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Did I suspect the Deepwater Horizon oil spill "incident" in the golf of mexico was purposeful?

No. I did not. They paid for the clean up. $18.7 billion in fines...

Fossil fuel was created by mother nature. That yellow soup was created by man...

No. I believe no one (upper level) will lose their job over this destruction.

As pressure builds on Hillary Clinton to explain her official use of personal email while serving as secretary of state, she faced new complications Tuesday. It was disclosed her top aides are being drawn into a burgeoning federal inquiry and that two emails on her private account have been classified as “Top Secret.”

The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications - more sensitive than previously known.

The notice came as the State Department inspector general’s office acknowledged that it is reviewing the use of “personal communications hardware and software” by Clinton’s former top aides after requests from Congress.

“We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate,” said Douglas Welty, a spokesman for the State Department’s inspector general.

Despite the acknowledgment, the State Department inspector general’s office has left numerous unanswered questions, including exactly who and what is being investigated. The office initially declined to comment and referred questions to the Intelligence Community inspector general’s office, which said it is not currently involved in any inquiry into aides and is being denied full access to aides’ emails by the State Department. Clinton, herself, is not a target.

The expanding inquiry threatens to further erode Clinton’s standing as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Since her reliance on private email was revealed in March, polls in crucial swing states show that increasing numbers of voters say Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, in part, because of her use of private emails.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wants Clinton and her aides to “come clean and cough up” information about their personal email use.

“Both the State Department and Intelligence Community inspectors general should be looking into the staff use of the Clinton private server for official State Department business. This means giving both inspectors general access and custody of all emails that haven’t already been deleted,” said Grassley of Iowa. “From what is publicly known, it appears that the investigation thus far has focused so much on the former secretary of state, that it’s gotten lost that high-level staff apparently also used this server too.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby referred to the Intelligence Community’s disclosure as a recommendation to “upgrade” the two emails’ classification to “Top Secret.” In a statement, he said that “while we work with the Director of National Intelligence to resolve whether, in fact, this material is actually classified, we are taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately.”

At least four top aides have turned over records, including copies of work emails on personal accounts, to the State Department, which is collecting them in response to a subpoena from Capitol Hill, according to the department. Lawmakers have demanded records, including personal emails, from six other aides, but it’s unknown whether they used personal email for work.

Three Republican Senate committee chairmen _ Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin _ requested in March that both inspector generals conduct an audit of aides’ personal emails.

“As outlined in the joint letter with his colleagues, Chairman Burr has expressed concern that State Department aides may have transmitted sensitive or classified information in an insecure manner,” Burr spokesman Becca Glover Watkins said. “Chairman Burr expects that the IGs will conduct their investigations as requested.”

But it’s not clear that’s being done.

Welty initially said the Intelligence Community inspector general, which had already been looking into the issue of whether classified information has been improperly shared with or by Clinton, has taken responsibility for deciding which emails to review, from whom and determining their classification.

However, Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the Intelligence Community Inspector General, said that office “never had access to any emails other than those provided to the State Department by former Secretary Clinton.”

But she said her office could get involved. “The intent is not to just focus on Clinton,” Williams said.




An impasse remains between the State Department and the Intelligence Community’s inspector general over whether the intelligence watchdog should be provided copies of emails due to jurisdictional issues. The State Department has provided records to its Inspector General. A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the issue.

Revelations that dozens of Clinton’s emails now include classified information has prompted an FBI inquiry into whether classified information was improperly stored on her private server and a thumb drive held by her attorney. The news has sparked fear among national security experts that the federal government’s secrets may have been exposed or even hacked. However, the two inspectors general said the material in Clinton’s email was not marked as classified at the time. The FBI declined to comment.

Clinton, which has repeatedly denied she ever sent or received classified information, has attempted to downplay the scrutiny as mere partisan attacks, but questions about her judgment and motive for setting up a private server in her Chappaqua house in 2009 continue to dog her. Her campaign declined to comment.

The case is more complicated because of Clinton’s prominence. A former secretary of state, senator and first lady, Clinton has friends and connections throughout the administration and on Capitol Hill.

“I think the headline is that there’s nothing but murkiness and non-answers from the State Department,” said Bradley Moss, a lawyer who is representing Gawker, a media organization suing for access to one aide’s emails. “I think the State Department is figuring this out as it goes along, which is exactly why no one should be using personal email to conduct government business.”

In March, the House committee investigating the fatal attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 subpoenaed records, including personal emails relating to official business, from 10 Clinton aides at the State Department about Libya for a two-year period. In turn, the department asked them for records.

Administration officials and Clinton aides have declined to provide a full list of which aides used personal email for government business or who might have had an email account on Clinton’s personal server.

Clinton acknowledged that Huma Abedin, her deputy chief of staff and one of Clinton’s closest confidants, had an account on her personal server in a sworn affidavit filed Monday in a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking State Department records.

Clinton’s affidavit was her first disclosure that any of her former aides used personal accounts or accounts on her personal server to conduct business. Clinton said that her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, did not have an account on the server.

Mills, Jake Sullivan, also a deputy chief of staff, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines have turned over records to the State Department, including personal emails, in response to a subpoena by the House committee investigating the fatal attacks in Benghazi, Libya in 2012, according to the State Department.

Mills had planned to delete her emails after submitting them to the State Department, according to an Aug. 6 letter from her attorney to the State Department submitted as evidence in the Freedom of Information suit by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest group that also has sued the State Department seeking Clinton aides’ emails. Her attorneys planned to keep a copy.

But U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is presiding over the suit, issued an order Friday instructing the State Department to direct Clinton, Mills and Abedin not to destroy any records.

Reines and Sullivan did not respond to messages nor did attorneys for Mills and Abedin.

Clinton has turned over 30,490 work emails to the State Department in response to a request from the agency, but said that she deleted another 31,830 personal emails.

But in June, after Clinton’s longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal gave the House committee emails between him and the former secretary of state, the State Department realized it was missing all or part of 15 emails.





The Intelligence Community’s inspector general requested that the FBI scrutinize the security implications of Clinton’s use of the private email after determining that at least five emails containing classified information had been stored on her private server, including one email that State Department officials inadvertently released in response to a public records lawsuit. Two others are under review for final classification.

I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community, said State Department officials had warned that there were “potentially hundreds of classified emails” on Clinton’s private server.

The State Department has begun to release Clinton’s emails in response to a public records lawsuit. Clinton said that the use of personal email by State Department employees was permitted at the time, but State Department and White House officials decline to say whether she sought or received prior approval from anyone or whether anyone objected to it later.

The National Archives’ regulations permit the use of personal email for government business, but mandates that records must be kept.



http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article30714762.html



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Hillary Certifies Under Penalty Of Perjury She Has Turned Over All Her Work-Related Emails

As soon as this happened 0bama gave the order to move. Nothing happening to hillary now could have happened without 0bama's approval.

Biden getting ready...

She said she is responsible... Does that mean she will quit? I doubt it...

Too bad reddit does not care.

Trump hires women on building constructions. Hillary's husband put women under construction...

Not after my indiegogo project...

Bill Gates and others just invested $120 million in a revolutionary medical startup


A recently discovered tool that gives scientists the ability to edit DNA — the basic blueprint for life — and to rewrite the genetic codes of humans and other creatures just got a major boost toward breaking through from research to applications that might affect human health.

Editas Medicine is one of the first companies using this genome-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to develop new ways to cure human disease. On August 10, the startup announced that they've raised $120 million from a group of investors led by Dr. Boris Nikolic, the managing director of bng0 (which was formed to invest in Editas) and who was before this was a chief science and technology advisor to Bill Gates.

"The company is at the forefront of genome editing – one of the most exciting and important frontiers in science," Nikolic said in a press release.

The massive investment is a vote of confidence in a tool that many scientists say could change everything — and in Editas Medicine's ability to use it wisely.

Gates has been confirmed to be one of the bng0 backers, according to Forbes's Matthew Herper.

The company was founded in 2013 with $43 million from Flagship Ventures, Polaris Partners and Third Rock Ventures, as well as Partners Innovation Fund. Other new investors include a long list: Deerfield Management, Viking Global Investors, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Google Ventures, Jennison Associates on behalf of certain clients, Khosla Ventures, EcoR1 Capital, Casdin Capital, Omega Funds, Cowen Private Investments and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Why it matters

This news is a major development because Editas is one of the leading startups coming up with ways to use CRISPR-Cas9 to eliminate human diseases in ways that weren't possible in the past. Such a massive spike in the financial resources of the company could have a transformative impact on health and medicine — and of course, as Wired pointed out in a recent feature on how CRISPR will change the world, health and medicine is where the real money is.

Researchers think they'll be able to cure genetic diseases with CRISPR by changing the part of a person's genome that causes that disease. If a person has a disease caused by a gene or a specific mutation, scientists think they'll be able to use this tool to rewrite or delete the parts of a genetic code that cause that illness. Right now, those ideas are still largely hypothetical: We haven't used CRISPR to cure anything just yet.

Editas is first trying to use CRISPR to treat a cause of blindness by snipping out a genetic mutation, the company's CEO told Forbes. After that, they may try to treat a blood condition by actually replacing a section of DNA with a new section of DNA.

The ability to make these changes is what gives CRISPR its incredible promise, but researchers haven't yet figured out how to make this happen safely and effectively enough to do this work in humans. They can delete or even replace sections of DNA in certain lab settings without many unwanted other effects (like deleting other, desired sections of DNA), but can't do it consistently enough yet to try this in people.

George Church, a leading Harvard geneticist and CRISPR researcher who is a scientific advisor for Editas, previously told Tech Insider in an email that he thinks researchers might eventually be able to use the tool to change genes so that people wouldn't be vulnerable to HIV.

And that's just the start. In a series of interviews, a number of researchers have told Tech Insider that CRISPR's implications for human health — and for transforming the world in other ways — are almost impossible to overstate.

As Jennifer Doudna, one of the first to discover the capabilities of CRISPR, told us: "We’re basically now able to have a molecular scalpel for genomes."

A possible wrinkle

Editas was founded by some of the first scientists to discover CRISPR, including Doudna (of the University of California, Berkeley) and Feng Zhang of the Broad Insitute of MIT and Harvard.

There's now a patent dispute over who owns the intellectual property rights for the genetic-editing technology. Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published some of the first work on CRISPR and filed for a patent; Zhang filed for another patent after subsequently publishing other work and his patent was granted first. Now, Doudna has licensed her patent to another company, while Zhang's is licensed to Editas, and Charpentier's is licensed to yet another group.

Still, Editas's list of scientific advisors includes some of the top researchers working with CRISPR, and various investors told Forbes they aren't worried about how courts settle the intellectual property dispute.

The worst-case scenario is that they have to pay a royalty, but if they're the first company to use genome editing to cure human disease, paying a royalty would be well worth it.


http://www.techinsider.io/bill-gates-and-others-invest-in-editas-for-crispr-gene-editing-2015-8

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Monsanto for human DNA? I can see a business model here: you'll have genes that keep you alive via a monthly injection... As long as you pay the licensing fee...

Surprise surprise. It is not about saving little turtles from drowning after all...

Who would want such a coward as president? Facing putin? Trading with china? If you are afraid of people you agree with, where are you going to hide facing people who hate you?

That video is telling.
http://launch.newsinc.com/share.html?trackingGroup=91212&siteSection=washingtonexaminer&videoId=29514274

Donald Trump, Pivoting Toward Policy, Urges Simpler Tax Code


 | Donald J. Trump’s feud with Fox News came to a close on Tuesday morning when the billionaire tycoon called into the network for a friendly interview, declaring “we’ve always been friends.”

Averting any discussion of his war of words with Megyn Kelly, the news anchor who angered him by asking questions about his history of sexism at last week’s presidential debate, Mr. Trump tried to keep the conversation focused on policy.

“We have to knock out their wealth,” Mr. Trump said of how he would defeat the Islamic State. “Take the oil, knock the hell out of them.”

Mr. Trump also shed some light on his tax policy, explaining that he would seek to simplify the existing system before overhauling it and attempting to create a flat tax or an entirely new structure.

“Put H&R Block out of business,” Mr. Trump said, calling for a simplified tax return.

In a separate interview on CNN, Mr. Trump said that he would consider partly defunding Planned Parenthood. He said that while he takes an anti-abortion stance, he supports exceptions for rape and incest. He dismissed suggestions that his previous statements about women would harm him at the polls.

“I’ve always been good to women and there will be nobody better to women as president,” Mr. Trump said, noting that he has put women in charge of major construction projects and that he pays them the same as he pays men at his company.

Besides policy, Mr. Trump dismissed reports that he might take a pledge to run as a Republican and continued to keep the option of an independent bid. He has said that if the Republican Party does not treat him fairly, that he might strike out on his own.

“We’re going to keep the door open, we’re going to see what happens,” Mr. Trump said on Fox.

Regarding the shake-up among staff members, Mr. Trump acknowledged that Roger Stone was no longer an adviser. He called him a “nice guy” but said that he was not really using his expertise and that Mr. Stone was seeking too much personal publicity.

Mr. Trump did not pull punches when it came to his rivals. Pointing to his enduring strength in the polls, he said that Gov. Scott Walker was trailing him in Iowa because of economic troubles in his home state of Wisconsin, and he said that former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida was beholden to special interests because of all the big donors he relies on.

As for Hillary Rodham Clinton, he expressed no hard feelings about comments she made on Monday saying that she did not know him that well and came to his wedding for its entertainment value. He has said that she had to come because he gave her so much money over the years.

“It sounds like she feels like she made a mistake,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s sort of an interesting thing.”


http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/11/donald-trump-pivoting-toward-policy-urges-simpler-tax-code/

Too bad the believers won't touch that book. We are the deniers, remember...

 

Feel The Bern: Sanders’ Unveils New Racial Justice Platform Wins Praise From Black Lives Matter Activists…





After activists from the Black Lives Matter movement repeatedly disrupted speeches by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over the past few weeks, the popular and populist presidential candidate released a comprehensive racial justice platform and hired a young racial justice activist as his national press secretary.

The platform, which has won praise from several prominent voices in the Black Lives Matter movement, focuses on different forms of violence against people of color in the United States: physical violence from law enforcement and extremist vigilantes, the political violence of voter suppression, the legal violence of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, and the economic violence of crushing poverty. Sanders lays out several proposals to address each form of violence, from passing “ban the box” laws to prevent hiring discrimination against people with criminal records, to outlawing for-profit prisons, to restoring the gutted protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Though Sanders has been involved in civil rights work since his college days, he has come under pressure from black activists since launching his bid for president. Having represented the overwhelmingly white state of Vermont for most of his life, Sanders has often struggled to specifically address racial justice issues with the urgency the movement is demanding — an urgency fueled by the fact that an unarmed black person has been killed by police, on average, every nine days this year.


http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/08/10/3689728/after-repeated-protests-bernie-sanders-releases-racial-justice-platform/

To the poster: get a life.

Environmental Agency Uncorks Its Own Toxic Water Spill at Colorado Mine






DURANGO, Colo. — The Animas River is the cultural soul of this patch of southwestern Colorado, a sort of moving Main Street that hosts multiple floating parades a year and is typically bustling with rafters and kayakers. Schoolchildren study the river. Sweethearts marry on its banks. Its former name, given by Spaniards, is el Río de las Ánimas, the River of Souls.

But since Wednesday, the Animas has been grievously polluted with toxic water spilled from one of the many abandoned mines that pockmark the region — a spill for which the Environmental Protection Agency has claimed responsibility, saying it accidentally breached a store of chemical-laced water.

On Sunday, anger over the spill boiled over after the agency announced that the amount of toxic water released was three times what was previously stated — more than three million gallons rather than one million — and that officials were still unsure if there was a health threat to humans or animals.

The day of that announcement, State Senator Ellen Roberts, a Republican who lives near the river, cried softly as she considered the pollution, adding that she had dropped her father’s ashes in the depths of the river, which pollutants had turned into an unnatural-looking yellow-orange ribbon.

“It is not just a scenic destination,” Ms. Roberts said. “It is where people literally raise their children. It is where the farmers and ranchers feed their livestock, which in turn feeds the people. We’re isolated from Denver through the mountains, and we are pretty resourceful people. But if you take away our water supply, we’re left with virtually no way to move forward.”

On Monday, Gov. John W. Hickenlooper released $500,000 in funds for assistance. The City of Durango and La Plata County have declared states of emergency.

Soon after the spill was detected, city officials stopped pumping water from the Animas into the reservoir that provides drinking water for Durango’s 17,000 residents — taking action swiftly enough that the contamination did not reach the drinking supply. The reservoir still receives water from the Florida River, a tributary of the Animas, but the city has asked local residents to conserve so that the reservoir does not get too low.

Most people living outside the city use wells, and officials say about 1,000 residential water wells could be contaminated.

The river is closed indefinitely, and the county sheriff has hastily recast his campaign signs into posters warning river visitors to stay out of the water. The yellow plume has traveled down to New Mexico — where officials in several municipalities have stopped pumping river water into drinking water systems, fearing contamination — and to the Navajo Nation. 

Testing by the E.P.A. — an agency typically in the position of responding to toxic disasters, not causing them — found that the wastewater spill caused levels of arsenic, lead and other metals to spike in the Animas River.

On the day of the accident, a team from the agency had been investigating an abandoned mine about 50 miles north of here. Called the Gold King, it is roughly 1.5 miles long and about 700 feet tall at its highest point. The mine had been abandoned for nearly a century, but between roughly 1890 and 1920 it produced 350,000 ounces of high-grade gold, according to its owner.

For years, the Gold King has leaked toxic water at a rate of 50 to 250 gallons a minute. The agency had planned to find the source of the leak in the hope of one day stanching it. Instead, as workers used a backhoe to hack at loose material, a surprise deluge of orange water ripped through, spilling into Cement Creek and flowing into the Animas. The burst did not injure workers.

In his first interview since the spill, the owner of the mine, Todd Hennis, said the spill was probably the fault of another mine company — the Sunnyside Gold Corporation — that had built retention walls inside an abandoned mine near the Gold King, part of an old cleanup agreement with the federal government. Once the Sunnyside mine filled with wastewater, the water probably spilled into the Gold King, and then into the Animas, Mr. Hennis said.

He urged Sunnyside’s parent company, the Kinross Gold Corporation, to clean up the mess. “They’ve got to step forward and be responsible,” he said of Kinross. A spokesman for Sunnyside, Larry Perino, said the company had no role in Gold King spill.

Since the 1870s, metal mining has both enriched and poisoned this region, turning the earth under portions of southwest Colorado into a maze of tunnels and leaving behind shuttered sites oozing with chemicals. There are about 200 abandoned mines in the Animas watershed. Sunnyside was the last to close, in 1991.

On Sunday night, residents packed a school auditorium in Durango for a meeting with the E.P.A.’s regional director, Shaun McGrath. During a public comment session that lasted more than two hours, residents flouted a sign on the wall that instructed the auditorium’s typical patrons — middle schoolers — to refrain from calling out, jumping up or insulting others during assemblies.

Shouts rang out. A few people cried. One resident questioned whether the agency had refashioned itself into the “Environmental Pollution Agency.” Others demanded to know what would happen to wildlife, livestock, water wells, sediment and river-based jobs.

“When — when can we be open again?” asked David Moler, 35, the owner of a river-rafting company who had approached a microphone. “All I hear is a handful of ‘gonna-dos,’ ” he added. “What should I tell my employees?”

Mr. McGrath and his colleagues urged patience and assured residents that they would provide information about health risks once they had it. The agency, he said, is awaiting test results to determine whether the water poses a risk.

“We’re going to continue to work until this is cleaned up,” Mr. McGrath said, “and hold ourselves to the same standards that we would anyone that would have created this situation.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/durango-colorado-mine-spill-environmental-protection-agency.html?_r=0

Maybe he could not swim, that is why his daughter was never taught to...? I am just guessing.