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Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

by Natalia681 Posted on May 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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RIP:

Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, the son of Vice President Biden and former state attorney general of Delaware, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for several years.

Biden, 46, the oldest son of the vice president and the rising star of a family dynasty, had been admitted recently to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington as he fought the cancer, a battle that his father largely kept private in the last weeks as his son clung to his life.

So sad.

Here’s the Vice President’s statement:

It is with broken hearts that Hallie, Hunter, Ashley, Jill and I announce the passing of our husband, brother and son, Beau, after he battled brain cancer with the same integrity, courage and strength he demonstrated every day of his life.

The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words. We know that Beau’s spirit will live on in all of us—especially through his brave wife, Hallie, and two remarkable children, Natalie and Hunter.

Beau’s life was defined by service to others. As a young lawyer, he worked to establish the rule of law in war-torn Kosovo. A major in the Delaware National Guard, he was an Iraq War veteran and was awarded the Bronze Star. As Delaware’s Attorney General, he fought for the powerless and made it his mission to protect children from abuse.

More than his professional accomplishments, Beau measured himself as a husband, father, son and brother. His absolute honor made him a role model for our family. Beau embodied my father’s saying that a parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did.

In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.

And the statement from the President:

Michelle and I are grieving tonight. Beau Biden was a friend of ours. His beloved family – Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter – are friends of ours. And Joe and Jill Biden are as good as friends get.

Beau took after Joe. He studied the law, like his dad, even choosing the same law school. He chased a life of public service, like his dad, serving in Iraq and as Delaware’s Attorney General. Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched – and he lives on in their hearts.

But for all that Beau Biden achieved in his life, nothing made him prouder; nothing made him happier; nothing claimed a fuller focus of his love and devotion than his family.

Just like his dad.

Joe is one of the strongest men we’ve ever known. He’s as strong as they come, and nothing matters to him more than family. It’s one of the things we love about him. And it is a testament to Joe and Jill – to who they are – that Beau lived a life that was full; a life that mattered; a life that reflected their reverence for family.

The Bidens have more family than they know. In the Delaware they love. In the Senate Joe reveres. Across this country that he has served for more than forty years. And they have a family right here in the White House, where hundreds of hearts ache tonight – for Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter; for Joe and for Jill; for Beau’s brother, Hunter; his sister, Ashley, and for the entire Biden clan.

“I have believed the best of every man,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats, “And find that to believe it is enough to make a bad man show him at his best or even a good man swing his lantern higher.”

Beau Biden believed the best of us all. For him, and for his family, we swing our lanterns higher.

Michelle and I humbly pray for the good Lord to watch over Beau Biden, and to protect and comfort his family here on Earth.

And this old tweet from Beau is heartbreaking:

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Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

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These Photos Show What Life Is Like for Girls in Juvenile Detention

by HildaYcrekr Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The number of kids entering the juvenile justice system has declined steadily in recent years, yet girls continue to represent an ever-growing share of those arrested, detained, and committed to custody. In his latest collection of photographs, Girls in Justice, Richard Ross—who has spent the past eight years documenting incarcerated kids—explores the lives of young women in custody. His haunting photos, taken across 250 different detention facilities, illuminate the difficult circumstances (absent caregivers, poverty, physical abuse, sexual violence, etc.) that drive girls into the system and in many cases keep them there.

BN, age 15

“We confine and often demonize a group of kids who have been abused and violated by the very people who should be protecting and loving them,” writes Ross, who also won a 2012 National Magazine Award for a photo collection on juvenile justice, in the preface. “These girls in detention and commitment facilities are further abused by an organized system that can’t recognize or respond to their history and their needs…Is this the only solution we can offer?”

In the book, for privacy reasons, the girls are identified only by their initials, and their faces are obscured. BN, the 15-year old at right, told Ross how she was forced into prostitution as a child—by her mom: “My mom’s 32, a crack and meth addict,” she explained. “I think I was in the fourth grade. Once you’re in the game, it’s hard to get out of it. And I like the money now. I had gonorrhea when I was 12. Nobody wanted to help me. I don’t know what they are going to do with me. I would be a mother to my brother and sister. I would do things like pay all the house bills.”

SG, age 17

BN also said she was a runaway—sort of: “I really didn’t run away, but my mom kicked me out of the house.”

Most of the girls Ross interviewed reported that their first arrest was either for running away or for larceny theft, which lines up with the statistics: Girls account for about 60 percent of arrests for running away from home.

Seventeen-year-old SG told Ross that she ended up in detention after being on house arrest; she left the house to go to church. “I was a meth baby,” she said, noting that she’s used meth too, but had been clean for a year. SG said her father beat her when she was little—he left the family when she was six. He later went to prison for child abuse and drug charges. When she was seven, SG said, she was abused by an adult that worked with kids at a local Boys and Girls Club. She waited six years to tell the police: “I don’t think they did anything.”

BW, age 18

Eighteen-year-old BW told Ross that her mother used to burn her with cigarettes when she and her siblings were young, and would hit them with extension cords if they got in trouble at school. She also recounted being sexually abused by her stepfather. “My aunt came in and said, ‘Did you touch my babies? Did you touch them?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t touch them goddamn kids.’ Then he comes in with a gun. He got the gun to her head like, ‘Don’t you snitch on me, don’t you tell the police.’ So we’re thinking ‘My auntie is gonna lose her life right in front of our eyes.'”

These sorts of experiences are common among girls in juvenile facilities: A 2009 Department of Justice study of 100 South Carolina girls in detention found that 81 percent reported experiencing some kind of sexual violence, 35 percent reported being sexually abused by an adult they knew, and 69 percent reported having “consensual” sex with an adult.

In the book, Ross points out that involvement in the system can lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress for girls. The militarized climate of detention facilities is one contributing factor.

A lot of detention facilities have “a very paramilitary framework,” he notes in an email. “Hands behind your back, eyes down, arms length.” The guards typically come from a military or law-enforcement background. “They treat the kids as little adults, small soldiers. The long hallway and locked doors are typical: 8×10 cells, concrete bed, mattress too flat, bed too hard, pillow too flat, blanket too thin…Their shoes are parked outside the door, indicating ‘There is a body inside the cell,’ to quote the guard.”

One young girl, 15-year-old KN, showed Ross her tattoos. At the time he photographed her, she had been in detention for two months. She said she’d been put in placement—a less restrictive detention option—after being charged with battery and assault of a girl at school, but she kept going AWOL and finally ended up in a lockup situation.

KN, age 15

After her four month stint in detention, she would most likely be sent back to placement. “But mostly, I want to go home,” she told Ross. “I have a girlfriend here. And on the outs. My parents are real Catholic. They say God doesn’t like you being with girls, but they’re glad that I do because that way I won’t get pregnant…God thinks I can do better with my life and He knows I will do better.”

Name unknown, age 11

“Who tattoos this across their fingers? Where can this lifetime commitment to purge and reject love come from?” Ross asks his readers. “‘Fuck Love’ is the response to a familial trust shattered. A wish to announce that she rejects those that have rejected her.”

One of the facilities that Ross visited is Maryvale, a Los Angeles residential treatment center for girls ages 8 to 17. It used to be an orphanage. One of the girls Ross photographed there was only 11. He doesn’t know her name and was not allowed to interview her. “Some of them are too fragile,” he writes. “They come from abusive homes and the results are the fragile world between dependency and detention.” In this facility, the girls are in rooms with real bedspreads and lots of stuffed animals. Ross asked the director why there were so many stuffed animals, even for the older girls. “The response was, ‘These kids have never had a real childhood, so we try and allow it at every age.'”

RT, age 16

Black, Native American, and Latina girls are all detained at higher rates than white girls. And the racial disparities in detention have an impact even after the girls leave. Ross cites a study from the American Academy of Pediatrics that shows that detention radically increases the likelihood of early mortality for Latinas. The study found that girls who have been in detention are five times more likely than the general population to die within 16 years of their detention. And for Latinas, the risk is nearly twice as high.

RT, a 16-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, told Ross that she was working at a packing plant when Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the place. She was one of many minors working there, she said. “They deported most of the people, but kept some of us to go to court against the owners…All of us were from the same village in Guatemala. We live in houses that the company owns. I think they let me stay because of my baby.”

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These Photos Show What Life Is Like for Girls in Juvenile Detention

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Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

by ManiePrescott Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Emily Herx first took time off work for in vitro fertilization treatment, her boss offered what sounded like words of support: “You are in my prayers.” Soon those words took on a more sinister meaning. The Indiana grade school where Herx was teaching English was Catholic. And after church officials were alerted that Herx was undergoing IVF—making her, in the words of one monsignor, “a grave, immoral sinner”—it took them less than two weeks to fire her.

Herx filed a discrimination lawsuit in 2012. In response, St. Vincent de Paul School and the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, her former employers, countered with an argument used by a growing number of religious groups to justify firings related to IVF treatment or pregnancies outside of marriage: Freedom of religion gives them the right to hire (or fire) whomever they choose. But the diocese took one big step further. It is arguing that, in this instance, its religious liberty rights protect the school from having to go to court at all.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I couldn’t find any other cases like it,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Liberty. The group is not directly involved in the lawsuit but has filed amicus briefs supporting Herx. “What the diocese is saying is, ‘We can fire anybody, and we have absolute immunity from even going to trial, as long as we think they’re violating our religion. And to have civil authorities even look into what we’re doing is a violation.’…It’s astonishing.”

The key legal question in Herx’s case is whether she was fired for religious reasons or her firing was an illegal act of sex discriminations.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. An exemption in that law allows religious institutions to favor members of their own faith during the hiring process. But there’s no religious exemption for sex discrimination—which is how Herx is framing her dismissal. As proof, she showed that the diocese had never fired a male teacher for using any type of infertility treatment. In response, the diocese asserted that it would fire a male teacher who underwent fertility treatments against church teachings—it just hasn’t done so yet. In early September, a federal judge ruled that there was enough evidence on both sides of the dispute for a jury trial.

That’s when the diocese launched its radical new legal strategy.

The diocese argued that a trial on this question would violate its freedom of religion and appealed the judge’s decision to a three-judge panel on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If the diocese is required to go through a trial,” attorneys for the diocese and school argued, it would “irrevocably” deny Fort Wayne-South Bend the benefits of religious protection. Herx’s attorneys are fighting the appeal.

A spokesman for the diocese and an attorney and for the diocese and school both declined to comment.

“Employers try to appeal these decisions all the time. But this is unusual because of the incredibly broad claim to a religious exemption they’re making,” says Susan Deller Ross, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who has written about Title VII and worked on sex discrimination cases. Thomas Brejcha, the president of the Thomas More Society, a conservative religious liberty legal group, called the move “creative, venturesome, and unusual.” He adds, “I’m very interested to see what happens.”

Louise Melling, a deputy legal director at the ACLU, was more critical: “It’s an unusual and extreme argument, to be saying the court doesn’t even have the legal authority to ask whether this was, in fact, sex discrimination. I can’t imagine they would prevail on that. It’s too extreme.”

Than again, Melling says she never would have predicted the recent wave of cases in which religious institutions asserted that they have an expansive right to discriminate. One of those cases was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the Supreme Court case that struck down the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The ACLU has also seen a climb in the number of Christian schools arguing that Title VII allows them to fire women who undergo IVF or become pregnant outside of marriage, or to fire employees who engage in same-sex relationships. “Hobby Lobby was just one case in this wave,” Melling says.

Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, says the diocese’s assertion is a “perfectly sensible argument.” Laycock, who has successfully argued numerous religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court, notes there is precedent for immunizing certain organizations from trial, although not necessarily under Title VII’s religious protections. “I think it’s going to be a hard sell,” he says. “But I don’t know that it’s ‘extreme.'”

Eventually, a case like Herx’s could reach the Supreme Court. There are at least four other high-profile lawsuits like Herx’s under way at the federal level. Four women—Jennifer Maudlin, a former cook at an Ohio religious community center; Teri James, a former financial-aid specialist for San Diego Christian College; Shaela Evenson, a former Catholic school teacher with the Helena Diocese in Montana; and Shanna Daly, a former teacher with St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic School in Florida—are suing their former employers for firing them because they became pregnant outside of marriage. Daly claims she was fired because she refused to get married until the church annulled her previous marriage. Each of these women filed their cases within the last two years.

“It’s striking that this is still an issue, that people are still firing women for getting IVF and being pregnant and unmarried,” Melling says. “It all feels so medieval.”

It is also hypocritical, according to Herx. Other teachers in the diocese, she claims, have undergone hysterectomies, vasectomies, and tubal ligations without any employment consequences, even though the church teaches that deliberate sterilization is immoral. Herx and her doctor made sure that none of the embryos created for her infertility treatment were intentionally destroyed. Herx’s school principal approved sick days for her IVF treatment. And the diocese’s health insurance plan, which the diocese directly administers without the help of a third party, paid for Herx’s visits to the fertility doctor and the anesthesia she required.

Ross agrees that the appeals court is unlikely to buy into the diocese’s argument. “That would have an extreme impact,” she says. “But with law you can never say never.”

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Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

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Gay Marriage Is Now Legal in England & Wales

by BetseyOHara Posted on March 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Same-sex couples can now legally marry in England and Wales. Parliament had passed the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act last July, but because of various implementation deadlines, it wasn’t until today that couples could actually wed. Prime minister David Cameron heralded the change by writing: “Put simply, in Britain it will no longer matter whether you are straight or gay—the State will recognize your relationship as equal.”

The Church of England, which was created in 1534 because King Henry VIII thought the Catholic Church was too conservative about traditional marriage, has also softened its stance. Though the church leadership had originally announced plans to forbid clergy from performing same-sex marriages, the Bishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said Friday night that it would no longer oppose gay marriage among Anglicans. “The law’s changed; we accept the situation,” he told the BBC.

A recent BBC poll found 68% of Britons accepting of gay marriage, so the Church’s shift may not be unexpected. However, the church has said that it won’t allow clergy themselves to enter into same sex partnerships because “getting married to someone of the same sex would clearly be at variance with the teaching of the Church of England,” which seems a bit like they’re saying, “Ok, you can get gay married and be ok with your friends and family who get gay married because you like Jesus but you don’t like like Jesus. If you like like Jesus, you can’t get gay married because gay marriage is still against God’s plan.”

But anyway, the church issue aside, good for England. Good for Wales. Equality was long overdue in Albion as it is everywhere. (Scotland recently passed legislation to legalize gay marriage by the autumn as well.)

Mazel tov!

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Gay Marriage Is Now Legal in England & Wales

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Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to Koch

by Myrna Posted on March 11, 2014

Catholic University’s decision to accept $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the study of “principled entrepreneurship” is like a modern-day reenactment of 1905′s “tainted money affair.” Catholic University of America. NCinDC/flickr Last November, the Catholic University of America announced a pledge of $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the study of “principled entrepreneurship” at the university’s new business school. As the billionaire funder of various libertarian causes and much of the Tea Party movement, Koch (along with his brother David) is not exactly a stranger to controversy. But his foundation has made gifts to many educational institutions in the past—its website lists 270 colleges and universities it supports, including more than two dozen Catholic schools—with only the occasional stir of opposition. And so he might have assumed that his gift would be met with a press release and that mild mix of gratitude and entitlement with which the public now greets most seven-figure gifts to educational and cultural institutions. After all: Who doesn’t like principled entrepreneurship? Yet, this time, the gift to Catholic (CUA) caused more than a stir. In fact, from a significant swath of the broader Catholic community it provoked something close to outrage. As things stand today, the outcry hasn’t managed to scuttle the donation. But it has the chance to do something even more important: to renew a vital and century-long debate about the terms of philanthropy itself. There are two reasons why Koch’s gift did not slide tranquilly into Catholic’s coffers. One is that CUA holds a unique status among American institutions of Catholic higher education; both because of CUA’s national profile and because U.S. bishops founded it and sit on its board, American Catholics tend to be especially defensive about its reputation. The other is that Koch’s gift coincided with a moment of mounting confidence among Catholic progressives, who have found an ally in Pope Francis. In fact, just a little more than a week after CUA announced Koch’s donation, the Pope issued his first major public pronouncement, denouncing the “deified market,” the folly of supply-side economics, and the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism. Here, it seemed, was a call for principled entrepreneurship that placed Koch’s libertarianism directly in its sights. Read the rest at The Atlantic. Continue reading: Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to Koch Related ArticlesDemocrat Senators to Stage All-Night Session of Climate Change SpeechesWhat the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy IndustryPublic Transit Usage Is at Its Highest Level in More than Fifty Years

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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

by huklx2 Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Marc Burckhardt

BOBBY JINDAL has never been one to wait. And so in November 2012, just one week after Barack Obama was reelected in a race the conservative establishment had long refused to believe it might lose, the 41-year-old governor of Louisiana stuck a knife in Mitt Romney’s back.

The party’s old guard was reeling and Jindal seemed poised to take advantage and confirm that he was a contender to lead the party in 2016. In winning a second gubernatorial term one year earlier, Jindal had crushed his top Democratic challenger by nearly 50 points, helping Republicans take control of the state Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. As Romney exited the national stage, Jindal was locking down the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), a perch that is generally considered a steppingstone to bigger things because of its access to a national network of conservative donors. And in his personal story and ethnic heritage, he offered a walking counterpoint to his party’s demographic stagnation.

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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

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Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

by DorethaMoo Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), chairman of the House budget committee, has apparently decided that by pretending to volunteer in a soup kitchen during the 2012 presidential campaign he didn’t do enough to prove he’s serious about anti-poverty policy. So he and his aides spent about a year examining federal anti-poverty programs and the congressman issued a report on their findings. The study, heralded in the Washington Post as a document likely to inform the GOP budget proposal expected later this month, is hefty, weighing in at more than 200 pages. It seems designed to bolster Ryan, a possible contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, as his party’s top dog on policy. But as any student who’s padded a paper knows, length doesn’t equal depth. And in this case, Ryan’s report is essentially an overview of existing federal poverty policies, itemized with a few citations to some research indicating how well they may or may not work. It’s a little like Federal Poverty Programs for Dummies, without any policy alternatives to be found. Instead, the report relies on cherry-picked data points to justify slashing entitlements.

Take the report’s description of the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that provides a miniscule amount of money to help low-income people afford child care so they can go to work. On the work part, Ryan seems to approve. He notes that data show that single mothers who get a childcare subsidy are—surprise!—more likely to go to work or go back to school. However, the data show that the childcare subsidy also encourages married women to go to work, and here, it’s clear, the GOP does not approve. The report suggests that when poor, married women get jobs thanks to the childcare benefit, their kids get totally neglected. Not only that, it asserts that such programs can cause “lower-quality parental relationships.” Of course, the the kids of single moms are also supposedly harmed by the subsidy, according to the report, which warns that childcare subsidies are related to increased health and behavioral problems in children, poor school performance—and it makes them fat.

It’s hardly a sophisticated analysis of the impact of childcare subsidies on poor families that might come from a real investigation of a federal poverty program—there are no voices from actual program users—but given the source, that’s no surprise. Ryan has been trying to convince the public for a while now that he really cares about the poor, and that, driven by his Catholic faith, he’s genuinely interested in trying to tackle entrenched poverty. But the proposals he’s offered up in the past—big budget cuts to poverty programs, block-granting Medicaid—have almost universally promised to make the suffering of the poor much worse, not better. His anti-poverty proposals have been so severe that he even earned the wrath of the conservative US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which found his ideas in direct conflict with the church’s teachings on social justice.

In his latest offering on the subject of poverty, Ryan does champion a few federal programs, namely the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That’s the modern version of the old cash entitlement system for low-income single moms that was “reformed” in 1996 by turning federal assistance money over to the states to administer. The welfare reform bill made it much more difficult for low-income families to access the safety net by putting sharp limits on benefits and imposing stiff work requirements as a condition of receiving help. The Ryan report credits the 1996 welfare reform bill with bringing down child poverty rates and increasing workforce participation rates of single mothers, at least up until 2001, when poverty rates started to spike again. But again, he’s writing in a vacuum: The report fails to mention that the main reason for the big drop in poverty and employment rates during that time was a major economic boom that by 2000 had brought the unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent, one of the lowest rates in recorded history, which made it a lot easier for welfare moms to find work.

In addition, even as Ryan champions welfare reform as a poverty killer, he fails to mention that though some measures of poverty went down after the welfare reform law was passed in 1996, the number of households living in deep poverty—on less than $2 per day—has more than doubled since then. So has welfare reform really alleviated poverty? It’s complicated. One thing it did do, however, was slash the amount of federal money spent on the program. The welfare budget hasn’t increased since 1996, meaning that the $16 billion program has lost a third of its value thanks to inflation.

Meanwhile, the report blames Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the federal disability program that’s recently become a favorite target of GOP budget hawks, for preventing people from joining the workforce. It cites a decade-old report suggesting that the program reduces the labor supply—but only of people between the ages of 60 and 64. The Ryan report contends that the program is full of scammers, particularly the parents of disabled children who have an incentive to keep them out of the workforce to keep the disability checks flowing. It claims that SSI permanently prevents children who receive disability payments from joining the workforce after they hit 18, without considering the possibility that these people are on SSI because they’re actually disabled and can’t work, even if they want to. And critically, Ryan doesn’t explain how anyone gets by on $535 a month, the average monthly SSI payment, or how that teeny bit of government money would be preferable to taking even a minimum-wage job.

These are fairly small oversights compared to the report’s biggest and most obvious omission, namely any discussion of the current economy and its relationship to poverty. Even as it knocks various poverty programs for discouraging labor force participation, Ryan’s study fails to mention the single biggest reason people don’t work: not enough jobs. Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (which Ryan cites with some regularity in his report), if every last job available in this country were filled tomorrow with an unemployed worker, three out of every five unemployed people would still be out of work.

Without acknowledging this basic economic fact, Ryan’s superficial review of federal poverty programs looks suspiciously like a move to help his party justify big cuts to social welfare programs. It doesn’t offer any new ideas that might improve programs to help the poor. It’s a cheat sheet for GOP budget cutters looking for easy targets.

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Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

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Divine intervention? Pope opposes fracking

by sssaa Posted on November 13, 2013

Divine intervention? Pope opposes fracking

By

Catholic Church England and Wales

The worldwide leader of the Catholic Church, none other than the motherfracking pope himself, has come out in opposition to the worldwide scourge of hydraulic fracturing.

OK, so Pope Francis didn’t exactly make a policy statement or a speech denouncing fracking. But hints have emerged that he might do so soon. And Twitter is afire with pictures of His Holiness holding up anti-fracking T-shirts. The pictures were taken Monday following meetings with Argentinians dealing with environmental issues:

Environmental filmmaker Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas told elEconomista that the pope had indicated during a Monday meeting that he was working on a papal memo, known as an encyclical, that will address environmental issues.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Divine intervention? Pope opposes fracking

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What do pandas, the Pope and Neil Young have in common?

by Posted on September 13, 2013

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What do pandas, the Pope and Neil Young have in common?

Posted 13 September 2013 in

National

This week, all three are making biofuel headlines!

National Geopgraphic reports that researchers have found a microbe in panda droppings capable of efficiently converting plant waste into biofuel.
Pope Francis has got himself some new wheels — a 1984 Renault that can run on biofuel, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
In Boston, Singer-songwriter Neil Young gave a live performance of his new composition, “Drive My Car”, an ode to his 1959 Lincoln Continental that runs on… you guessed it: ethanol!

You can watch a video of the performance right here:

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What do pandas, the Pope and Neil Young have in common?

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