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President Obama comments on bias in policing

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Racial discrimination from police in Ferguson, Missouri, was "oppressive and abusive," President Barack Obama said Friday as he called for criminal justice reform as part of the modern struggle for civil rights.

"It turns out they weren't just making it up. This was happening," Obama said during a town hall at South Carolina's Benedict College, the day before he prepared to commemorate a half-century since the historic civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.

In his most expansive comments yet about the Justice Department's report on bias against blacks in Ferguson, Obama said it was striking that investigators merely had to look at email sent by police officials to find evidence. He said the City of Ferguson now must make a decision about how to move forward.

"Are they going to enter into some sort of agreement with the Justice Department to fix what is clearly a broken and racially biased system?" Obama said.

A Justice Department investigation found patterns of racial profiling, bigotry and profit-driven law enforcement and court practices within the Ferguson Police Department. Ferguson city leaders are to meet with Justice Department officials in about two weeks to put forth an improvement plan.

The president himself was the subject of some of the racist emails from Ferguson police and municipal courts employees uncovered in the investigation. A 2008 email said Obama would not be president for long because "what black man holds a steady job for four years," while another depicted Obama as a chimpanzee.

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U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a meeting with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in …

Attorney General Eric Holder, who accompanied Obama on the trip, told reporters the federal government will "use all the power that we have to change the situation there," including possibly dismantling the police force. "If that's what's necessary we're prepared to do that," Holder said.

Holder said surprised is not a strong enough word for his reaction to the report, which he said revealed "appalling" practices. He said other police departments should understand the intensity of feelings across the federal government in terms of making sure what's transpired in Ferguson doesn't happen elsewhere, although he called the Ferguson bias "an anomaly." ''That is not something that we're going to tolerate," Holder said.

The Justice Department this week also cleared Darren Wilson, the white former Ferguson police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed, while on duty in a St. Louis suburb in August. Brown's death prompted massive street protests last year and triggered the Justice Department investigations.

A questioner at the town hall held at the historically black college asked Obama why Holder filed no charges against Wilson. Obama replied that the standard for federal charges is very high and the officer is entitled to due process like anyone else. "We may never know what happened," Obama said.

Although Obama said he didn't think what happened in Ferguson was typical of the rest of the country, he added that it wasn't an isolated incident, either.

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A protester takes shelter from smoke billowing around him Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014, in Freguson, Mo. …

Ferguson Police Racially Biased, Feds Say (video)

ISIS continues to control large swathes of the country, Iran's influence is growing, and the Kurds are in an increasingly strong position to declare independence and fracture the country for good.

This splintering of Iraq illustrates how difficult it is to reconstruct a country after years of war and destruction. Unfortunately, the seeds of this current dysfunction were in place years well before the US military began its withdrawal in 2011.

No story demonstrates the difficulty of Iraqi reconstruction, and the mistakes made, quite as vividly as the Mother of All Generators (MOAG).

Almost immediately after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the country faced persistent energy problems. Rolling blackouts were common and Iraqis could count on a scarce few hours of power a day. To rectify this, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) bought a $50 million Siemens V94 generator which was designated for a new power plant in Kirkuk. It was supposed to single-handed increase Iraq's power generation by six 6%.

But the program encountered programs from the get go, former USAID regional coordinator Kirk W. Johnson told The Daily Beast in an interview about his book "To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind."

Since the 700-ton generator was too heavy to airlift to its final destination, MOAG was first transported by sea to the Syrian port of Tartous. From Tartous it was driven to the Tishrim Dam east of Aleppo at a painstakingly slow speed of five miles per hour.

But the Syrians refused to allow the generator to cross the dam in retaliation for US sanctions on the country.

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This rerouting caused the generator to sit on the Jordanian border for all of 2004 and the first three months of 2005. James Stephenson, a veteran member of USAID, notes in his book Losing The Golden Hour how the generator's delivery was further delayed until after the battle of Fallujah and the subsequent clearing of insurgents. Moving the generator before the city was pacified — with its maximum convoy speed of five miles per hour — would have given the insurgents an easy and very tempting target. But the costs of protecting the generator in Jordan ran around $20,000 a day in private security fees, Johnson notes .

All this time, Kirkuk continued to face power shortages. By April 2, 2005, MOAG finally reached its destination in Kirkuk after a 640-mile journey through Iraq, with 250 to 300 military personnel accompanying MOAG alongside Humees and a number of helicopters.

Ultimately, all of this work and money was completely wasted.

"[N]obody had bothered to train the Iraqi plant workers in the operations and maintenance of this state-of-the-art generator," Johnson told The Daily Beast. "So, months after it was handed over in a triumphant ribbon-cutting ceremony, the generator was broken."

Today, Kirkuk is at the frontline in the fight against ISIS. Kurdish forces took over the city in June of 2014 shortly after ISIS blitzed through much of the rest of northern Iraq. The city remains a point of dispute between Baghdad and Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government, each of which claims the city as part of its sphere of control.

(Health Secrets) Tens of millions of bees near Ontario, Canada dropped dead following the last planting of genetically modified (GM) corn. David Schuit, a beekeeper in Elmwood, reportedly lost 600 hives containing some 37 million bees, the direct result, say scientists, of neonicotinoid pesticides that damage bees’ immune systems and navigation abilities, resulting in mass die-offs.

According to Ontario’s The Post, the bees died just days after GM corn seeds were planted in the vicinity. The crops were sprayed with so-called “neonics” produced by Bayer CropScience Inc. that have already been banned in the European Union for harming beneficial pollinators. But in North America, neonics are still permitted because of heavy influence from the chemical industry.
“Once the corn started to get planted our bees died by the millions,” stated Schuit to reporters, lamenting the serious losses to his Saugeen Honey operation.

Another local grower by the name of Nathan Carey, a member of the National Farmers Union, says he has observed major bee losses on his own farm in recent weeks. Affirming the latest science on the subject, Carey believes that neonics are directly responsible for the bee losses occurring not only in Ontario but around the world.

“I feel like we all have something at stake with this issue,” he told The Post, announcing plans to organize a public workshop and panel discussion about the topic.

Earlier in the year, Gary Kenny’s farm, also in the region, lost 80 percent of its hives immediately following the spring planting of GM corn. Like Schuit, Kenny’s business took a huge hit as a result, while the purveyor of this genocide continues to peddle its poison without consequence.

Air seeding of neonic-treated GM corn accelerating bee losses

Why this has suddenly become a major problem just within the past year can be explained by a new seeding technique that exposes bees to much higher levels of neonics. According to The Post, GM corn seeds are being pre-treated with neonics before being sprayed into the soil from special “air seeders,” which spread pesticide dust into the air.

When bees are exposed to this dust, the chemicals lodge in their bodies and cause neurological damage, which then triggers the symptoms associated with colony collapse disorder (CCD). Multiple studies have confirmed this link, including one conducted by researchers from American Purdue University. They learned that:

“Bees exhibited neurotoxic symptoms, analysis of dead bees revealed traces of thiamethoxam/clothianidin in each case. Seed treatments of field crops (primarily corn) are the only major source of these compounds.”

Schuit says continued use of neonics is ‘criminal’

Back in May, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) provided further evidence that neonics destroy bees, observing that particularly during the wintertime exposed bees are abandoning their hives and turning up dead. Both clothianidin and imidacloprid, another type of neonic, are implicated in the study.

“We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” wrote lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, an associate professor of environmental exposure biology at HSPH.

Despite his continued losses, Schuit says the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) continues to drag its feet in addressing the problem. And this, he says, constitutes criminality.

“I think it’s criminal what is happening, and it’s hard to have faith if it doesn’t look like they are going to do anything anyway,” he told The Post.

For more information:

http://www.thepost.on.ca

http://organichealth.co

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu

http://science.naturalnews.com

http://truthwiki.org/Genetically_modified_cr…

The man who killed a Canadian soldier and then opened fire at the Canadian Parliament last October said in a newly-released video that he did it “in retaliation for Afghanistan.”

“Canada’s officially become one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and our innocents,” Michael Zehaf-Bibeau says in the video, which police say was filmed in his car just prior to the attack. “So we [are] just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show you’re not even safe in your own land and you got to be careful.”

The video was presented to the Canadian Parliament today by RCMP Commission Bob Paulson, who said that a total of 18 seconds had been edited out of the video from the beginning and end for operational purposes.

Last October, 32-year-old dual Libyan-Canadian national first opened fire at Canada’s National War Memorial outside the Canadian Parliament, killing a uniformed soldier, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. Zehaf-Bibeau then hijacked a car, drove the short distance to Parliament where he ran inside and opened fire again. He was gunned down by 58-year-old Sgt. at Arms Kevin Vickers before anyone else could be killed.

Paulson said today Canadian authorities have still not figured out where Zehaf-Bibeau obtained the relatively small caliber rifle he used. Paulson said an autopsy report revealed Zehaf-Bibeau was sober when he undertook the attack.