Brazil's famous Christ the Redeemer statue has been re-opened after a $4 million (£2.7m) renovation.Read More......
The Rio de Janeiro monument has undergone a four-month restoration, covered with scaffolding as workers fixed cracks and damage due to water.
As it was unveiled, it was lit up in green and yellow to honour the Brazilian football team playing in the World Cup.
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is to receive a prestigious US medal and $100,000 (£67,000) prize for his work in conflict resolution.Read More......
The National Constitution Centre is awarding him its Liberty Medal for "steadfast" efforts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.
Previous winners include Nelson Mandela and former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior.
Mr Blair said he was driven by values of "freedom, liberty and justice".
Mr Clinton, the centre's chairman, will present the medal in Philadelphia on 13 September.
First, some gratifying news: The ACLU has put Louisiana law enforcement on notice. In a letter (PDF) released yesterday, Marjorie Esman, executive director of the group's Louisiana chapter, reminded the sheriffs of the coastal parishes that "members of the public have the right under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to film, record, photograph, and document anything they observe in a public place. No one—neither law enforcement nor a private corporation—has the legal right to interfere with public access to public places or the recording of activities that occur there. Nor may law enforcement officials cooperate with private companies in denying such access to the public."Read More......
Esman told me that the ACLU had discussed the matter due in large part to Mother Jones' reporting. She says it would consider filing a lawsuit if appropriate.
Louisiana police don't have any right to tell you you can't walk onto a public beach (even to, as Esman puts it, "roll around in sticky gunky tar that I'll never be able to get off—if I want to, that's my right"). However, they do have the right to mislead you about who they're really working for. In Louisiana, as in many places, it's legal for police officers to wear their uniforms regardless of whether they're acting in an official capacity or working for a private corporation. Which is why Andrew Wheelan, the environmentalist mentioned above, was unaware that the cop who pressured him to stop filming a BP building and later pulled him over so that a BP official could question him wasn't on duty at the time. The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office told me that the deputy who pulled Wheelan over is just one of 40 in the parish who are working for BP on their own time. And the BP-police collusion goes beyond uniformed deputies moonlighting. In nearby Lafourche Parish, for example, the sheriff's office is filling 57 security positions a week for BP; the shifts are on the clock, and BP reimburses the sheriff's office for them.
At issue is the engine for the aircraft known as the Joint Strike Fighter, an all-purpose military jet that is expected to become the backbone of American air supremacy for a generation. The fighter already has an engine – built by Pratt & Whitney and in use as the jet is being tested. Some members of Congress want to pay General Electric and Rolls-Royce to develop a second one….The money involved is not insubstantial. By some estimates, Congress has paid $3 billion to GE and Rolls-Royce since first setting aside money for a second engine in the mid-1990s, and it will take close to $3 billion more to have the engines tested, proven and in full production.Congressional members are fighting tooth and nail on both sides, depending on their state’s economic dependency on the project, but there is also strong disagreement between non-profit organizations, Defense Secretary Gates and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), about which direction to take.
The conservative blog RedState.com has revealed that CAGW, which was apparently the source of information for ABC’s piece – secretly has been paid by Pratt & Whitney for its efforts. This certainly calls both CAGW’s credibility and the reliability of the ABC story into question.Harper’s Ken Silverstein and former Congressman Bob Barr have both reported on another organization’s pay-for-play on the issue, this time it’s the Lexington Institute.
…The Lexington Institute’s chief operating officer, Loren Thompson, cites as proof that his company’s advocacy supporting certain weapons systems (in this case, Pratt & Whitney’s single-engine proposal) is fair and honest the fact that it “received money from donors on both sides of the issue…”Thompson (incredulously) told Silverstein, "I'm not going to work on a project unless somebody, somewhere, is willing to pay. This is a business." Wow, so much for an independent voice.
The Project on Government Oversight reported this in a July 2009 article. Specifically, as reported in 2006, Thompson expressed concerns about Pratt & Whitney’s “monopoly” position as the developer of the only engine to be used in the multibillion-dollar F-35 program.
But now, Lexington vocally opposes Congress’s awarding funding for the development of a competing engine for the multirole fighter to Rolls-Royce and General Electric.
In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.Read More......
Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.
Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.
"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."
A decorated former Chicago police lieutenant accused of suffocating, shocking and beating confessions out of scores of suspects was convicted Monday of federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying about the torture. Former Lt. Jon Burge, whose name has become synonymous with police brutality and abuse of power in the country’s third-largest city, did not react as the guilty verdicts were read.Horton continues (my emphasis):
A federal investigation concluded that more than 100 victims had been tortured, sometimes brutally, by Chicago police, especially on the city’s South and West Sides, in incidents dating back to the seventies. Although allegations were frequently made, they were routinely batted down by prosecutors as nonsense until students at a clinic at Chicago’s Northwestern University Law School began rigorously documenting the allegations. When Illinois Governor George Ryan ordered a moratorium on executions out of concern over the torture allegations, he found himself the target of a corruption inquiry by local prosecutors, who also took extreme measures to intimidate the law students investigating the torture allegations.The south and west sides of Chicago are the two largest African-American communities. Again, who'da thought?
Chicago prosecutors, it seems, were eager to protect the police—and themselves—from the allegations of torture now validated by a Cook County jury. They used all their prosecutorial powers to interfere with and block probes, and sought to criminalize their critics.
Fitzgerald is also special prosecutor in an investigation into the involvement of CIA agents in the torture—and occasionally the torture-homicide—of prisoners held in the war on terror. Amazingly, however, rather than the allegations of torture, Fitzgerald is going after the efforts of private investigators, working under the instructions of counsel for the prisoners who were on the receiving end of these techniques. The preposterous theory on which Fitzgerald’s inquiry is premised is official impunity taken to a wild extreme—CIA officers argue that their identities and their involvement in the torture episodes are matters of the highest secrecy, and any effort to learn the facts about them is a crime. In other words, just like the Cook County prosecutors who sought to harass and criminalize those who investigated torture in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald is being charged to harass and criminalize human-rights investigators who have probed the use of torture techniques by CIA agents.The two faces of Patrick Fitzgerald.
For more than two months, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has made it clear that he considers the response of the federal government and BP to the gulf oil leak a failure on many fronts.Read More......
But elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Mr. Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.
The measure was proposed by Senator Robert Adley, a Republican, and easily passed the Democrat-controlled Legislature. He told the Associated Press that the veto was a “black eye” on the state. “This governor has opposed transparency for the three years he’s been in office,” he said.
Sharron Angle may be giving the press the silent treatment now, but she hasn't always been so tight-lipped. Think Progress (via Alternet) has dug up some eyebrow-raising audio of a radio interview the Nevada Senate candidate did with Bill Manders back in January. The subject: abortion. Her stance: disgusting.Read More......
Manders asks her whether there is "any reason at all for an abortion," and she answers: "Not in my book." For clarity, he says: "So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?" And Angle replies with this reasoning: "You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things." You see, God planned your rape and pregnancy. Isn't that reassuring?
Rep. Edward Markey says BP's disaster response plan for an oil spill doesn't mention hurricanes or tropical storms.Read More......
Markey says the omission is yet another example of what the oil giant was not prepared to handle.
The Massachusetts Democrat's comments came during a congressional hearing on a law to improve technology intended to prevent disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
For the tens of thousands of sea turtle eggs incubating in the sands of the northern Gulf of Mexico—and dangerously near the oil—it's come to this: Officials are planning to dig up the approximately 700 nests on Alabama and the Florida panhandle beaches, pack the eggs in Styrofoam boxes, and fly them to a facility in eastern Florida where they can mature. Once the eggs have hatched, the young turtles will be released in darkness on Florida's Atlantic beaches into oil-free water. Translocation of nests on this scale has never been attempted before.Read More......
"This is really a worst-case scenario," says Michael Ziccardi, a University of California, Davis, veterinarian and oil-spill veteran who is leading the government's response efforts for marine mammals and sea turtles. "We hoped we wouldn't get to this point."
Sea turtles that hatch in the Northern Gulf of Mexico typically spend a few months near the coast, and many eventually enter the Loop Current to make their way into the Atlantic. This year, that path would put them right in the oil spill. Federal officials in charge of response "believe that most, if not all, of the 2010 Northern Gulf hatchling cohort would be at high risk of encountering oil during this period," according to the written translocation plan, developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They estimate that 50,000 hatchlings could be lost to the oil.
Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen.Read More......
From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection.
Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.
In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law.
Standard & Poor's said late Tuesday that it may downgrade the short-term rating of rival rating agency Moody's Corp. because of new legislation. S&P; has an A-1 short-term rating on Moody's.Read More......
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