IRS workers say supervisors directed targeting

IRS agents in Cincinnati believe higher-ups in Washington directed tea party targeting

LGBT Victims of Violence: ‘Going to the Cops Will Only Make It Worse’

When Milan Nicole was 16 years old, she went out for an ordinary walk, on an otherwise ordinary day in her New Orleans neighborhood. Moments after leaving her door, she recalls, a man approached her and invited her back to his apartment for a drink—an offer she accepted.

Seconds later, she was in handcuffs. The man was a police offer, and he was arresting Nicole for prostitution.

“I was not doing street work,” insists Nicole.

A transgender woman of color, Nicole says her story is indicative of how police continue to treat members of the LGBT community—particularly transgender women and LGBT people of color.

“I was charged with a ‘crime against nature’—a felony offense—just for being a black transgender female walking down the street,” says Nicole.

The stats show that hers is not an isolated case.

A study released on Tuesday by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs shows that transgender people are 3.32 times more likely to face violence from law enforcement than non-transgender people. As if that weren’t bad enough, transgender people of color are nearly 2.5 times more likely to face attacks by police than white members of the transgender community.

Nicole’s story underscores an often-adversarial relationship the LGBT community shares with police departments across the country—and not just in the Deep South.

Only half of LGBT victims of violence that reported their assaults to the Anti-Violence Project, reported their experiences to law enforcement.

“In New York City, we’ve seen law enforcement arresting members of the LGBT community for possessing condoms—which they cite as evidence of prostitution,” New York City Anti-Violence Project community organizer Ejeris Dixon tells TakePart.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Community United Against Violence organizer Maria Carolina Morales says that an enhanced deportation scheme by local police has driven undocumented victims of LGBT hate crimes underground—afraid to even go to the hospital after an attack, for fear that police will come and start asking questions.

“Victims of violence are seeing their survival criminalized by the state,” says Morales.

The result of this police antagonism is that huge numbers of hate attacks against the LGBT community go unreported, and uninvestigated. As a result of the accumulated distrust that has built up over the years, “Only half of LGBT victims of violence that reported their assaults to the Anti-Violence Project, reported their experiences to law enforcement,” says Dixon.

Nationally, according to the NCAVP report, the raw numbers of reported anti-gay hate crimes in 2012 are shocking on their own. There were 2,016 incidents of anti-LGBT violence in 2012, and 25 documented LGBT-hate homicides.

“Though the recent spate of hate violence incidents in New York City has captured the media’s attention, this report demonstrates that severe acts of violence against gay men, transgender people and LGBTQ people of color are, unfortunately, not unique to Manhattan nor to the past month, but rather part of a troubling trend in the United States,” says Chai Jindasurat, NCAVP Coordinator at the New York City Anti-Violence Project. “NCAVP’s report findings are a wakeup call that LGBTQ people are facing extremely high levels of violence that need to be addressed as a priority in the United States.”

Ending violence against the LGBT community will take a massive overhaul in the way huge segments of the population continue to regard LGBT rights—a battle for hearts and minds that shows no immediate end in sight.

But that is no excuse for making the LGBT community wait to receive equal protection and treatment from law enforcement.

How can you help influence attitudes and ultimately end violence against the LGBT community? State your plan in COMMENTS.

Brooklyn is the National Epicenter of Racist Pot Arrests

Brooklyn is the National Epicenter of Racist Pot Arrests

Don't pretend you're terribly surprised. After all, Kings County(Brooklyn's home) is the county with the most marijuana possession arrests in the state with the most such arrests, according to the ACLU. But what might surprise you is that, if you're black, you're almost ten times more likely to be busted in Brooklyn than if you're white.

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Earlier this week, the national ACLU released a study on marijuana arrests. Nationally, 45.7 percent of all drug-related arrests are for marijuana. One of the primary findings of the research was that blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites, in every state except Hawaii. Mapped by state, the ratio of black-to-white marijuana arrests looks like this. The darker the shade of the state in the interactive map below, the more likely a black person is to be arrested than a white person. No ratio is worse than Iowa, where blacks are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested.

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But Iowa doesn't have that many marijuana arrests. The reigning champion of arrests for that crime is New York state. New York has 40 percent more marijuana arrests than next next-closest state, Texas.

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Today, the NYCLU, the New York-specific branch of the agency, released county-by-county data for the state. The ratio of black-to-white arrests varies around the state, but in some places it's far worse than in Iowa. In Kings (Brooklyn) and New York (Manhattan) counties, the ratio tops 9 — meaning that nine black people are arrested for marijuana crimes to every one white person.

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And when you look at the data in terms of raw numbers, New York City reigns. In 2010, there were over 20,000 arrests in Brooklyn alone. That's more than forty entire states.

Why this happened in 2010 is no secret. As the New York Police Department expanded its stop-and-frisk policy, in which people loosely suspected of crimes are stopped on the street and searched, misdemeanor drug crimes like marijuana possession increased.

It's one reason why the state legislature moved to legalize possession — because of rampant racial disparity in such arrests.

But anyway: Congratulations, Brooklyn. When it comes to arresting massive numbers of people of color for marijuana crimes, you are Kings County, indeed.

The estimate could have a dramatic impact on environmental policy

Last week, buried in an announcement for updated efficiencystandards for microwave ovens, the U.S. Department of Energycasually dropped news that environmentalists are celebrating as a rare win in the battle against climate change: New and improved numbers for the "social cost of carbon."

The social cost of carbon estimates how much, after all is said and done, each ton of carbon burned costs the U.S. economy. When calculating the number, analysts consider everything from how warmer climate trends will impact agriculture, to the damage rising sea water will cause, to the cost of installing charging stations for electric cars. "This is a tricky calculation," says The Washington Post. "It entails scrutinizing climate models and estimating the future effects of higher temperatures, and then translating that into present-day dollar terms, which means deciding how much value to place on future generations."

In 2010, Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon (the agency that calculates the number) estimated that each ton of carbon would cost the American economy $22 for 2013. The new report, which you can read here, puts the number at $36 per ton. For context, the United States produced the equivalent of 7.4 billion tons (6.3 billion metric tons) of carbon-dioxide in 2011.

So why are environmentlists cheering? Because the White House Office of Management and Budget runs a cost-benefit analysis on all new regulations — and the office will now use the higher estimate when considering carbon-related issues (like, for example, the Keystone Pipeline). "This will, all things being equal, increase by 60 percent the amount of carbon mitigation that can be economically justified," explains David Roberts at Grist. "That’s a big deal, especially in light of the fact that EPA regulations are going to make (or break) Obama’s second-term climate legacy."

As the Daily Kos puts it: "We simply can't ignore the fact that each ton of CO2 that we put in the air has a dollar sign associated with it."

The new numbers may not affect policy right away, says Roberts. "It won’t alter the politics of those regulations, and sadly, political considerations generally count for more than cost-benefit analysis." But, he continues, "if this number stays on the books — and if the government continues to update it based on the latest science — it will eventually worm its way deep into the regulatory apparatus and do something that no amount of argument and advocacy have been able to do: Force the federal government to properly value the climate."

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In Alaska's oilfields, drones countdown to takeoff

By Krithika Krishnamurthy

(Reuters) - No pilot was required when the Aeryon Scout took off into the leaden skies of Alaska to inspect a stretch of oil pipeline. The miniature aircraft was guided by an engineer on the ground, armed only with a tablet computer.

The 20-minute test flight, conducted by BP Plc last fall, was a glimpse of a future where oil and gas companies in the Arctic can rely on unmanned aircraft to detect pipeline faults, at a fraction of the cost of piloted helicopter flights.

It could become reality as soon as 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) opens up American skies for the commercial use of unmanned aircraft, popularly known as drones.

While technical shortcomings and strict regulation are likely to limit the use of drones in the near term, the rules governing public airspace will be more relaxed in the wilderness of Alaska than in the lower 48 states, industry experts say.

"We're going to take baby steps," said Gary Shane, senior project manager and chief technology officer of BP Pipelines in North America. The company plans to deploy its first drones in the Alaska North Slope within three years, he told Reuters.

Laid end to end, the more than 300,000 miles of natural gas pipelines that crisscross the United States would circumnavigate the planet 12 times. There's a lot of money to be saved by reducing the number of manned flights on these routes.

A small, unmanned vehicle fitted with a heat-sensing camera costs about $85,000, while it costs about $3,000 to send a helicopter to monitor an oil pipeline for an hour, said Dave Kroetsch, chief executive of drone manufacturer Aeryon Labs Inc.

The drone, therefore, would pay for itself within 29 hours.

BP began researching the use of unmanned aircraft in 2006. Royal Dutch Shell Plc began a year earlier. One aim, says Shell, is to track the movement of marine mammals to assess the impact of the company's operations in the seas off Alaska.

The Scout is the flagship product of Aeryon Labs, a private Canadian company based in Waterloo, Ontario - the same university town that gave rise to BlackBerry.

Under a meter in length, the Scout weighs 1.2 kg (2.7 lbs) - tiny when compared with the 1,020-kg MQ-1 Predator drone used by the U.S. military and manufactured by San Diego-based General Atomics.

Aeryon Labs calls the Scout a "flying robotic reconnaissance system". It has been used by Gaddafi-era Libyan rebels and seen action in a Central American drugs bust. (http://r.reuters.com/zec68t)

A camera mounted on the drone transmits a live feed to the operator. In the case of pipeline work, sensors can pinpoint the location of a suspected leak and detect signs of decay, such as cracks or rust, said Ian McDonald, Aeryon Labs' vice-president.

With four rotors and legs allowing for vertical take-off and landing, the Scout can also hover closer to a pipeline than any helicopter could. Proponents of the technology say this will help oil companies to find defects earlier than they can now.

According to a U.S. government report on pipeline safety, the public was quicker to report pipeline leaks than companies' in-house detection systems in a third of cases recorded between January 2010 and July 2012. (http://link.reuters.com/wyk48t)

SHORT FLIGHTS ONLY

So with all these advantages, why aren't more oil companies signing up? Why do Canada's two biggest pipeline operators, Enbridge Inc and TransCanada Corp, prefer traditional methods for inspecting their U.S. pipeline routes?

Technology, for one thing. Drones might not be new - BP also used the Aeryon Scout to help direct clean-up crews after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 - but they are yet to be proven for large-scale commercial use.

"We have looked at this in detail, but advanced drone technology is largely proprietary to the U.S. military," said Enbridge spokesman Graham White.

"Our experience is that there is still no substitute for human eyes, knowledge and expertise when inspecting the lines."

The 20 minutes flown by the Aeryon Scout is about the most that a small drone can manage. The sophisticated sensor systems needed for inspection are too big for longer flights; "miniaturizing" these sensors will take time, said BP's Shane.

Also missing from today's fleet of drones is the collision avoidance technology that automatically instructs an aircraft to take evasive action if an obstacle appears in its path.

While doubts persist, some oil majors are on the sidelines. ConocoPhillips said it was interested, but that it did not operate its own aerial surveillance program. Exxon Mobil Corp declined to comment for this article.

David Yoel, chief executive of industry consultants Aerospace Advisors Inc, said it would be at least 10 years before unmanned aircraft are in common use along U.S. pipelines.

Draganfly Innovations Inc, a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based manufacturer that sold several drones to deepwater oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, said industry-wide sales had begun to flag, due largely to the regulatory environment.

"Actual sales have definitely slowed, especially in the U.S., because of people's issues with the FAA regulations," said Kevin Lauscher, Draganfly's industrial sales manager.

INTO THE WILDERNESS

Current U.S. federal law permits only public agencies and universities to fly drones in public airspace. BP teamed up with the University of Alaska Fairbanks when it tested the Scout.

This should change from September 2015, by which time the FAA is mandated by Congress to have drawn up rules for their commercial use.

Even public agencies today must operate drones under strict regulations, and these restrictions will not disappear overnight for commercial users, industry experts say.

Such rules - drones must fly in daylight hours only, for example, within the remote operator's line of sight and more than five miles from any airport, big or small - are hardly conducive to monitoring a vast pipeline network.

Gretchen West, executive vice-president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), said she believed that drones would become "an important technology" for oil and gas companies. "(But) it's still going to be several years before it's not heavily regulated."

Alaska just might be the exception.

It's very remoteness could win it special dispensation that would permit drones to be operated round-the-clock and controlled from beyond the line of sight.

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 - the existing law that stipulates the September 2015 deadline for commercial drone use - saves a separate mention for the Arctic.

"The FAA is working ... to integrate unmanned aircraft into the Arctic region, where potential uses include wildlife observation, oil and mineral exploration, sea ice studies and pipeline monitoring," FAA spokesman Les Dorr said.

The FAA estimates that about 7,500 commercial "small unmanned systems" - drones weighing up to 55 lb (25 kg) - will be in operation within five years of its opening up the skies.

For companies such as Aeryon Labs and Draganfly, the challenge will be to develop the technology to drive more sales.

"Manufacturers and start-ups see that there will be great potential," said West. "This is going to be a great industry."

(Editing by Robin Paxton)