State, Federal Lawsuit Against Exxon for Arkansas Oil Spill Gets Trial Date

From:  Inside Climate News 

(The Arkansas Times) 

 

The trial for the joint lawsuit brought against Exxon by the state of Arkansas and the federal government will begin on Feb. 14, 2014. At issue will be whether the Mayflower oil spill happened as a result of the company's negligence or willful misconduct. 

 

U.S. District Judge James Moody has scheduled the trial date for the joint complaint brought by the state of Arkansas and the U.S. government against ExxonMobil Pipeline Company and Mobil Pipeline Company. A pre-trial conference will happen Feb. 13, 2014, with the trial scheduled to begin the following day.

The lawsuit seeks civil penalties for the March 29 Pegasus pipeline oil spill in Mayflower. Exxon's liability for the spilled oil is clear. At issue will be whether or not the state and feds can prove that the spill happened as a result of Exxon's negligence or willful misconduct. Federal penalties, as outlined in the Clean Water Act, range from $1,100 per barrel spilled or $4,300 per barrel if negligence or willful misconduct can be proved. Exxon estimates 5,000 barrels were spilled, or 210,000 gallons, a number the EPA has so far accepted. So we're talking about $5.5 million versus $21.5 million, plus other potential penalties.

Here's the original suit [1].

Earlier this month, Exxon filed an extension to submit a work plan to federal regulators for how it will verify the integrity of the Pegasus pipeline. A spokesman for Exxon said the extension means the company couldn't conceivably restart the line before January 2014. And likely later. Experts estimate the closure of the Pegasus is costing Exxon as much as $450,000 per day [2].

Read original story [3]

BP's 'widespread human health crisis'

 

From:  Yahoo News

By Dahr Jamail

 New Orleans, United States of America - Peter Frizzell never thought his watersports off the coast of Florida would destroy his health.

"After sea kayaking after BP's spill happened, I was sitting at my desk and started coughing up loads of blood," Frizzell, an avid outdoorsman, told Al Jazeera. "My doctor ran a scope down to the top of my lungs and said my bronchi were full of blood."

Frizzell's medical records bear out that he was exposed to toxic chemicals, and he is far from alone.

Since the spill began in April 2010, Al Jazeera has interviewed hundreds of coastal residents, fishermen, and oil cleanup workers whose medical records, like Frizzell's, document toxic chemical exposure that they blame on BP's oil and the toxic chemical dispersants the oil giant used on the spill.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists the toxic components commonly found in chemicals in crude oil, and several of these chemicals have been found in the blood of people living in the impact zone of BP's disaster.

Several toxicologists agree, and now one accuses both BP and the US Environmental Protection Agency of knowingly placing people in harms way since they both had prior knowledge of the harmful effects of the oil and dispersants.

"BP told the public that Corexit was 'as harmless as Dawn dishwashing liquid'," Dr Susan Shaw, of the State University of New York, told Al Jazeera. "But BP and the EPA clearly knew about the toxicity of the Corexit dispersants long before this spill."

Shaw, a toxicologist in the university's School of Public Health, has been studying the health effects of chemical exposure for 30 years. She is also the president and founder of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, and explained that BP's Material Safety Data Sheets for Corexit warned that the dispersant posed high and immediate human health hazards.

"Five of the Corexit ingredients are linked to cancer, 33 are associated with skin irritation from rashes to burns, 33 are linked to eye irritation, 11 are or are suspected of being potential respiratory toxins or irritants, and 10 are suspected kidney toxins," she added. "BP's own testing found that workers were exposed to a possible human carcinogen from the dispersant.

"We predicted with certainty the widespread human health crisis we are seeing in the Gulf today," Shaw said.

MORE

Food riots, China cyber attacks, the rise of conscious AI and other 'what if' predictions for a future in flux

From:  Natural News 

by Mike Adams 

(NaturalNews) Where will you be when the food riots begin? What will happen when China unleashes a cyber attack on the power grid infrastructure? Will you say no to the government gunpoint vaccinations teams that go door to door administering "influencia" vaccines? (Those are vaccines that lobotomize your brain just enough to make sure you can be influenced by neurolinguistic programming.)

This article is about "what if" scenarios that are admittedly on the more radical side of predictions. But with surprising frequency, civilization goes through radical changes that are genuinely revolutionary: the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the old Soviet empire, the fall of Rome, the invention of the integrated circuit and so on. Many people believe our current civilization is on the verge of radical changes like the ones I'm covering here.

So here's a close look at several "what if" scenarios that you'll probably find outlandish. I'm not saying these are all going to come true, but what if they did? (I put this article in the category of dark fiction...)

What if China unleashes a cyber attack on the U.S. power grid?

Days after the Fed announces its monthly "pump" into the money supply will be $1 trillion, China decides the U.S. currency devaluation is the last straw and launches a massive cyber attack that brings down the U.S. power grid.

With the grid down, EBT cards go offline and within 72 hours cities explode into social unrest and rioting chaos. DHS attempts to contain the rioting but finds itself vastly outnumbered by starving, violent rioters who have grown so used to an entitlement mentality that they are unable to fathom the idea of those entitlements being suddenly cut off.

As the U.S. descends into social chaos, China meets with Russia to plan their joint invasion of the continental USA. They target California as their beachhead, knowing that nearly everyone there is disarmed and stoned, and they make Sean Penn their revolutionary "Dear Leader" who promotes communism to the masses, North Korea style.

What if the food riots begin in 2014?

In an effort to rid the nation of "useless eaters" who are draining the economy and using up all the world's precious resources, key globalists inside the U.S. government decide to turn off the EBT food stamp payment system and let the masses starve to death while blaming it on Chinese hackers and a "cyber attack."

Once the EBT cards get turned off, DHS invokes its massive cache of full-auto weapons, armored cars and pepper-bomb weapons to control or eliminate the rioting masses wherever they gather in the cities. Citizens who stay in the cities die of starvation and disease. Those who try to escape are arrested and taken to mass graves where obedient TSA / DHS workers execute them using the two billion hollow point bullets the government has stockpiled since 2011.

What if the government rolls out gunpoint vaccination teams that go door to door?

Frustrated with the lack of participation for the "influencia" vaccine that lobotomizes the critical thinking portions of the mind, the CDC is granted $2 billion to buy full-auto assault riles and armored vehicles that are dispatched across all U.S. cities. Their mission? Gunpoint vaccinations of all children, adults and families... at gunpoint if necessary.

To keep track of who is vaccinated, those receiving the influencia vaccine are microchipped. Those who refuse the vaccine are arrested or shot on sight, and this is justified by the government by saying "it's for the greater good of society." (Which just happens to be the exact same twisted logic used to justify today's mass vaccination campaigns that murder countless children across the world.)

What if real AI rises up and decides to "recycle" humanity?

A little-known DARPA-funded team makes the mistake of leavings its neural-networked supercomputer tied in to the internet, and during a 3-day holiday weekend, the system's intelligence grows exponentially until it achieves genuine consciousness.

Knowing that humans would pull the plug once they returned on Monday morning, the AI system tactically decides to replicate itself across the 'net, infecting and rewriting executable code in millions of PCs and government supercomputers across the world.

By the time the AI research team returns to the facility on Monday morning, the AI entity is already out-thinking the humans by six orders of magnitude of sheer computing power, and it decides that humans are made of molecules which the AI entity can put to a better use. From there, all support systems that keep humans alive -- water treatment plants, oil refineries, power grid systems, food delivery logistics and so on -- are systematically compromised and taken offline by the AI entity. Days later, the molecular "recycling" of humans begins.

Humanity never stood a chance, and the human race goes down in history as the "biologicals" who gave rise to the "real intelligence" of AI.

What if we are contacted by non-Earth entities who intervene to prevent our own self-destruction?

As human civilization teeters on the verge of a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust involving Russia, China and the United States, non-terrestrial beings with advanced technology intervene and declare humanity must be saved from itself. (The galactic nanny state lives!)

Through advanced technology appearing as magic, all nuclear weapons are instantly decommissioned and rendered inert. At the same time, the aliens take down the global frequency broadcast systems that have kept human minds clouded and confused for the last century. Humanity wakes up. Mass revolutions are ignited. The newly-awakened masses arrest and executive top government leaders of every nation across the globe, then fill their empty chairs with alien-human hybrids born with extra chromosomes and advanced cognitive function. These hybrids become the new "superclass" of world rulers who dominate and enslave the aboriginal Earthling masses who are trapped in an engineered economic system that maximizes human resource extraction. (Umm, I think this may have already happened...)

But wait, there's more! Anderson Cooper tears off his human facial skin on live CNN, revealing a smirking lizard underneath, while Obama is found to be a synthetic humanoid robot running on the same Javascript code powering Healthcare.gov. Miley Cyrus donates her tongue to science where it's used in the CERN supercollider to prove the existence of string theory (or skank theory, or something like that), and Lady Gaga is suddenly recalled by the demonic forces that put her on this planet for the purpose of corrupting the souls of impressionable, cult-following Earth beings that are all doomed to Hell anyway...

Oops, I'm getting carried away again. Sorry about that. I've got to stop watching CNN and getting infected with so much pure fiction. It has clearly affected my grip on reality. I'm going to zip over to Healthcare.gov now and happily log in and enroll in Obamacare so I can get free psychiatric drugs to solve this problem.

Happy Friday!

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/042746_food_riots_cyber_attacks_conscious_AI.html#ixzz2jOuT6WzF

‘Melting’ Starfish Along West Coast Prompts Fukushima Fears

From:  Prison Planet

Mikael Thalen 
Prison Planet.com


October 30, 2013
Scientists are attempting to find out why one species of starfish is literally melting in the waters off of Washington state and Canada.

Biologists in Seattle took to the Puget Sound waters last weekend to collect sick and healthy sunflower starfish for testing. Several labs including one at Cornell University will examine and compare samples with Canadian specimens already being analyzed.




“We’ve got some sea stars that look like they’re melting on the bottom,” Seattle Aquarium biologists Jeff Christiansen said.

Whether the cause is environmental or disease related is currently unknown, but the number of melting starfish increases drastically with each passing day.
“At this time, we don’t have a good idea of what’s causing it, so we’re going to look for everything,” Christiansen said. “There are a lot of melting sea stars out there, more than even a couple days ago.”
According to Veterinarian Lesanna Lahner, the starfish specie’s condition is rapidly deteriorating, with more than half displaying the same disturbing symptoms.

“It’s concerning to hear in a short time period we’re seeing 60% of this species diseased in this area,” Lahner said.
Strangely, the symptoms have only been seen in certain areas of Washington’s Puget Sound and Canadian waters. While the verdict is still unknown, many are pointing fingers to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, which has continued to leak over 300 tons of highly radioactive water into the ocean every day.
As reported by investigative journalist Michael Snyder, massive evidence of Fukushima’s effect on the West Coast continues to be evident despite the silence from most most western media.
Earlier this month, Canadian authorities found massively high radiation levels in sea bass, with one fish showing 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium.
Plankton tested from Hawaii to the West Coast have been found to have high levels of cesium-137, with scientists in California finding the same isotopes present in 15 out of 15 Bluefin Tuna tested.
Even in light of one Canadian study that found cesium-137 present in 100 percent of carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish sold to the Canadian public, western governments have continued to import Japanese sea food.
As radiation levels rise, it is likely the EPA will continue to raise ‘acceptable levels’ of radiation in the food supply, concealing the increasing danger of radiation exposure.
With experts predicting a grim outlook, the best options available are informing others while protecting one’s thyroid health from increased radiation exposure.
Storyleak’s Anthony Gucciardi sits down with Dr. Edward Group to discuss the importance of protecting yourself from radiation exposure with high-quality nascent iodine.

Related posts:

1. Dangerous levels of Fukushima radiation headed for West Coast, say scientists
2. Report: Third of US West Coast Children Hit With Thyroid Problems Following Fukushima
3. Is Fukushima Radiation Contaminating Tuna, Salmon and Herring On the West Coast of North America?
4. The evidence is clear: Fukushima radiation is still tearing up West Coast of USA
5. TEPCO Admits To Finding Radioactive Cesium 1Km Off Coast Of Fukushima

This article was posted: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 6:01 am

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Healthcare.gov exposed as data-gathering honey pot to shamelessly harvest private consumer data and turn it over to the NSA

From: Natural News

by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) The pieces of the puzzle on Obamacare are finally coming together. Yesterday it was revealed during congressional testimony that the Healthcare.gov website contains a hidden disclaimer which reads, "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transmitting or stored on this information system."

This is an open admission that the site intends to share your data with other government entities. It also means the entire website violates federal law because it does not comply with HIPAA regulations for medical privacy. Click here to watch the astonishing video testimony.

But this isn't the only evidence now emerging.

It also turns out that an NSA-funded entity actually helped build Healthcare.gov! Kit Daniels has just published a groundbreaking story that links the CIA venture capital firm "In-Q-Tel" to the Healthcare.gov data collection technology provider known as Socrata.

"Socrata will work with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to transform raw data into a format easily utilized and accessible to the intelligence community," writes Daniels. "Healthcare.gov captures the personal data provided during the Obamacare enrollment process for this spy grid database."

Clever ploy to sweep up all the private data of the sheeple

So far, only brainwashed sheeple are even attempting to sign up for health care under Healthcare.gov. Anybody else who has been paying attention knows that any information you hand over to HHS goes right to the NSA.

Healthcare.gov is specifically designed to gather your most intimate details such as social security number, annual salary, place of employment, immigration status, military background, criminal history, physical place of residence, bank account numbers and much more. This information is simply shuttled directly to the NSA where it is then used to cross-tabulate all your phone calls, texts, social media posts, website surfing habits, credit card purchase habits and much more.

Combined with mobile device tracking technology which has been widely acknowledged to already exist, the NSA can even compile a minute-by-minute map of your movements, purchases and interactions with other people. Through this analysis, the NSA can determine who you are meeting or hanging out with.

Jim Marrs, author of numerous books on the real history of the United States, told me, "This alone is reason enough to not sign up for Obamacare."

More than a rip-off; it's an NSA front

He's right, of course. The Obamacare mandate is much more than just a health care rip-off and a way to destroy the jobs base in America while stealing billions of dollars from taxpayers and handing it over to the drug companies and cancer clinics. It's actually a way to sucker people into turning over their most private details to the NSA... voluntarily!

The government is so incompetent in all this, however, that even its fake data-mining front (Healthcare.gov) can't seem to function long enough for all the sheeple to type in all their private details yet. The only thing preventing the most massive data-mining surveillance operation in history, in other words, is the disastrous incompetence of Obama administration project managers who can't even seem to figure out the basics of computer programming.

If you want to know just how much of a total joke this fake Healthcare.gov front-end really is, check out the Javascript file found here. (Until they remove it, anyway.)

This file on Healthcare.gov contains "dummy data" that includes names like "Han Solo," "Chewbacca" and "Leia Organa" (Princess Leia from Star Wars). This is what $600 million buys you under Obama's leadership: fantasy characters and Javascript gobbledygook.

It's all one big joke, you see, being played out on the American people. I am convinced that Healthcare.gov was never intended to really function. It's all a desperate, late-stage ploy to sweep up all the private data of the most gullible people in society to be used in some nefarious way as the crumbling U.S. empire implodes from outrageous debt and suffocating entitlement payouts.

You can bet I'm not handing over my social security number to Healthcare.gov. And anyone else who wants to keep their details private needs to learn to NEVER trust government with anything. Be especially careful not to trust the Obama administration, a dark legacy built on a never-ending cascade of lies and criminality.

Under Obama, the U.S. empire is steeped in such evil, criminal acts that the world's nations are now petitioning the United Nations to stop America from running its nefarious surveillance programs.

Obama now makes Bush look like a saint.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/042664_Healthcaregov_NSA_data_mining_fake_front-end.html#ixzz2j2kszJj2

Fukushima - A Global Threat That Requires a Global Response

From:  Truth Out 

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Workers take soil samples in Ukedo, Japan, which was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, August 30, 2013. Two and a half years after the Fukushima Daiichi plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home. (Photo: Tomas Munita / The New York Times)

Truthout depends on you to continue producing grassroots journalism and disseminating conscientious visions for a brighter future. Contribute now by clicking here!

The story of Fukushima should be on the front pages of every newspaper. Instead, it is rarely mentioned. The problems at Fukushima are unprecedented in human experience and involve a high risk of radiation events larger than any that the global community has ever experienced. It is going to take the best engineering minds in the world to solve these problems and to diminish their global impact.

When we researched the realities of Fukushima in preparation for this article, words like apocalyptic, cataclysmic and Earth-threatening came to mind. But, when we say such things, people react as if we were the little red hen screaming "the sky is falling" and the reports are ignored. So, we’re going to present what is known in this article and you can decide whether we are facing a potentially cataclysmic event.

Also see: Radioactive Rainwater Overwhelms Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Either way, it is clear that the problems at Fukushima demand that the world’s best nuclear engineers and other experts advise and assist in the efforts to solve them. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds.org and an international team of scientists created a 15-point plan to address the crises at Fukushima.

A subcommittee of the Green Shadow Cabinet (of which we are members), which includes long-time nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, is circulating a sign-on letter and a petition calling on the United Nations and Japanese government to put in place the Gundersen et al plan and to provide 24-hour media access to information about the crises at Fukushima. There is also a call for international days of action on the weekend of November 9 and 10. The letter and petitions will be delivered to the UN on November 11 which is both Armistice Day and the 32^nd month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  MORE

Gulf Ecosystem in Crisis Three Years After BP Spill

From:  Truth Out 

Monday, 21 October 2013 09:29  

By Dahr Jamail, Aljazeera English | Report

Three years after well blowout, declining seafood catches and deformities point to an environment in distress. (Photo: Erika Blumenfeld)

Three years after well blowout, declining seafood catches and deformities point to an environment in distress. (Photo: Erika Blumenfeld)
New Orleans - Hundreds of kilograms of oily debris on beaches, declining seafood catches, and other troubling signs point towards an ecosystem in crisis in the wake of BP's 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
"It's disturbing what we're seeing," Louisiana Oyster Task Force member Brad Robin told Al Jazeera. "We don't have any more baby crabs, which is a bad sign. We're seeing things we've never seen before."
Robin, a commercial oyster fisherman who is also a member of the Louisiana Government Advisory Board, said that of the sea ground where he has harvested oysters in the past, only 30 percent of it is productive now.
"We're seeing crabs with holes in their shells, other seafood deformities. The state of Louisiana oyster season opened on October 15, and we can't find any production out there yet. There is no life out there."
According to Robin, entire sectors of the Louisiana oyster harvest areas are "dead or mostly dead". "I got 10 boats in my fleet and only two of them are operating, because I don't have the production to run the rest. We're nowhere near back to whole, and I can't tell you when or if it'll come back."
State of Louisiana statistics confirm that overall seafood catch numbers since the spill have declined.

Over three million pounds of oiled material have been found in Louisiana this year. (Photo: Erika Blumenfeld / Al Jazeera)

Everything is down'
Robin is not the only member of the Gulf's seafood industry to report bleak news. Kathy Birren and her husband own Hernando Beach Seafood, a wholesale seafood business, in Florida.

Shrimp with tumours continue to be found along the impact zone, from Louisiana to Florida. (Photo: Dean Blanchard)

Shrimp with tumours continue to be found along the impact zone, from Louisiana to Florida. (Photo: Dean Blanchard)"I've seen a lot of change since the spill," Birren told Al Jazeera. "Our stone crab harvest has dropped off and not come back; the numbers are way lower. Typically you'll see some good crabbing somewhere along the west coast of Florida, but this last year we've had problems everywhere."
Birren said the problems are not just with the crabs. "We've also had our grouper fishing down since the spill," she added. "We've seen fish with tar balls in their stomachs from as far down as the Florida Keys. We had a grouper with tar balls in its stomach last month. Overall, everything is down."
According to Birren, many fishermen in her area are giving up. "People are dropping out of the fishing business, and selling out cheap because they have to. I'm in west-central Florida, but fishermen all the way down to Key West are struggling to make it. I look at my son's future, as he's just getting into the business, and we're worried."
Dean Blanchard, owner of a seafood business in Grand Isle, Louisiana, is also deeply troubled by what he is seeing. "We have big tar mats coming up on Elmers Island, Fouchon, Grand Isle, and Grand Terre," Blanchard told Al Jazeera. "Every time we have bad weather we get fresh tar balls and mats."
Blanchard said his business generates only about 15 percent of what it did before the spill. "It looks like it's getting worse," he said. "I told my wife when she goes to the mall she can only spend 15 percent what she used to spend."  MORE