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Two Top Democrats Ask Justice Department to Investigate FBI Leaks

by sipid34 Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two top Democratic lawmakers are asking the Justice Department to investigate the leaks coming from the FBI in recent weeks regarding the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It’s the first indication of what is likely to be a series of inquiries after the election into the FBI’s willingness to make public comments about its ongoing investigation and its inability to control leaks so close to a presidential election.

On Friday, Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) sent a letter to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz asking him to investigate the leaks, including evidence of leaks to Rudy Giuliani, a top adviser to Donald Trump. The letter cites Giuliani’s appearance Friday morning on Fox and Friends, during which he acknowledged receiving inside information from the FBI about Clinton’s investigation before the agency notified Congress of the information. “Did I hear about it?” Giuliani said on air. “You’re darn right I heard about it.” The letter also cites leaks to Fox News host Bret Baier, which resulted in the anchor retracting a story about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

“These unauthorized and inaccurate leaks from within the FBI, particularly so close to a presidential election, are unprecedented,” the letter says. “For these reasons, we are calling on your office to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the sources of these and other leaks from the FBI and to recommend appropriate action.”

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Two Top Democrats Ask Justice Department to Investigate FBI Leaks

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

by ArielleRosales Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Ah, McTeacher’s Night—the occasion for kids to watch their teachers peddle burgers, fries, and sugary drinks. In these tie-ups between schools and the fast-food giant, teachers encourage their students and their families to visit a McDonald’s outlet on a particular evening, and then work behind the counter (uncompensated) in McDonald’s t-shirts. A portion of the night’s sales are donated to the school. The above video depicts one such event held for an Illinois high school in 2012.

Sound like an edifying spectacle for youth? A labor union called United Teachers Los Angeles thinks not. In a blistering letter recently published in its union newspaper, UTLA vice president Cecily Myart-Cruz lays out the case against McTeacher’s Night. She claims that the events amount to “predatory marketing of fast food to children,” “exploits the trust between teachers and students to promote its junk food,” and “often raise as little as $1 per student, a ridiculously small amount compared to the time teachers must spend participating and recruiting their students to attend.”

In an emailed statement, a McDonald’s spokesperson defended the program:

McTeacher’s Night is an optional community-based program that supports schools seeking financial support for initiatives like sports equipment, band uniforms, iPads for the classroom, field trips and other programs. It is not a corporate mandated program, but a way our company-owned and franchised restaurants support the communities they serve at the request of and in partnership with local schools.

Like the sweet sauce that tops a soft-serve sundae, the LA teachers union critique comes after a campaign launched last year to kibosh McTeacher’s Nights, led by advocacy groups Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and and supported by 50 national, state and local teachers unions.

A spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International pointed out to me in an email that McTeacher’s Night events contradict sponsorship guidelines (downloadable here) issued by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in 2011. The guidelines state: “Keep in mind we may not accept donations from or promote organizations that market, sell or produce products that may be harmful to children including but not limited to, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, gambling, or high fat and calorie foods and drinks.”

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have documented more than 120 McTeacher nights in greater LA since the start of 2013, including four this year. Their research suggests that the funds these events raise tend to be paltry. They obtained fundraising totals for around 30 LA-area McTeacher nights, for which the cash haul ranged from $67 to $1,000. Nationwide, the groups have counted more than 600 McTeacher Nights since 2013.

On Monday, the UTLA announced a formal policy “calling on McDonald’s to end these disrespectful marketing gimmicks once and for all,” Myart-Cruz said in a statement.

Like a class clown who doesn’t know when to stop, Ronald McDonald would appear to be no longer welcome as a fixture in LA public schools.

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

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How Not to Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

by Myrna Posted on September 24, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

How Not to Be Wrong

The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Jordan Ellenberg

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: May 29, 2014

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


The Freakonomics of math—a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our hands The math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In How Not to Be Wrong , Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is: Math isn’t confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do—the whole world is shot through with it. Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It’s a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted: How early should you get to the airport? What does “public opinion” really represent? Why do tall parents have shorter children? Who really won Florida in 2000? And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer? How Not to Be Wrong presents the surprising revelations behind all of these questions and many more, using the mathematician’s method of analyzing life and exposing the hard-won insights of the academic community to the layman—minus the jargon. Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God. Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need. Math, as Ellenberg says, is “an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.” With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, more meaningful way. How Not to Be Wrong will show you how.

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How Not to Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

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How Light Pollution Affects Wildlife and Ecosystems

by Stewart50G Posted on August 31, 2016

Night skies throughout the world are becoming brighter due to humans increasing use of artificial lights. This doesnt simply interrupt our star gazing opportunities it has a significant impact on many different animal species.

The term light pollution generally refers to how urban lighting blocks out our view of the night sky. But researchers are becoming more concerned about whats called ecological light pollution, which alters light levels in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The following are some of their discoveries on the effects of ecological light pollution.

Bird Navigation

Nocturnal bird species use the moon and stars for navigation during migrations. Artificial lighting on tall office buildings, communication towers and other brightly-lit structures has been shown to throw them off-course with often fatal results.

Migrating birds are attracted to artificial lights and will fly in circles around them until they die from exhaustion or predators. Lights also cause a significant number of collisions with human-made structures.

For instance, a 4-year study that concluded in 2007 counted fatal night-time bird collisions at an illuminated offshore research platform in the North Sea. At the end of the study, 767 bird carcasses of 34 different species had been collected. Considering there are over 1,000 human structures in the North Sea, researchers estimated that hundreds of thousands of nocturnal migrating birds could be killed each year in that area alone.

Communication

Some night-dwelling creatures require darkness for proper communication. An example is the complex system fireflies use to communicate messages. The bioluminescent lights they emit from their bodies range from adult mating signals to young larvae warning off predators. These messages can be easily interrupted by stray light.

Darkness is also important for coyote communication. Coyotes howl more during the time of a new moon, when the sky is darkest. They most likely do this to reduce trespassing from other packs or to assist with hunting larger prey during dark conditions. A brighter sky reduces the amount they howl, which could disrupt territorial marking and group hunting coordination.

Reproduction

The reproductive behaviors of many animals may also be altered by light pollution. For instance, female glow-worms use bioluminescent flashes in order to attract males up to 45 meters (150 feet) away. Artificial lights can disrupt these important signals.

Its been found that the female South American tungara frog is less selective about mate choice when greater amounts of light are present. Researchers suggest they may prefer to mate quickly in order to avoid an increased risk of predation in higher light.

Another experiment showed that frogs stopped their mating activity during night football games where a local sports stadium increased sky glow. Frog mating choruses resumed when a shield was put up to block the stadiums light from the frogs habitat.

Ecosystem Interactions

Many predator-prey relationships are dependent on light. One study found that more harbor seals congregated under artificial lights to eat juvenile salmon migrating downstream. When the lights were turned off, the seals ate less salmon. This shows how increased light pollution can disrupt a natural balance, benefitting one species and putting another at risk.

The loss of nocturnal moths is another example of how local ecology can be impacted. Moths are attracted to lights and many are killed annually by touching hot components or getting caught in light-bated electric traps. The bats and birds who feed on them lose a food source. Also, moths play an important role in pollination for many different plant species. These are affected by declining moth populations.

Disorientation

Artificial night lighting may also disorient creatures that rely on darkness for navigation. The disruption of newly hatched baby sea turtles is a well-documented case.

When the hatchlings emerge from nests on sandy beaches, they will naturally move away from the dark silhouettes of vegetation on the beach. This causes them to head towards the open ocean. Beachfront lighting prevents the young turtles from seeing the silhouettes properly, and they become disoriented and remain stranded on the beach exposed to the elements and predators. Millions of hatchlings die this way each year.

What Can Be Done?

Many places throughout the world have taken steps to reduce light pollution. Audubon started a Lights Out program that now includes many major US cities.

In addition, the International Dark Sky Association works to conserve areas with dark skies through public education and designating Dark Sky communities, parks, and reserves. These are all listed on their website and many are open to visitors.

You can also take action at home to reduce ecological light pollution. Some helpful measures include:

Avoid using unnecessary interior or exterior lighting.
Install motion sensors on all outdoor lights. This will also help reduce your electricity costs.
Turn off any lights at night that are not motion sensing.
Take extra care to reduce night lighting during bird migration periods, typically in April and May, and again in August through to November.
Ensure all exterior lighting is fully shielded so light is prevented from shining upwards into the sky. These fixtures may also be called zero light up or dark sky compliant. The International Dark Sky Association has further information on types of fixtures to look for.
Use yellow or red lights when possible. These have a lower impact on wildlife and dont attract insects.
Install window coverings that block as much light from escaping as possible.

Related
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Grow Your Own Goji Berries
Genes Found That Come Alive After Death

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How Light Pollution Affects Wildlife and Ecosystems

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Aliens Are (Maybe) Finally Knocking. The Pentagon’s Plan Is Underwhelming.

by Sean43618048 Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Paul Gilster, who blogs about deep space exploration and other interstellar issues, broke the news on his blog that in May 2015, a team of Russian scientists had detected an interesting signal coming from a star system about 95 light-years from Earth. Gilster was very measured in his report, noting that “no one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study.” The researchers involved believe the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, a nonprofit organization that’s looking for life in the universe and has the equipment to scan the skies for signals from deep space, might follow up on the lead.

But that didn’t stop others from going wild, most notably the New York Observer, which published an attention-grabbing story Monday titled “Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space.”

SETI is, in fact, scanning for the signal, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the organization, who discussed the matter in a blog post available on the group’s website. “Could it be another society sending a signal our way?” he wrote. “Of course, that’s possible. However, there are many other plausible explanations for this claimed transmission—including terrestrial interference. Without a confirmation of this signal, we can only say that it’s ‘interesting.'”

UFOs, extraterrestrials, and life in outer space has gained new currency over the last year or so. Last fall, a team from Yale University announced they had found a star that gave off such unique light patterns that some speculated it was being orbited by an alien megastructure. Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, have both repeatedly discussed the need for the release of information about US government research into extraterrestrials. (You can read more about Clinton’s history with the UFO issue that goes back more than 20 years here.) A week ago, scientists announced they had found a potentially life-supporting, Earthlike planet just 4.5 light-years away, within Earth’s closest celestial star system neighbor.

This whole thing got us thinking: What would happen if extraterrestrials not only reached out to communicate, but showed up on our doorstep? Is there a plan?

I put this question to the Department of Defense last fall when I profiled Stephen Bassett, the only registered lobbyist in Washington whose major focus is to force the US government to reveal what it knows about extraterrestrials contact with the human race. To people like Bassett, the question of what to do when they show up is moot because it has already happened; the people who need to deal with it already are.

The Department of Defense does not agree. Here’s the answer I got from them: “The Department of Defense does not maintain plans for hypothetical dangers for which we have absolutely no information—either to the likelihood of the danger, or to what form the danger would take.” For what it’s worth, the DoD spokesman also said the department doesn’t have an office or organization that handles “issues related to UFOs and/or extraterrestrials,” and the DoD has never interacted with or recovered any kind of material related to extraterrestrials.

Do we really not have any plans in place should we be contacted by an alien race? I checked the DoD’s answer with Christopher Mellon. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, among other roles, he said, “I think you got an honest answer from DoD. How would you plan for the arrival of an advanced civilization without any understanding whatsoever of their capabilities, technology or intentions?” He added that his sense was that the government had “little if any idea” of what we’d be up against and “whatever it is would be so far beyond us it would look and appear magical or spiritual, totally beyond our ability to cope with or resist if hostile. If such an event occurred we’d simply have to muddle through as best we could.”

“Meanwhile,” he says, “DoD has an overflowing plate already and I suspect the Joint Staff has little patience for such seemingly unlikely, open-ended and ill-defined scenarios.”

Nick Pope, a former official with the British Ministry of Defense whose job it was to investigate UFO sightings, doesn’t think powerful governments should get off that easy. He told me Tuesday he’s long advocated some sort of contingency plan but never saw any evidence that the British or US governments had one. When he asked colleagues in the intelligence and military world about plans, “there was no real enthusiasm for it. It was a combination of skepticism and almost this feeling that this was the ultimate taboo, that something like this could just not be put down on paper.”

Pope said news about a potential signal from another civilization should trigger a whole series of thorny questions: Is this just a signal letting us know they’re there, or is there information encoded within it? If there is information in it, can we decode it? Should we? If we could, should that information be disclosed? Who should control the information in the signal, if there’s anything there?

That’s a far cry from a scenario that finds us dealing with an extraterrestrial craft in orbit around Earth or actually landing. “The No. 1 priority would obviously be avoiding getting in a fight with these people,” he said. But what do we do then? Who’s in charge? Who speaks for planet Earth? What is the message?

Pope admits that the possibility of this scenario playing out is miniscule, describing it as “the ultimate low probability, high impact scenario.” But, he said, “We don’t need to go into Star Trek territory to say it’s possible we could be visited. That being the case, it just seems prudent to have a plan.”

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Aliens Are (Maybe) Finally Knocking. The Pentagon’s Plan Is Underwhelming.

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A War Reporter’s Family is Suing the Assad Regime Over Her Death

by scormeciurilive Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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As the Syrian government launched a scorched-earth siege of Homs in early 2012, the American war reporter Marie Colvin holed up in a clandestine media center inside the city, sending out live broadcasts on the attack’s heavy civilian casualties. “There are rockets, shells, tank shells, anti-aircraft being fired in parallel lines into the city,” she said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the pre-dawn hours of February 22, 2012. “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

It was Colvin’s last call to CNN. Later that morning, the Syrian military fired directly at the makeshift media center. Using a targeting method called “bracketing,” rockets and mortars landed on each side of the center, the rounds inching closer until eventually, a rocket struck outside the front door as Colvin and her colleagues attempted to evacuate. Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed immediately, and shrapnel and debris severely injured the French reporter Edith Bouvier and Colvin’s colleagues, Paul Conroy and Wael al-Omar.

At the time, the Syrian Information Ministry said that the government was unaware that Colvin and Ochlik were in the country. However, a federal lawsuit filed over the weekend on behalf of Colvin’s family alleges that the Syrian government targeted the media center “with premeditation” to silence Colvin and other media critics of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The civil complaint claims that Colvin was deliberately assassinated by high-ranking officials within the Assad government. “Marie Colvin was killed for exposing the Assad regime’s slaughter of innocent civilians to the world,” said attorney Scott Gilmore of the Center for Justice and Accountability, which is representing her family, in a statement. “The regime wanted to wage a war without witness against the democratic opposition. To do that, they needed to neutralize the media.”

The case, which is the result of a three-year investigation that draws on captured government documents and statements from defectors, seeks unspecified financial damages from the Syrian government. The suit alleges that Syrian intelligence officers got a tip that foreign reporters were staying at the media center in Homs and tried intercept Colvin’s broadcast satellite signal. After pinpointing her location, Syrian forces shelled her position with artillery strikes, the complaint states.

Colvin, who was 56 at the time of her death, had a reputation for courageousness while covering some the world’s most violent conflicts over the two decades that she reported for the London-based Sunday Times. She wore an eye patch after suffering an injury in an explosion while covering Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2001.

Her family’s suit is the first case yet that aims to hold the Assad regime responsible for war crimes. It was filed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a relatively obscure federal law that allows Americans to sue nations that are designated as sponsors of terrorism. “It’s very hard to hold a foreign state accountable for war crimes,” says Dixon Osburn, the executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. But with the Colvin case, says Osburn, “we had the jurisdictional perfect storm of being able to have the plaintiff and defendant that both fit the statute.”

Previously, FSIA has been invoked against the Vatican in cases involving clergy sexual abuse. It also protected Saudi Arabia when families and victims of the 9/11 attacks filed a lawsuit alleging that Saudi leaders had financed Al Qaeda. In 1980, plaintiffs used FSIA to successfully sue the government of Chile for the assassination of its former ambassador to the United States, and in 1992, the act was cited in a torture suit against Argentina.

“The Colvin family recognizes that they’re in a unique position to bring this lawsuit, and there are so many others who have lost sons and daughters who don’t have the same kind of opportunity,” says Osburn. “The hope is to provide some voice about what’s happening in Syria, about what happened at the siege of Homs, and to shed light on the atrocities that have been committed.”

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A War Reporter’s Family is Suing the Assad Regime Over Her Death

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Al Franken Is Worried About Pokemon Go

by Charlen62J Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Pokemon Go is all the internet cares about at the moment. Within the first week of the game hitting app stores in the United States, the augmented-reality game has been downloaded more than Tinder and is on pace to move past Twitter in active users, with an estimated 7.5 million downloads so far. It’s causing headaches at the Holocaust Museum and late-night gym battles outside the White House.

But one senator is worried that the game’s maker has gone too far in trying to catch all of its users’ information. On Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, posing a series of questions to clarify how the company will handle user information. “While this release is undoubtedly impressive,” Franken wrote, “I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users’ personal information without their appropriate consent.”

Media reports over the weekend highlighted that Niantic pushes users to sign up for the app by linking it to their Google account. And unlike many such services, for which a person signs up with a Google or Facebook account but only hands over limited information to the third-party app, Niantic’s privacy policy said it gathered access to a user’s full account—including the contents of his or her Gmail account—when the user signs up for Pokemon Go.

Niantic quickly responded to the news reports and said it would dial back the amount of information it can access from Google. But Franken wants to be extra sure that Pokemon Go is not exploiting its users’ privacy. “When done appropriately, the collection and use of personal information may enhance consumers’ augmented reality experience,” Franken continued, “but we must ensure that Americans’—especially children’s—very sensitive information is protected.”

Franken oversees a Senate subcommittee on privacy, technology, and the law and has used that perch to question companies like Uber on how they handle user information.

Read Franken’s full letter below:

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Al Franken Is Worried About Pokemon Go

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A Judge Just Slammed San Francisco Cops for Racist Policing

by GinaShephard Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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A federal judge has ruled that there is “substantial evidence of racially selective law enforcement by the San Francisco Police Department.” The holding came on Thursday in a drug-related case, and as several SFPD officers are under investigation for allegedly sending racist and homophobic text messages. That’s the city’s second police texting scandal, and after a record year for fatal police shootings, it serves as more troubling background to the reform efforts following the firing of police chief Greg Suhr.

US District Judge Edward Chen ruled in favor of 12 defendants arrested during Operation Safe Schools, a series of drug stings carried out in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood by the SFPD and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2013 and 2014. All 37 people arrested during the stings were black. The defendants maintained they were the victims of racial policing. Noting that ethnicities of drug dealers in the Tenderloin vary, Chen’s ruling signaled he would dismiss all charges if the defendants could prove civil rights violations, and allowed them to seek further information, presumably on the races of arrestees and the agencies’ profiling policies, from law enforcement for the next steps of the trial, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Trial evidence included video of an undercover informant declining to buy drugs from an Asian dealer and waiting for another one, who was black, before making a purchase, according to the Chronicle. In a second video, an officer involved in the sting could be heard saying “fuck BMs”—a law enforcement term for black men—the officer holding the camera offered a warning: “Shhh, hey, I’m rolling!”

The ruling “sends a clear message to the government that racial discrimination and selective enforcement will not be tolerated,” said San Francisco’s chief public defender Jeff Adachi. Adachi has said that if the information obtained by the defendants shows a pattern of racism, it could be used to seek dismissal in other criminal cases.

Under new interim police chief Tony Chaplin, the SFPD has undertaken several reform efforts. Recently, the city’s Police Commission unanimously approved a new use-of-force policy that mandates officers attempt to deescalate conflicts before using force. The department’s policies and practices are also under review by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing.

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A Judge Just Slammed San Francisco Cops for Racist Policing

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

by LannyIsabel51 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Do the birds get what they want?” Perdue executive Bruce Stewart-Brown asked. We were surrounded by 20,000 squawking chickens in a vast indoor facility in Maryland. I was in the midst of reporting a Mother Jones deep-dive on the meat industry’s over-use of antibiotics crucial to human medicine, and how Perdue had moved decisively away from that practice.

At the time, Stewart-Brown’s rhetorical question sounded a bit silly, coming from a company that slaughters and packs 650 million chickens per year, making it the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company. Yet as I found during my reporting, Perdue isn’t just any chicken producer. Unlike all of the other industry giants, the company had quietly begun to move away from antibiotics around a decade ago.

Now Perdue has announced an animal welfare program that seems as ambitious as its move away from drugs. The company has committed itself to following the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s “five freedoms” for farm livestock, the most notable of which are the “freedom from discomfort,” “freedom to express (most) normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind,” and “freedom from fear and distress.”

“Our goal is to double the rate of play/activity by our chickens in the next three years,” the company states in a newly released “Commitment to Animal Welfare.” Moreover, acknowledging that modern chickens have been bred to grow rapidly, causing leg injuries and making it very difficult to walk late in their lives, Perdue says it’s considering moving to “breeds of birds that grow slower.”

In concrete terms, the facilities that house Perdue’s birds will eventually be outfitted with windows, giving them access to sunlight, and be less densely stocked, giving the birds more room. The company so far hasn’t released details on how much more space birds will get (the current industry standard is eight-tenths of a square foot per bird). As for the windows, the company plans to install windows in 200 of the 6,000 existing poultry houses that supply it. They’ll be used as a kind of controlled experiment, to “compare bird health and activity to enclosed housing.” If the windows prove effective in increasing activity among the flock, “we will establish annual targets for retrofitting houses with windows,” Perdue states. All new chicken houses will be required to have windows.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom got a look at one of the the window-equipped chicken houses, run by an operation that contracts for Perdue:

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another. At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

In addition to responding to long-simmering animal-welfare complaints about factory-scale farming, Perdue is also openly discussing another highly controversial topic: Big Poultry’s reliance on nominally independent farmers to grow their chickens, under contract terms that largely favor giant processing companies like Perdue. (See my piece on a particularly presumptuous contract term that Perdue quickly nixed when I exposed it.)

Normally, when a big chicken company decides it wants to change something about the enormous barns where its birds are grown, it merely changes the terms of its contracts, forcing farmers to upgrade their facilities or risk losing their market. In this case, Perdue will pick up the cost of retro-fitting the 200 pilot houses, a company spokeswoman told me. As the windows program expands, the company says it will continue to pick up at least part of the cost. “We’ll determine how it will get paid for,” the spokeswoman said, “whether we will pay for it directly or compensate the grower through a premium for upgraded housing or…a cost-share or financing approach.”

And the company’s “Commitment to Animal Welfare” document even includes a pledge to “do a better job listening to farmers and communicating with them.” Rather than set pay solely based on factors like efficiency and output, contracts will include incentives for “care of the birds and welfare performance,” the document states. A Perdue spokeswoman added that the company is consulting with farmers to figure out the best way to compensate them for making the birds’ lives better.

Of course, as with all voluntary corporate initiatives, Perdue sets the terms of the program and controls the information that emerges from it. As Maryn McKenna notes on the National Geographic website, “For most of its initiatives, the company has not disclosed a timeline.” But as I discovered in my reporting, Perdue’s anti-antibiotics effort proved to be the real deal, and it has pulled the bulk of the poultry industry in the same direction. Perhaps its animal-welfare reforms will do the same.

Leah Garces, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, which released a video in 2014 exposing harsh welfare conditions on a Perdue-contracted farm, thinks they just might. “Just as Perdue led the way on antibiotics, they are laying out the inevitable direction of the market,” she said. “I’m confident every poultry company today is thinking hard about steps they also need to take to improve the lives of chickens in order to keep up.”

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

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Obama and India’s Prime Minister are meeting this week, but there’s a toxic elephant in the room

by SterlingHgr Posted on June 7, 2016

Obama and India’s Prime Minister are meeting this week, but there’s a toxic elephant in the room

By on Jun 7, 2016Share

President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, where they announced new joint partnerships related to climate change, clean energy finance, and nuclear nonproliferation. Among the announcements were commitments to join the Paris Agreement this year, the sale of six U.S.-built nuclear reactors to India, and enhanced cooperation to combat wildlife trafficking.

In a statement, World Resources Institute CEO Andrew Steer commended the two leaders “for not shying away from historically contentious issues.” But the most historically contentious environmental issue concerning the two nations — a feud over who’s to blame for a 31-year-old disaster — was never on the table.

In 1984, a methyl isocyanate gas leak at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed nearly 25,000 people. More than a half million suffered injuries from the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) plant disaster, which would come to be considered the worst industrial accident of all time. Aquifers in the area are still contaminated by hydrochloric acid.

The task of assigning responsibility for the accident has proven to be a profoundly difficult one. The UCIL plant was majority owned by U.S.-based Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), a chemical company bought by Dow Chemical in 2001. The Indian court proceedings mostly targeted UCC and its chairman, Warren Anderson. After a 1989 civil settlement, neither showed up for criminal proceedings in 1992.

Since then, the United States hasn’t extradited any executives or representatives connected to the disaster for the criminal case, even though India has requested it to do so for more than two decades.

Under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the two countries, the Department of Justice is supposed to pass along notice to appear in court from the Indian government. It has not. In a letter late last year, DOJ claimed that Dow bought UCC too long after the disaster to warrant answering for the latter’s misdeeds.

Today, UCC is still missing — a “fugitive from justice” in the eyes of India — and Anderson died in 2014 without ever having been extradited.

A new White House petition calls on the Department of Justice to serve Dow Chemical to attend court in Bhopal on July 13 of this year, as requested by the region’s district court. The petition has 50,000 signatures; the White House will be forced to respond if it reaches 100,000.

Campaigners describe nearly every stage of the Bhopal disaster and its aftermath as unjust.

Activist Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action contrasts the standstill action with the U.S. government’s role in securing from British Petroleum (BP) a criminal settlement five times the value of UCC’s civil settlement, despite the Bhopal accident causing almost 2,000 times as many deaths as the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Justice campaigners are equally critical of the Modi administration, which they claim has shielded Dow’s Indian subsidiaries from criminal proceedings. Last year, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forest denied a UNEP offer to conduct the first comprehensive contamination assessment of the disaster site. “Assessment is the first and the most important step towards cleanup in Bhopal, but for reasons that he hasn’t cared to explain, the Environment Minister would not accept UNEP’s unprecedented offer,” said Nawab Khan of advocacy group Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha.

The critiques come at a time that several other Bhopal cases plod through both countries’ judicial systems. Late last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York affirmed an earlier U.S. ruling that found UCC not to be responsible for cleanup costs stemming the accident. In a 2012 decision, a district court judge wrote that after “a discovery expedition worthy of Vasco de Gama, it is clear from the undisputed facts that UCIL, and not UCC, designed and built the actual waste disposal system.”

The legal fallout from Bhopal offers a reminder of the tensions that can underly even the rosiest of bilateral announcements. In Tuesday’s joint statement, the leaders described their countries’ relationship as “rooted in shared values of freedom, democracy, universal human rights, tolerance and pluralism, equal opportunities for all citizens, and rule of law.” If that’s the case, there’s reason to believe securing justice for Bhopal would be higher up on the priority list.

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Obama and India’s Prime Minister are meeting this week, but there’s a toxic elephant in the room

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, oven, PUR, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama and India’s Prime Minister are meeting this week, but there’s a toxic elephant in the room