Friday, Jul 05th
Last update02:52:13 AM GMT
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spied on famed activist and linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1970s, documents obtained by Foreign Policy confirm. While the CIA long denied it kept a file on Chomsky, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an attorney and given to reporter John Hudson has confirmed that the CIA snooped on the professor from MIT.
Furthermore, the CIA appears to have scrubbed its record on Chomsky--a potential violation of the law.
The US Air Force unit that oversees a remote Cold War-era nuclear missile installation has failed a safety test, the Air Force has said.
The 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana made "tactical-level errors" in an exercise, it said.
The exercise concluded on Tuesday was meant to test the unit's ability to operate safely, the Air Force said. But a senior Air Force commander said the failure did not indicate the US nuclear arsenal was at risk.
Israel has freed a group of 26 Palestinian prisoners, whose release was agreed as part of the deal that allowed peace talks to resume. The prisoners, most of whom carried out attacks more than 20 years ago, were driven out of a jail in white minibuses with tinted windows.
About half are being taken straight to Gaza, and half to the West Bank. Palestinian and Israeli negotiators began direct talks two weeks ago for the first time in three years.
Another round of talks is due to begin in Jerusalem on Wednesday.
So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office — has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes.
Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what’s called a “parallel construction,” a fake or misleading trail of evidence. So no one in the court system – not the defendant or the defense attorney, not even the prosecutor or the judge – can ever trace the case back to its true origins.
A judge ruled on Monday the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" crime-fighting tactic unconstitutional, dealing a stinging rebuke to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had argued the practice drove down the city's crime rate.
U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called it "indirect racial profiling" because it targeted racially defined groups, resulting in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics while the city highest officials "turned a blind eye," she said.
Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.
"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said, blinking back tears. "I went: 'dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind."
Beneath the farms, orchards and vineyards of Central and Southern California lies a prehistoric soup worth a fortune. The mineral-rich Monterey and Santos shale formations stretching 1,750 square miles across the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles Basin hold a watery mixture of oil and gas – but it’s the oil that may trigger another gold rush. That is, if companies can figure out a profitable way to tap it.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the contiguous 48 states hold an estimated 23.9 billion barrels of recoverable oil, of which an astounding 15 billion barrels are in the Monterey/Santos formations. California has been plumbed for oil extraction and production for 150 years, but getting to the Monterey’s mother lode is no easy task.
A recently published study by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington found elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural gas fracking sites in Texas’ Barnett Shale.
While the findings are far from conclusive, the study provides further evidence tying fracking to arsenic contamination. An internal Environmental Protection Agency PowerPoint presentation recently obtained by the Los Angeles Times warned that wells near Dimock, PA, showed elevated levels of arsenic in the groundwater. The EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] also found arsenic in groundwater near fracking sites in Pavillion, WY, in 2009—a study the agency later abandoned.
On Thursday, an industry research firm announced a new study predicting that construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would have “no material impact” greenhouse gas emissions. But while proponents and media outlets quickly reported on this “independent study,” the for-profit energy research firm behind the report is anything but independent.
The findings contradict a July study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which found that over its 50-year life, the pipeline would add 1.2 billion metric tons more carbon pollution than if it carried conventional crude — more than every car in the United States releases into the air annually.
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