GUARDIAN– Barack Obama took the Republican slogan “drill, baby, drill” as his own today, opening up over 500,000 square miles of US coastal waters to oil and gas exploitation for the first time in over 20 years.

The move, a reversal of Obama’s early campaign promise to retain a ban on offshore exploration, appeared aimed at winning support from Republicans in Congress for new laws to tackle global warming. Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill” slogan was a prominent battle cry in the 2008 elections.

The areas opened up are off the Atlantic coast, the northern coast of Alaska and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. However, in a concession to his environmentalist base, Obama did retain protection for Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the single largest source of seafood in America and home to endangered species of whale. The Pacific Coast from Mexico to Canada is also off-limits.

Obama said the decision to allow oil rigs off the Atlantic coast was a painful one, but that it would help reduce US dependence on imported oil.

“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” the president said. “But the bottom line is this: given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we’re going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.”

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© 2010 GUARDIAN

TIMES ONLINE– CIA interrogators used the controverisal waterboarding technique 183 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks and 83 times on another al-Qaeda suspect, according to The New York Times.

A 2005 Justice Department memorandum revealed that the simulated drowning technique was used on Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.

Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner questioned in the CIA’s overseas detention programme in August 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, although a former CIA officer had told news organisations that he had been subjected to only 35 seconds under water before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

President Barack Obama has banned the use of waterboarding, overturning a Bush Administration policy that it did not constitute torture.

The memo is one of four authorising “harsh interrogation” that were declassified by the Obama Administration last week. They show that the CIA based more than 3,000 intelligence reports on the questioning of “high-value” terror suspects from September 11, 2001, to April 2003.

According to The New York Times, some copies of the memo on Mohammed appeared to have the number of waterboardings used on him redacted while others did not.

A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo said that waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the CIA rules permitted, the newspaper claimed, while a separate footnote said that the use of the harshest techniques appeared to have been “unnecessary” in Abu Zubaydah’s case.

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© 2009 TIMES ONLINE

LA TIMES– No one was surprised when conservation organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council challenged the anti-environmental policies of President George W. Bush. But it’s a shock to many when we part company with the Obama administration.

It happens. And it’s happening right now on the question of what to do about commercial whaling and, more specifically, whether to maintain the 25-year-old moratorium against the killing of whales for profit. Last week, the International Whaling Commission announced a proposed 10-year deal, spearheaded by the Obama administration, that would suspend the moratorium and allow whaling countries to kill whales legally for commercial purposes for the first time in a generation.

There’s no disagreement between the council and the administration about the fact that the moratorium is one of the singular environmental achievements of the 20th century. Before it was adopted, on average an estimated 38,000 whales were being killed each year. Since the moratorium, that number has dropped to about 1,240, and whale populations have begun, little by little, to rebound.

There’s no disagreement that whales are among the most extraordinary creatures ever to inhabit the Earth. And there’s no disagreement that we need to protect them, or that many of the large whale species covered by the proposed agreement — humpback, fin, sperm, sei and Bryde’s whales — are depleted or near extinction.

The problem is how best to protect them.

The Obama administration argues that the whaling moratorium should be suspended because it has loopholes that are being illegally exploited by Japanese, Norwegian and Icelandic whalers. They believe that after 25 years of conflict within the International Whaling Commission, commercial whaling should be legalized in the hope that, by bringing the killing out into the open through agreed-upon quotas, a consensus eventually will emerge in support of a phase-out of whaling altogether.

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© 2010 LA TIMES

Joel R. Reynolds is a senior attorney and director of, among other programs, marine mammal protection at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles.

Sign the petition to say NO to commerical whaling HERE.

RAW STORY– US President Barack Obama on Saturday urged senators to grant the Federal Reserve a dramatic expansion of its regulatory powers and to establish a new consumer protection committee to help safeguard Americans from Wall Street’s excesses.

“These reforms are essential,” Obama said in his weekly radio address.

“As I’ve urged over the past year, we need common-sense rules that will allow our markets to function fairly and freely while reining in the worst practices of the financial industry.”

On Monday, the Senate banking committee will debate a proposal by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd that is designed to halt what he sees as abuse and excess by financial firms.

Dodd’s bill would empower the Federal Reserve to conduct oversight across the financial sector, putting insurance companies and even smaller lenders under their sway.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has disclosed in public that with the bank’s expanded framework, it assumes the coming elimination of “minimum reserve requirements” for banking institutions.

Unhinging banks from even basic deposit standards would essentially create a class above the daily requirements of capitalism, resting atop a pool of funds with infinite depth, removing the need for what’s currently known as “fractional reserve banking.”

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© 2010 RAW STORY

This video was published to the Internet by the White House on March 20, 2010.