“We’re running out of water and the crisis is getting worse,” Maude Barlow said Monday from New York, on the eve of a vote expected as early as Wednesday at the UN General Assembly.

“If we don’t make a statement that we don’t want entire populations left behind, what does it say about us? About our humanity?”

Barlow, former senior adviser on water at the UN and chair of the Council of Canadians citizens group, is optimistic the resolution will pass by majority vote.

However, it appears powerful nations — including Canada — either will not support it or will push for a version that Barlow says would continue to allow water to be bought and sold as a commodity.

“My fear is that the world is going to be divided into North and South — developed and developing nations — and that’s a disaster for the United Nations and for the world,” said Barlow.

She was referring to apparent behind-the-scenes opposition by the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Britain and other European countries, as well as Canada.

At a time when 2 billion people live in water-stressed regions, the resolution declares that “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation (are) a human right.”

Read the rest here

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it.

Watch ‘World News‘ for the latest coverage on the Gulf oil spill.

At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

Today, ABC News surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.

Watch Video here

GULFPORT, Miss. — Something besides oil washed ashore along a section of beach in Gulfport this week.

Millions of small dead fish have washed ashore just east of Jones Park. The fish are believed to be menhaden.

Low oxygen levels in the water are typically to blame when large numbers of the tiny fish wash up dead, experts said. Harrison County leaders said it’s too soon to tell if the fish-kill is related to the oil spill.

“If it’s oil-related, the BP contractors will have to pick it up,” Harrison County Sand Beach Director Bobby Weaver said. “If not, we’ll dispatch a county crew to come down here and get it.”
By early Monday afternoon, sand beach crews started scooping up the dead fish and raking the sand. They were loaded on a dump truck and taken to the landfill.

Factual satellite images in the past several weeks are showing that the Gulf Loop Current is broken and may cease to function entirely! This will result in massive climate change and possibly an ice age for Europe! Major trouble brewing?? More freakish weather on its way??

RISK OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE BY BP OIL SPILL by Gianluigi Zangari

Abstract: BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf Stream global climate thermoregulation activity.

Read full article…

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BEIJING — China’s largest reported oil spill more than doubled in size to 165 sq. miles (430 sq. kilometers) by Wednesday, forcing nearby beaches to close and prompting one official to warn of a “severe threat” to sea life and water quality.

The oil slick started spreading five days ago when a pipeline at a busy northeastern port exploded, sparking a massive fire that took more than 15 hours to contain. Hundreds of boats have been deployed to help with the cleanup.

At least one person has been killed in those efforts, a 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, who drowned Tuesday after a wave threw him from a vessel and pushed him out to sea, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Another man who also fell in was rescued.

Beaches near Dalian, once named China’s most livable city, were closing as oil started reaching their shores, Xinhua reported.

“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals, and water quality, and the sea birds,” Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for Dalian, China Maritime Safety Administration, told Dragon TV.

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Some in South Korea dispute the official version of events:

that a North Korean torpedo ripped apart the Cheonan.

[ ... now that's what I'm Tonkin about ... ]

The way U.S. officials see it, there’s little mystery behind the most notorious shipwreck in recent Korean history.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls the evidence “overwhelming” that the Cheonan,

a South Korean warship that sank in March,

was hit by a North Korean torpedo.

Vice President Joe Biden has cited the South Korean-led panel investigating the sinking as a model of transparency.

Read the rest here

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Immigrants.  Taking our jobs and public assistance.  The cause of all our problems.

But it’s not true.

We’re blaming people who are struggling day-by-day to survive on their own or support their families,

while we applaud a system that allows a financial expert to make enough money to pay the salaries of 50,000 police officers.

[ wow,  that doesn't sound very  -balanced- ]

Here are some facts:

The Census Bureau and the World Wealth Report 2010 both report increases for the top 5% of households even during the current recession.

Based on Internal Revenue Service figures,

the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie in one generation.

In 1980 the richest 1% of America took one of every fifteen income dollars.

Now they take THREE of every fifteen income dollars.

That’s a TRILLION extra dollars a year.

Some ultra-rich individuals,

like hedge fund managers David Tepper and John Paulson,

made $4 billion in a year

(on most of which they paid only a 15% capital gains tax rate).

This is enough to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City.

But we blame the immigrants instead of the people taking unimaginable amounts of money from society.

Read the rest here

Democrats who play liberals on TV say it isn’t.

Vice President Joe Biden says the Tea Party “is not a racist organization” per se,

but allows that “at least elements that were involved in some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views.”

Right-wing Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has received permission to form an official Tea Party Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It’s official.

The Tea Party matters.

So: is it racist?

Certainly a sizeable minority of Tea Partiers’ “take America back” rhetoric

is motivated by thinly disguised resentment that a black guy is president.

As for the remainder, their tacit tolerance of the intolerant speaks for itself.

“Take America back” from whom?

You know whom.

It ain’t white CEOs.

Yes.

The Tea Party is racist.

Obviously.

But racism is only one facet of a far more sinister political strain.

It’s more accurate to categorize the Tea Party as something the United States has never seen before,

certainly not in such large numbers or as widespread.

The Tea Party is a protofascist movement.

Robert O. Paxton defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity,

in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,

working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,

abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence

and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Typical Tea Party rants fit the classic fascist mold in several respects.

Read the rest here

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– Five leaks in and around BP’s well are more like “drips” and aren’t yet reason to worry, said retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander. He extended testing of the experimental cap by another day, which means the oil will remain shut in. Seepage two miles from BP’s oil cap is coming from another well, he said.

– BP would like to implement a “static kill” of the well, which involves sending mud and later cement down into the well through the cap, according to BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells. The company is waiting for government approval.

The final closing of the well would still have to be performed by a relief well “bottom kill,” scheduled now to begin in late July or early August if the weather remains good.

By the numbers

$7 billion

The amount that BP is getting from Apache Corp. for oil and gas properties in the United States, Egypt and Canada.

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Watch here- http://www.moviesforfree.tv/video/123…

Or here- http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=9090

DVD will be onsale in December 2010.

http://www.gaslandthemovie.com

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Gaslandmovie
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GASLAND…
Interview with film maker Josh Fox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9hz62…

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The Conflict

A cartoon published in an American newspaper in 2002 showed former president George Bush sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office,

utterly confused by a news report he was reading about India and Pakistan going to war over Kashmir.

“But why are the two countries fighting over a sweater,” he asked Dick Cheney who stood by with his usual sly smile on his face.

Besides reflecting the intellectual capacity of the American president of the time,

the cartoon was a realistic portrayal of the understanding that American leaders have generally shown of this longstanding dispute between Pakistan and India.

The unresolved Kashmir conflict has rocked South Asia for six decades.

It has created an environment of distrust and acrimony,

forced the people to sink into poverty with bulk of the resources consumed by the war machines and claimed lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as well as soldiers who died in the three wars fought between India and Pakistan.

India, whose forcible occupation of Kashmir in 1947 created the conflict,

refuses to settle it.

The other stake holders, the Kashmiri people and Pakistan, insist on a fair solution.

The international community including the US and the United Nations played little or no role in diffusing it either.

Consequently, the conflict has developed into one of the most intractable problems of international politics that remains a continuing threat to peace of the region.

Read the rest at Axis of Logic

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Record levels of poaching are endangering survival of rhinoceros in South Africa


The last rhinoceros cow in Krugersdorp park, South Africa, bled to death on Wednesday after poachers hacked off her horn. Photograph: Reuters

South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off.

Wildlife officials say poaching for the prized horns has now reached an all-time high. “Last year, 129 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa. This year, we have already had 136 deaths,” said Japie Mostert, chief game ranger at the 1,500-hectare Krugersdorp game reserve.

The gang used tranquilliser guns and a helicopter to bring down the nine-year-old rhino cow. Her distraught calf was moved to a nearby estate where it was introduced to two other orphaned white rhinos.

Wanda Mkutshulwa, a spokeswoman for South African National Parks, said investigations into the growing number of incidents had been shifted to the country’s organised crime unit. “We are dealing with very focused criminals. Police need to help game reserves because they are not at all equipped to handle crime on such an organised level,” she said.

Rhino horn consists of compressed keratin fibre – similar to hair – and in many Asian cultures it is a fundamental ingredient in traditional medicines.

Mkutshulwa said poaching was also rife in the Kruger Park. Five men were arrested there in the past week alone – four of whom were caught with two bloodied rhino horns, AK-47 assault rifles, bolt-action rifles and an axe.

Krugersdorp game reserve attracts at least 200,000 visitors every year. It is also close to a private airport, which may have been used by the poachers.

“The exercise takes them very little time,” Mostert said. “They first fly over the park in the late afternoon to locate where the rhino is grazing. Then they return at night and dart the animal from the air. The tranquilliser takes less than seven minutes to act.

“They saw off the horns with a chainsaw. They do not even need to switch off the rotors of the helicopter. We do not hear anything because our houses are too far away. The animal dies either from an overdose of tranquilliser or bleeds to death.”

The committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) warned last year that rhino poaching had reached an all-time high. The Cites conference in Geneva in July 2009 heard that Asia’s economic expansion had fuelled the market in rhino horns. The horns are also used in the Middle East to make handles for ornamental daggers. Cites said demand for them had begun to soar in recent years. In the five years up to 2005, an average of only 36 rhinos had been killed each year.

Conservationists estimate that there are only 18,000 black and white rhinos in Africa, down from 65,000 in the 1970s. Mostert, who has been a ranger for 20 years, said the animals fetch up to 1m rand (£85,000) at game auctions and cannot be insured.

Cites has praised South Africa for its action against poachers. Two weeks ago, a Vietnamese man was jailed for 10 years for trying to smuggle horns out of the country.

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A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access.

The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to information, something every government seeks to do.

[ good luck with that shit ]

Read the rest here

Want to know more?

Say NO to new oil and coal mining in ‘Pure NZ’

NEW ORLEANS (Associated Press))- A federal official said Sunday that scientists are concerned about a seep and possible methane seen near BP’s busted oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Both could be signs there are leaks in the well that’s been capped off for three days.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Sunday because an announcement about the next steps had not yet been made.

The official is familiar with the spill oversight but would not clarify what is seeping near the well. The official said BP is not complying with the government’s demand for more monitoring. BP spokesman Mark Salt declined to comment on the allegation, but said “we continue to work very closely with all government scientists on this.”

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When a branch fell from a tree at the Central Park Zoo in New York City last month, killing a 6-month-old baby and severely injuring her mother, who had been holding the infant, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared it “an act of God.”

But in all likelihood it was the act of a mayor.

The Central Park Zoo is public, but its management has been contracted out.

Surely the mayor should be familiar with the repeated failures of contracting out in New York City over the past two centuries.

The City Council ordered an investigation of these failures in 1825, and the investigation concluded: “The contracting system has not given satisfaction to the public.”

In 1826, a follow-up committee decreed that contracting out should be discarded and explained why:

“Private interest is too frequently at variance with public convenience and therefore ought to be abandoned.”

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The Coast Guard conceded Friday that the pressure has not built up as hoped in the blown-out BP Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico, raising concerns that the pipe that runs from the surface down through the bore to the oil reservoir 13,000 feet below the sea bottom has lost its integrity, and is allowing oil under high pressure to leak out into the surrounding concrete and rock outside the pipe, where it can and likely will make its way to the waters above.

There is visual evidence that this is happening. While it has not been mentioned in news reports, one view taken of the sea floor taken by a videocam on the Hos ROV 1, one of the remote robot submersibles monitoring the wellhead, and on display on the BP website, beginning at about 2:48:40 Central Time showed clouds of muddy looking water suddenly spring up and begin obscuring the view of the sea floor. Some of the billowing material was light colored, and could be mud pushed up by leaking methane gas. Some looked decidedly dark brown, like the oil that has been seen coming from the top of the blowout preventer (BOP).

A second rover, the Viking Poseidon ROV 1, which was not included in the live cams displayed from BP’s public access site, but which can be seen live here, also showed a large cloud of churning brown material billowing up from the sea floor beginning at 3:06:00 Central Time. (A number of other camera views show a lot of bubbles rising through the water, which officials claim is “normal” in ocean, though it wasn’t happening earlier in the company’s undersea videos, suggesting these bubbles may be leaking methane gas.)

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/140

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July 15, 2010: NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet’s atmosphere. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

Layers of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Credit: John Emmert/NRL. [larger image]
“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record.”
The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.
“Something is going on that we do not understand,” says Emmert.

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Using man made volcano-like smoke stacks, reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, aerosolized particles dispensed from aircraft

…and other such dangerous (not to mention expensive) ideas.

Whilst I’m in no rush to usher in a ‘compulsory earth-based religion’ (and there are elements of that in this) These people are doing some good work.

You don’t need to support everything someone does to support some of what they do.

===================

“Hands Off Mother Earth (H.O.M.E) is a global campaign to defend our one precious home, planet earth, against the threat of geoengineering experiments.

Join with us to send a clear message to the geoengineers and to governments worldwide that our home is not a laboratory”

http://www.handsoffmotherearth.org/

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http://blog.imva.info/?p=862

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Chem Trails (why?) / Eugenics / New World Order plans to kill the population off with a strain of Influenza-A (a deadly flu virus) starting in the US soon first. (why?)

[ preamble: Sometimes there are messages that the whole internet community shares with one another (like the Palm Beach ballot cartoon); I deeply pray that this message becomes one of those... it is not about anything else but the *hope* that this emergency broadcast message will get transmitted around the world and to many millions of people, hopefully the billions of us. It is far more important than "voting" - this letter is about "living". YOUR OWN LIFE MAY BE IN DANGER IF YOU DO NOT GET THIS MESSAGE AND PLAN TO REACT.

This letter has absolutely nothing to do with "money" - it has everything to do with your "life".

I pray you never catch the discussed deadly NWO/H1N1 Influenza-A flu virus now in stock to be soon released to the majority of the Earth's population which includes you! That is what this recent rash of high altitude chemical spraying above densely populated areas in the US/Canada/Mexico that you may be starting to become aware of is all about - to get microfibers in your lungs to make the virus spread like an unstoppable wildfire. They wanted all of us to build this entire world for them; now they want to claim it for themselves.

Nobody with these microfibers stuck to the linings in their lungs will be able to escape certain death without an appropriate inoculation against the H1N1 "Spanish Flu"-strain virus when it starts becoming an epidemic here in the US first. I am taking a personal day from my other work to get this message out. It is not my intent to fruitlessly scare you or anybody. It is my intent to report these facts to you and inform you! ] People of the world,

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Chicago – In a desperate attempt to stop a huge area of the Gulf ocean floor from possibly rupturing due to subterranean methane gas (leading to a calamity no human has ever seen) BP has ripped a page from science fiction books.

The giant oil company is now quietly preparing to test a small nuclear device in a frenzied rush against time to quell a cascading catastrophe. If successful they will have the capability to detonate a controlled fusion generated pulse.

While the world watches BP’s attempt to contain the oil gusher at the former Deepwater Horizon site, company officials have given the green light on an astounding plan to use what is known as a nuclear EPFCG charge if all else fails.

Read full article…

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25926.htm

Some of those leather chaired legislation-jockeys currently taking up space in Wellington

actually improved your life the other day

merely by pointing out to the populace of this agrarian mini-continent

that food consumers

(i.e. you and everyone you know)

are getting horribly fleeced by large food selling companies.

As anyone who has been visiting supermarkets regularly over the last decade will attest.

These semi-obscene markups continue to eat their way through pay packets and household budgets.

This systemically contributes to a higher crime rate and it also means poorly nourished children.

Naturally, all manner of widget mouthpieces emerged from the woodwork to deny everything ]

Supermarkets deny ‘500 percent mark-up’

Fruit and vegetable growers face ruin because two giant supermarket chains are using their powerful position to put the industry at risk.

MP Sue Kedgley said yesterday a survey of 75 fruit and vegetable growers found supermarkets marking produce up by up to 500 percent, while growers were being forced to sell for less than it cost them to grow it.

But Food and Grocery Council chief executive Katherine Rich said today that wasn’t happening.

“I don’t think supermarkets are ripping anybody off,” she said on TV One’s Breakfast programme.

“While supermarkets would love a mark-up of 500 percent, it just doesn’t exist in reality.”

Ms Rich said it wasn’t fair to compare the prices growers received with the prices people paid in supermarkets.

“There are a lot of costs that are incurred throughout the supply chain,” she said.

“A lot of goods get thrown away.”

Read the rest here