EMERSON URRY – It seems like we, at EnviroNews, have been reporting on this type of thing all year. That is, sketchy environmental riders being attached to totally unrelated appropriations bills in backdoor efforts to kill environmental and wildlife protections. Yes, this year’s spending bills are littered with Republican-stamped provisions seeking to gut current regulations, while rolling back what little painstaking progress the government has made on the climate issue – this, in an attempt to open the door for limitless carbon pollution, and myriad other industrial plunders.
Bang Bang! You’re Not Dead
CLANCY SIGAL – I hold no special brief for the British police at whose hands and batons I’ve split a lip or two. But here in Los Angeles, where our trimly athletic LAPD shoots fewer civilians than, say, in Albuquerque or Baltimore, we’re seeing a spike in “he was reaching into his waist band†or “coming at me with a knife (or rock).” Police in Gardena, LA, shot two unarmed Hispanics looking for their stolen bike, one died (you can see the police-camera video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkjGBEbfKyo); a few days ago police in the beach city of Venice shot and killed a homeless guy who allegedly had a knife; police in Los Feliz, LA, shot an unarmed jogger who approached them. The dead guys tend to be black, brown or homeless. It’s a weekly sometimes daily occurrence. The city has paid victims’ families over $20m in recent years. From the WashPost and the UK Independent, I’ve put together one or two factoids for perspective.
Boeing Patents Nuclear-Powered Airplane
KARL GROSSMAN – Consider getting on to an airplane with nuclear-powered engines. Consider the consequences if an atomic airplane crashes. The Boeing Company last week received approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an airplane engine that combines the use of lasers and nuclear power. “Boeing’s newly-patented engine provides thrust in a very different and rather novel manner,†heralded Business Insider. It’s a leap into mad science—and backwards to a 1950s notion of nuclear-powered aircraft.
Greek Financial Debacle is a Crisis of Soulless Economics
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – Austerity, the brutal tool of neoliberal capitalism, stands up to Greek democracy and stares it down. Oh well. We’re remarkably comfortable with soulless economics. Pope Francis, speaking this week in Paraguay, cried to the nations of Planet Earth: “I ask them not to yield to an economic model … which needs to sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.â€
What’s Being Ignored in the Iranian Nuclear Deal?
WINSLOW MYERS – I’m not an expert, just another interested citizen who follows the news, but something genuinely bothers me about the U.S. negotiations with Iran, whether they are ultimately successful or not.
New Oil Drilling Threatens New Disasters
MEL GURTOV – On January 17 the New York Times reported that, to appease environmentalists, the Obama administration would “ban drilling in portions of the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.†But in return, Republicans and the oil and gas industry got federal approval to drill in a large swath of the Atlantic Ocean, a move that I believe risks another BP-type disaster.