left Iran to pursue a journalism career with the online news outlet Iranwire and other media, says major reforms right now are a "political dead end," but change isn't always visible on the surface.... 'The people in Iran are engaged in a daily struggle on these issues,' he says. 'You can even see it in the kindergartens. The state is trying to implement Islamic rules in kindergartens, but mothers prefer to send their children to other schools, where they can learn English, they can be happy and they can dance.'”

Where they can learn English, be happy and dance – this is not a great deal of progress, but if individual mothers are today able to send their girls to some alternative schools like this maybe it's a beginning. I am surprised that they have that choice open to them in a place like Iran. Rouhani is either unable to abide by his campaign pledges of improved human rights, or he is another evil man with a pleasing facade. The entire Middle East is beginning to seem like a wasteland to me. The charge that has been levied against Ghoncheh Ghavami is astounded to my US bred ears – “propagating against the ruling system.” Those people simply have no concept of human rights. Might makes right is their only rule of law.

I wish there were a country made up totally of women and girls who are refugees from these unspeakable environments, where they can go to live a free and peaceful life, absolutely able to attend sporting events if they want to, play sports and be a “tomboy,” even, and study any subject they choose. We could call it Amazonia after the ancient Greek stories. If they want to leave the island at some point and come to the US, France or Britain where they will not be subject to Sharia Law, they can do so. Maybe they can even find a moderate, enlightened and benign man with whom to share the rest of their days in peace, and rear happy and gentle children of both sexes.