Feds Under Pressure to Open US Skies to Drones

Posted on June 23, 2010 by abby

AP– Unmanned aircraft have proved their usefulness and reliability in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the pressure’s on to allow them in the skies over the United States.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to issue flying rights for a range of pilotless planes to carry out civilian and law-enforcement functions but has been hesitant to act. Officials are worried that they might plow into airliners, cargo planes and corporate jets that zoom around at high altitudes, or helicopters and hot air balloons that fly as low as a few hundred feet off the ground.

On top of that, these pilotless aircraft come in a variety of sizes. Some are as big as a small airliner, others the size of a backpack. The tiniest are small enough to fly through a house window.

The obvious risks have not deterred the civilian demand for pilotless planes. Tornado researchers want to send them into storms to gather data. Energy companies want to use them to monitor pipelines. State police hope to send them up to capture images of speeding cars’ license plates. Local police envision using them to track fleeing suspects.

Like many robots, the planes have advantages over humans for jobs that are dirty, dangerous or dull. And the planes often cost less than piloted aircraft and can stay aloft far longer.

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Photo by flickr user PLaneMGlasgow

Monsanto GM Seed Ban Overturned by Supreme Court

Posted on June 21, 2010 by abby

BBC– The bio-tech company Monsanto can sell genetically modified seeds before safety tests on them are completed, the US Supreme Court has ruled.

A lower court had barred the sale of the modified alfalfa seeds until an environmental impact study could be carried out.

But seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices decided that ruling was unconstitutional.

The seed is modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s brand of weedkiller.

The US is the world’s largest producer of alfalfa, a grass-like plant used as animal feed.

It is the fourth most valuable crop grown in the country.

Environmentalists had argued that there might be a risk of cross-pollination between genetically modified plants and neighbouring crops.

They also argued over-use of the company’s weedkiller Roundup, the chemical treatment the alfalfa is modified to be resistant to, could cause pollution of ground water and lead to resistant “super-weeds”.

But Monsanto says claims its products were dangerous amounted to “bad science fiction with no support on the record”.

Internet Monitoring Needed to Fight Homegrown Terrorism

Posted on June 21, 2010 by abby

FOX NEWS– Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.

“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

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Obama Approves 400 Leases for Oil Companies to Drill in Gulf

Posted on June 19, 2010 by abby

MOTHER JONES– At his long-awaited press conference on the Gulf oil disaster last month, President Obama announced a moratorium on new oil drilling and exploration for six months. “We can’t do this stuff if we don’t have confidence that we can prevent crises like this from happening again,” he declared.

But while existing rigs may be out of commission for the near future, the administration hasn’t exactly put the brakes on new oil and gas drilling ventures. In recent weeks, the government has quietly approved the sale of more than 400 new leases for vast swaths of the Gulf of Mexico. And these contracts—which mark the first step in the drilling process—were subjected to the same slapdash environmental oversight that failed to prevent the BP catastrophe.

The region was included in a plan created by the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior to lease new areas of the Gulf to the oil and gas industries. But it was Obama’s Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, who gave the go-ahead for the sale of Lease 213—6,800 tracts covering 36 million acres off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in November 2009. The sale—which was held on March 17 this year in the New Orleans Superdome—attracted $1.3 billion in bids. Since then, the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has approved the sale of 448 of those tracts, 198 of them in deepwater, which is defined as more than 656 feet below the sea. BP is the proud new leaser of 13 of those tracts.

The lease sale is the first step in the oil drilling process. Companies must first obtain the right to drill the tracts before they can devise exploration plans, which must be approved by MMS.

And that’s where the problem lies. MMS has been notorious for rubber-stamping the oil industry’s plans. The lease for the well that’s spewing oil into the Gulf, the Macondo, was sold in March 2008. The exploration plan for that well was granted a “categorical exclusion” from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in April 2009, paving the way for drilling to begin.

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Pentagon Still Buying Most of Its Oil and Gas from BP

Posted on June 19, 2010 by abby

NATION– Last October, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent out a memo to the heads of all federal agencies ordering them to ensure that no federal funds were awarded or obligated to the community organization ACORN. Orszag’s memo was a response to bipartisan legislation known as the De-fund ACORN Act, passed after right-wing activist and wanna-be pimp James O’Keefe’s propaganda film sparked mass-hysteria about the community organization.

ACORN was hardly a major US government contractor–the group had received just $53 million over the course of 15 years in federal dollars, most of it in the form of funding for low income housing initiatives. ACORN has never received any money from the Department of Defense, yet Undersecretary of Defense Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s top contracting official, sent a memo to the commanders and directors of all branches of the military instructing them to cease all business with ACORN and to take “all necessary and appropriate” steps to prevent future contracts with the organization. All of this happened because ACORN was accused of some of its workers giving improper tax advice to a fake prostitute.

Contrast the Congressional response to ACORN’s federal contracts with its response to BP, which does billions of dollars in business with the federal government, specifically the Pentagon. BP holds more than $2 billion in annual US defense contracts and continues to be the premiere provider of fuel to the world’s largest consumer of oil and gas: the Pentagon. BP is responsible for the worst environmental crime in US history. It is responsible for the deaths of 11 oil rig workers. Attorney General Eric Holder said he is conducting both criminal and civil probes into BP’s actions in the US Gulf.

And yet, there is no real, bi-partisan Congressional march to de-fund BP. The White House is reportedly considering the possibility of debarment of BP, but as of last week no formal inquiry had begun. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Cutting BP off from future government contracts, though, would be an unprecedented and highly complicated move, lawyers say. BP supplies the military with nearly 12% of its fuel needs, making it the Pentagon’s largest fuel supplier, with Royal Dutch Shell coming in a close second, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. ‘It is not hard to block a debarment if an argument exists that it would harm the government, especially on national security grounds,’ said Robert Burton, a Washington lawyer who worked as the Bush administration’s top procurement official.”

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Written by Jeremy Scahill

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