Category Archives: Fail!

Both sides cry foul over prairie chicken decision – Albuquerque Business First

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Rep. Pierce has filed a House Bill to take authority over Lesser Prairie Chickens away for USFWS. It’s all about fracking, campaign donations, and trashing the ground water needed for drinking and for crops!)

“I support Chaves County in its decision to stand up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service against its destructive decision to list the prairie chicken,” Pearce said. “The FWS’s decision to cater to environmental groups and disregard science will devastate New Mexico’s way of life. New Mexicans will pay the price in lost jobs, industry, ranching and oil and gas production. This is a federal government that is out of control. The only way change can occur is when local citizens and their leaders, like those in Chaves County, start standing up and demanding it.”

via Both sides cry foul over prairie chicken decision – Albuquerque Business First.

Who Owns Your Womb? Women Can Get Murder Charge for Refusing C-Sections | The Women’s International Perspective

When most women become pregnant, understandably they believe the choice of how they give birth will remain theirs; whether to deliver vaginally or through cesarean surgery or where to give birth, at home or at a hospital. Decades ago, those decisions were well within the domain of pregnant patients whose reproductive liberty and autonomy interests gained constitutional recognition in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

After all, whose body is it anyway? But what may have seemed clear-cut decades ago, is now put to the test by doctors and lower courts.

via Who Owns Your Womb? Women Can Get Murder Charge for Refusing C-Sections | The Women’s International Perspective.

Kidnappings put Netanyahu back on offense – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

The kidnapping of the three teenage boys suddenly dominated both the media and the public agenda. And it was with the same rapidity that Netanyahu regained his stature as the responsible adult in the room, and the person with the most diplomatic and security mileage in the government and Cabinet.

In an instant, the kidnapping erased any memory of one of the, politically speaking, worst weeks Netanyahu has had in his current term, if not the worst. His unfocused, emotional plotting to thwart the election of his sworn enemy Reuven Rivlin came crashing down around him, and he was forced to congratulate the newly elected president, though he did so without any show of enthusiasm.

via Kidnappings put Netanyahu back on offense – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.

Junk Miles: What?! Woman Arrested On A Run – Competitor.com

Runner sent to jail Thursday but later released. (Police should have joined in the jogging and lose weight rather than good sense)

A female runner in Austin, Texas, was arrested by local police on Thursday night after she was allegedly caught jaywalking. Although details are yet unclear, the event was caught on smartphone camera by a bystander. The Austin American-Statesman reported that police arrested the woman for not identifying herself.

According to the newspaper, police said Amanda Jo Stephen, 24, disregarded traffic signals at the intersection of West 24th and San Antonio streets as she was running. Officers tried to stop her, according to a police spokeswoman, but she was running with headphones and couldn’t hear them. When they finally stopped her, she “was resisting and wouldn’t provide identification,” the spokeswoman told the newspaper.

Stephen was taken to Travis County Jail but later released.

“I was sitting at the Starbucks at 24th and San Antonio,” said Chris Quintero, the bystander who caught the arrest on camera told The Daily Texan. “Then I hear a cop shout at an innocent girl jogging through West Campus with her headphones on. She repeatedly pleaded with them, saying that she was just exercising and to let her go.”

via Junk Miles: What?! Woman Arrested On A Run – Competitor.com.

“Free Market” Texas is ‘Shocked’ at Chipotle Importing Australian Beef

Ells last month defended the move by writing for the Huffington Post that Chipotle was having difficulty getting beef it prefers from U.S. producers because the lingering drought is leading to the smallest herd in decades.

The U.S. Agriculture Department said in January that the U.S. cattle herd was 89.3 million head, the lowest since 1952.

via Texas is ‘Shocked’ at Chipotle Importing Australian Beef.

I am a vegan so it does not directly effect me but 89,300,000 cattle will be raised and die to feed the burger, pink slime, and steak diet here and where ever we also EXPORT our beef.

Workers At Kum Gang San Allegedly Forced To “Volunteer” As Farm Laborers & Beg For Forgiveness: Gothamist

Kum Gang San restaurant is a mainstay in Manhattan’s Koreatown, open for business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Its Queens location is a cornerstone of community celebrations in downtown Flushing. Throughout the weekend, weddings and baby showers crowd the banquet hall and private rooms, while diners in the main rooms can enjoy platters of meat cooked on tableside grills, unlimited plates of banchan, or Korean side dishes, and bubbling stone bowls of stew.

But for the restaurant’s waiters and kitchen workers, the hours were often brutal, sometimes extending into 18-hour shifts with 7-day work weeks, for which they received no overtime pay and sometimes not even a break, according to the lawsuit, which was filed last year by eleven former employees.

Tae Ho Kim, a tall, lanky 50-year old who waited tables at the restaurant for 15 years and one of the plaintiffs in the case, did not want to sue at first. Working at Kum Gang San was his first job in New York City, and he had risen to the position of head captain. But he said conditions at the restaurant had become unbearable. “We wanted to have a dialogue with the owner to fix some issues,” Kim said. “But instead of engaging in a conversation, his behavior got worse and worse.”

According to Kim, more than 30 waiters had originally been interested in participating in a lawsuit. But after finding out about the complaint, Kim said owner Ji Sung Yoo called all the waiters into a meeting and threatened to report them to immigration authorities and blacklist them from further employment in the Korean community if they participated. Most of the waiters withdrew. Kim testified through a translator that the owner said he would use all his influence to ensure that Kim would never work in New York again.

via Workers At Kum Gang San Allegedly Forced To “Volunteer” As Farm Laborers & Beg For Forgiveness: Gothamist.

What happens when the world “unfriends you?” Libya’s ‘friends’ desert failed state – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

Indeed, Libya is more a failed state than the functioning, stable and peaceful country Libyans wanted when they rose up in 2011. The unmistakable reality now is that the world helped us create the mess we live in, but it has long since turned its back on us and gotten busy with other crises elsewhere. In our hour of need, we find no friends to help us heal our country.

Incidentally, the American businessman flew back with me to Paris in May. I asked him if his trip had been fruitful. He said, “As fruitful as the Friends of Libya!”

via Libya’s ‘friends’ desert failed state – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.

South Sudan’s Wildlife Become Casualties Of War and Are Killed to Feed Soldiers and Rebels – Inter Press Service | Inter Press Service

War kills everything in its path!

“Since the start of this conflict we have noticed that poaching has become terrible. Rebels are poaching and the government forces are also poaching because they are all fighting in rural areas and the only available food they can get is wild meat,” Lieutenant General Alfred Akuch Omoli, an advisor to South Sudan’s Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, told IPS.

Officials say elephants are being killed for their meat and tusks while migratory animals that move in large numbers, especially the white-eared kob, the tiang (also known as the Senegal hartebeest) and reedbuck, are being killed specifically to provide bush meat.

via South Sudan’s Wildlife Become Casualties Of War and Are Killed to Feed Soldiers and Rebels – Inter Press Service | Inter Press Service.

Caribbean chikungunya cases top 170,000 | CIDRAP

The number of chikungunya cases in parts of the Caribbean continued to surge last week, pushing past 170,000 cases, with the first cases confirmed in El Salvador, west of the main outbreak area, and more imported cases detected in the United States and other countries. {Will not be long before all of Central America is effected and then Mexico, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida – all from people visiting the currently effected areas – coming home infected and getting bitten by local mosquitoes!}

The outbreak has grown to 170,566 suspected or confirmed cases of the mosquito-borne disease, which is 35,139 higher than the 135,427 cases reported the previous week, according to a Jun 13 report from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). The number of deaths remained the same, at 14.

Over the past few weeks, most new cases are suspected infections reported from the Latin Caribbean countries, such as the Dominican Republic, where suspected cases rose from 52,976 to 77,320 last week. Guadaloupe and Martinique also reported thousands of new cases, but no new case totals were given for Haiti, another country that has recently been hard hit by the outbreak.

In the non-Latin areas that were mainly affected earlier in the outbreak, new cases were reported by Dominica, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the US Virgin Islands.

via Caribbean chikungunya cases top 170,000 | CIDRAP.

Between A Rock And A Sectarian Bloodbath « The Dish

Joshua Landis offers an ominous prediction about the coming Shiite backlash:

I would not be shocked to see significant ethnic cleansing of Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad should ISIS attack and give the Iraqi Army a run for its money.

After all, the Iraqi army is large, has helicopters, sophisticated intelligence capabilities, tanks, artillery and all the rest. They were caught napping and without esprit de corps, much as the Syrian army was. But capable officers will emerge who will strip down the “power-sharing” fat that the US built and rebuild it based on loyalty to Maliki and Shiism, if most of that has not been done already. This is what happened in Syria, when we saw the Syrian Army unravel at the base during the first year of the Sunni uprising. The Syrian military was quickly rebuilt along sectarian and regional lines to make it much stronger and more loyal, with locally recruited Iranian style National Defense Forces modeled on the Islamic Guard. If Sunnis choose to form such local militias and ally with the Shiite regime, so much the better. If they do not and choose to lay low until they figure out whether ISIS can win in their regions, the Shiites will go it alone and assume all Sunnis are a fifth column.

via Between A Rock And A Sectarian Bloodbath « The Dish.