Posted: 11 Jun 2014 04:53 PM PDT

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has flouted the advice of his own attorney general and scores of legal scholars by signing a bill which blocks a levee board’s lawsuit against oil and gas companies, who are accused of destroying the state’s coast.
“This bill will help stop frivolous lawsuits and create a more fair and predictable legal environment, and I am proud to sign it into law,” Jindal said in a written statement Friday.
The law, SB 469, has thwarted a levee district in New Orleans’ East Bank, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPA-E) – from pushing forward with a lawsuit introduced last July against 97 oil and gas companies for damage done to the state’s wetlands. According to the suit, the firms exposed New Orleans to catastrophic damage from hurricanes Rita and Katrina by dredging and cutting thousands of miles of pipes and canals through barrier islands and wetlands which, left intact, would have protected the coastal city, The Times-Picayune Newspaper reports.
“We are looking to the industry to fix the part of the problem that they created,” SLFPA-E vice president John Barry told the tri-weekly last year. “We’re not asking them to fix everything. We only want them to address the part of the problem that they created.”
Local republicans and energy heavyweights, however, viewed the lawsuit as frivolous and “illegal.”
“This bill keeps a rogue agency from misrepresenting this State and trying to raise money through illegal actions,” said Senators Robert Adley and Bret Allain, who sponsored the legislation Jindal approved this week.
Adley, who has owned Pelican Gas Management Co. since 1993, was president of ABCO Petroleum from 1972 to 1993, is affiliated with the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, and has been the recipient of an estimated $597,950 in campaign contributions from companies, political action committees and individuals affiliated with, or controlled by, oil and gas interests, was incredulous at claims the industry had harmed the state.
“I think it’s absurd to say that the oil and gas industry has damaged the coast,” Republican Adley said. “They did what they were told to do, and a lot of what they have done has helped us, not hurt us.”
Jindal himself is no stranger to oil and gas money, having received at least $545,000 in industry contributions “and most probably more,” according to the Louisiana Voice. Last year, environmental groups claimed that figure was nearly twice as high, saying oil and gas companies had donated $1,019,777 to his campaigns between 2003 and 2013.
Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association, called the move a “huge victory for the oil and gas industry,” according to a statement released by the governor’s office.
Louisiana in deep waters
The victory for the oil and gas industry could be much more far-reaching in the years ahead. Critics fear the slipshod language in SB 469 will not only kill the flood authority’s lawsuit, but potentially scuttle other attempts to litigate against the energy industry.
Topping that list are government claims against BP, whose Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 people and spilling 210 million gallons of oil in the worst marine oil spill in history.
On Tuesday, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell wrote Jindal imploring him to veto the measure, saying the “very broad and all-encompassing language” of the bill “may have other potential serious unintended consequences.”
“No one can currently quantify or identify all of the causes of action which will be swept away if this bill becomes law,” the letter warns.
“In the coming years perhaps the proponents of the bill can tailor legislation more narrowly drawn which does not portend such a broad and vague attack on the abilities of the State, and most importantly, local governmental entities to protect their citizens.”
Seventy-nine law school professors also warned bill could interfere with state and local government claims against BP.
A seven-page legal assessment of the legislation cautioning Jindal not to sign SB 469 because it could have “adverse consequences” was compiled by Loyola Law School Robert Verchick and received the endorsement of legal scholars from California to Maryland, The Times (Shreveport) reported.
Steve Murchie, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, said: “This legislation is governance at its worst: poorly written, for the worst of reasons, with no public benefit, and having potentially staggering unintended consequences. Governor Jindal, in his zeal to please the oil and gas industry and further his political ambitions, has abandoned the hundreds of thousands of Louisianans facing another hurricane season with inadequate storm protection and a disappearing coast.”
But Jindal’s executive counsel, Thomas Enright, said their arguments did not hold water.
“We are satisfied that the concerns expressed by your office are the same as those offered by the opponents of the bill during the session and that those concerns were properly considered and publicly debated at length,” he said.
Source

Posted: 11 Jun 2014 03:42 PM PDT

Australia’s biggest defense expenditure ever of USD 15 billion to be used for purchasing 72 US F-35 fighter jets has triggered a debate, with some saying that the planes are not worth the high costs, local press reports say.
Australia has committed to purchasing the F-35 combat aircraft from the US, which itself is spending 1 trillion dollars on the biggest defense program in its history.
However, Pentagon’s inspector general has identified 719 specific problems with the aircraft, ranging from minor to mission-critical. Colonel Michael W. Pietrucha, from the United States Air Force, told the Air and Space Power Journal that the F-35 continues to arrive late and cost more than anticipated.
“Budgetary realities should serve as an impetus to reexamine the Air Force’s participation in the F-35 program and the future of the fighter force,” Pietrucha said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Mark Thomson, an analyst at the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that Australia’s choice of fighters from the international market was limited.
“The alternative to the F35, is a previous generation aircraft designed 15 or 20 years before the F35,” he said. “If Australia wants an up-to-date aircraft that would see it through the next two decades, it was the only choice, but yes, it does cost a lot of money.”
Thomson said there were some people critical of the aircraft’s performance but the problems were up to the US to address.
Source

Posted: 11 Jun 2014 03:36 PM PDT

The French electoral earthquake has surprised nobody but the hostile elite who handle our affairs and the presstitute media (to put it in the terms of Mr Craig Roberts) who still try to control the minds in the world. The old country is now under fire as was Austria more than ten years ago. At this time it was fake Gaullist Chirac who conducted the moral crusade against the small continental country. Now who will guide the crusade against the French elector?
For there is a big monster to kill: the National Front, a party that wants to put an end to our attractive post-modernity made of cultural nihilism, replacement of population and lunatic plutocracy. This attitude clearly deserves a punishment, where will it come from?
Will Dr. Barack Obama send his drones or his Halliburton mercenaries in order to bring back the former Great nation to the doghouse of the New World Order? Will the freedom fighters of Al Qaeda be sent from Syria to France in order to submit the French recalcitrant elector? After all, according to one of our ministers, they have done a good job in Damascus and around…
For the national front is now the first party of France and it is well known that the rebellious party has the better reserves among the huge cohorts of abstention. The UMP, the puppet party of former president Sarkozy, is not able to replace the actual longing socialist party: corruption and the pitiful balance left by the precedent administration are enough for the elector. And Hollande, now considered “the most incompetent of statesmen in the world” has still three years to endure and he will use every minute of it to damage our country – like he has contributed to damage Libya, Syria or of course Ukraine. Yes, it is the same chain of global disasters poor French elite contribute to.
Talking of the national Front, it is well known too that the first party of France (now the socialists rule this country with a mere 6% of the electors) is a friend of Russia and an admirer of Putin. This sounds like an echo of de Gaulle and of Chateaubriand, when the great romantic writer – the best French diplomat of his time – promoted a French-Russian alliance. When I interviewed Jean-Marie Le Pen for Pravda.ru two years ago, he defended the unification of a great Europe, like de Gaulle, from Brest to Vladivostok. Let us remind him in his own terms:
I am campaigning for the creation of a harmonious ensemble, animated by the vision of a common destiny of the entire boreal area, from Brest to Vladivostok.
This is why the treatment by the global media is interesting when it comes to Putin or the National Front. Both navigate in “another world” (to put it in the terms of the suddenly inspired Angela!), both believe in ideals fallen into desuetude like nations, spirituality, roots, geopolitics and gentlemen’s agreements. Both are of course considered new Hitler in Europe, both are despised, humiliated, caricatured, demonized by a press that has no more arguments to give.
The awful truth, since Obama has been elected, is that the new World order needs no gloves.
The huge debt artificially created by the banksters who rule our unfortunate destinies is enough to compel weak, coward or corrupted ministers and commissars. The only tools left to the Western elites are the lies. The more it takes our liberties and our money (and many human lives in Ukraine and elsewhere) the more the Western madness boasts to be Democracy. We should remind them how democracy ended in Greece or in Rome.
Marine Le Pen has beautifully handled her campaign, avoiding jingoist traps and directing her attacks against this global order made of cynical oligarchies, treacherous treaties of commerce, systematic delocalization and of course great replacements of populations. The undemocratic origins of the great replacement have to be underlined: for it was recommended by Machiavelli in his chapter four and applied by tyrants such as the Incas (the infamous mitmac), Stalin, and various American presidents – not to mention ubiquitous Adolph Hitler! Nowadays our tyrants belong to the Bilderbergs and they have shaped another future for our children. The destruction of Europe – 71 million immigrants in one generation – by her elite is a wonderful example of historical insanity. It maybe has no other example in traditional history. And having for various reasons the worst elite in the world, it is normal for France to get the greater resistance. After all it always was this country, “land of recurrent fiascos” since 1815, a caricatured victim of modernity that had the best writers and theories challenging that modernity, from Tocqueville and Baudelaire to Bernanos or Jacques Ellul.
But the French rebellion is too related to another factor: the web – I wrote a book in 2000 about this peculiar way of enlightenment. No one now is obliged to swallow the global garbage of the mainstream media. The good news is the fact that through Internet the people have access to an unpolluted source of information (labelled, I know, conspiracy theories…). It may be sure that in the future the New World Order and its devilish agencies will try to curb the voices of freedom in the web.
Source

Posted: 11 Jun 2014 02:58 PM PDT

Suspected Boko Haram Takfiri militants have reportedly abducted 20 women from a settlement in the northeastern part of Nigeria.
According to officials on Monday, the militants arrived on Thursday in the Garkin Fulani settlement, near the town of Chibok, where they kidnapped a large group of schoolgirls in April.
They then forced the women to enter their vehicles at gunpoint and drove away to an unknown location in the remote stretch of Borno state. The militants also took three young men who tried to stop the kidnapping.
“We tried to go after them when the news got to us about three hours later, but the vehicles we have could not go far, and the report came to us a little bit late,” Alhaji Tar, a member of the vigilante groups set up to fight Boko Haram, said.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s defense headquarters said its forces prevented attacks by Boko Haram on several villages in Borno and neighboring Adamawa state this weekend, killing more than 50 militants.
Boko Haram has recently escalated its campaign of terror, even as Nigerians are holding almost daily protests, demanding the release of the abducted schoolgirls.
Last week, the militants killed hundreds of people in three villages in Gwoza district in Borno.
On April 14, the militants kidnapped 276 students from their secondary school in the northeastern town of Chibok in Borno state. The mass abduction triggered an international outcry.
Reports say 57 of the girls managed to escape but 219 are still missing and international efforts to spot and rescue them have failed so far.
The Nigerian government has been under intense pressure by many people around the globe especially the girls’ families to secure their release.
Boko Haram whose name means “Western education is forbidden” says its goal is to overthrow the Nigerian government.
Source

Posted: 11 Jun 2014 02:34 PM PDT

The Pentagon has an awful lot of leftovers, but luckily for law enforcement agencies across the United States they aren’t going to waste.
Millions of dollars’ worth of military gear is distributed to local police forces on an annual basis, and these regular exchanges are occurring from coast to coast in towns and cities that are hardly considered epicenters of violent crime, let alone on par with the foreign warzones where these hand-me-downs, machine guns, armored cars and other made-for-battle items, were originally intended to be used.
Over the weekend, the New York Times took a look at some staggering statistics concerning a Congress-created military-transfer program in which items in the Department of Defense’s massive inventory are routinely supplied to small-town police departments for free.
The program is far from new, it dates back to the early 90s, the Times acknowledged — and has been investigated by RT in the past more than once. New data from the Pentagon that has been provided to the paper offers an updated look, however, revealing the actual extent to which heavy-duty war supplies are shipped today to small police departments where one might not normally expect a camouflaged mine detector or silenced machine gun to be needed.
Since 2006, a total of 432 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles, or MRAPs, have been handed out by the feds to state and local law enforcement agencies in most of the 50 states. Usually costing close to a million dollar apiece, those vehicles were intended for battle in the likes of Afghanistan and Iraq. With those operations largely over, though, a surplus of like-new, barely used MRAPs have been handed out by the hundreds to police departments desiring an armored multi-ton vehicle equipped to withstand a serious shelling.
Last November the New York Daily News reported that 165 MRAPs had been handed out to these agencies in less than half a year, and around 731 more vehicles were requested by police after the Pentagon ran out. In most reported incidents, the recipient appears to pay nothing more than the cost of shipping.
“It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, the head of one of five New York county sheriff’s departments to receive last year’s shipments told the Daily News at the time.
Then in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon has roughly 13,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks to part with “because they have outlived their original purpose.”
“We’ve notified our friends and allies that we have MRAPs available and if they want them they can have them,” Alan Estevez, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, told the Journal.
This outstanding surplus coupled with the wants and wishes of police chiefs who feel ill-equipped to handle a high-intensity standoff has helped move these made-for-war machines into towns that far well below the national average with regards to crime.
Handing MRAPs and other war weapons over to police departments is one of the more affordable options, as well. RT reported previously that surplus MRAPs are being sold for scrap in Afghanistan, but even then it costs around $12,000 to demilitarize each one. Earlier this year, Defense News reported that the US military were destroying roughly $7 billion worth of material in Afghanistan, including MRAPs, as US troops were readying their exit.
Used goods from the Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and elsewhere aren’t the only sources of these exchanges, though. One town in Indiana, for example, was supplied a MRAP with only eight miles on it and a brand new engine, according to the recipient.
According to the latest report from New York Times journalist Matt Apuzzo, MRAPs and other military equipment have been handed down to state and local law enforcement agencies in huge numbers.
“During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” Apuzzo wrote.
Also in that inventory of slightly-used or good-as-new goods are M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more all going to towns many Americans would be hard pressed to find on a map or globe.
Since 2008, Apuzza reported, nearly 900 MRAPs and other armored vehicles have been handed out by the Pentagon to police agencies, as well as 533 aircraft, 93,763 machine guns and 180,718 magazines.
Six states have received magazines from the military that can hold a minimum of 100 rounds, he added, and agencies in 22 states total have even been given land mine detectors. Eight agencies in just the state of Indiana have been awarded MRAPs, and the Times noted that law enforcement in 38 states have received silencers from the Pentagon, including police in Walsh County, North Dakota, where only roughly 11,000 residents live.
Last year, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that “a disproportionate share” of $4.2 billion in Pentagon property handed out by the Defense Department military surplus program since 1990 was “obtained by police and sheriff’s departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.”
In Neenah, Wisconsin, for example, Apuzza wrote that the town of only 25,000 now has its only MRAD, despite being far below the national average with regards to crime.
“It just seems like ramping up a police department for a problem we don’t have,” one local father told the reporter. “This is not what I was looking for when I moved here, that my children would view their local police officer as an M-16-toting, SWAT-apparel-wearing officer.”
But Neenah Police Chief Kevin E. Wilkinson and others in his shoes in small towns say that acquiring these items are meant to bolster safety—the penultimate goal for law enforcement.
“We’re not going to go out there as Officer Friendly with no body armor and just a handgun and say ‘Good enough.’” Wilkinson told the Times.
In many towns, getting these goods from the Pentagon is the only affordable option. Capt. Vic Wahl of Madison, Wisconsin told the AP recently that he would have preferred a more traditional civilian rescue unit for his agency’s arsenal but the problem, he said, is “they don’t give them away.”
“The price was right for this one,” Wahl said of a free MRAD his office acquired in lieu of spending a quarter-of-a-million dollars on a less-militarized BearCat vehicle.
Source