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Richard Grenell,US envoy to Germany,wants to 'empower' Europe's right

- Monday, June 04, 2018

The US ambassador to Germany has said he wants to "empower" Europe's right.

Richard Grenell, who was appointed by President Donald Trump last year, made the highly unusual comments for a diplomat to right-wing Breitbart News.

"I think there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left," he said.

Mr Grenell's comments follow several other controversial remarks by Trump-appointed diplomats.

In the interview, the ambassador, who only took office last month, said President Trump's election had energised people to take on the "political class". Mr Grenell said he had been contacted by people throughout Europe about a conservative "resurgence".

He attacked the perceived bias of the media and politicians against Mr Trump as "the group-think of a very small elitist crowd", and praised Austria's conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz as a "rock star".

Mr Kurz's party formed a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party in 2017.

Right-wing populists have won support across Europe, with recent electoral success for parties in Italy and Slovenia that espouse strict immigration policies.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy described the interview as "awful".

In a tweet, he said he had previously spoken to Mr Grenell about "politicising this post".
What's his background?

Formerly the longest serving US spokesperson at the United Nations, Mr Grenell is under contract with Fox News as a contributor on world affairs and the media.

He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Times, Al Jazeera, CBS News and CNN.

A Senate vote in May confirmed him as US ambassador to Germany after President Trump's nomination in September 2017.

But only an hour after he officially began his role, Mr Grenell provoked controversy for tweeting that German companies should "wind down operations immediately" in Iran, following Mr Trump's announcement that the US was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

Is 'diplomatic language' dying out?

Mr Grenell's comments are the most recent case of controversial language from a US diplomat.

The US state department's guide, Protocol for the Modern Diplomat, states that "each country will be respected uniformly and without bias", and includes the instruction "that as a guest, one is expected to respect the host's culture".

However, former US ambassador to Germany John Kornblum told the BBC there is "no lexicon" for ambassadors.

"There is no such thing as diplomatic language," he said. "The language diplomats use is attuned to their needs."

For example, during the negotiations for the Dayton Agreement in 1995, Mr Kornblum says there was "incredibly undiplomatic" language used to criticise heads of government, in particular Serbia.

He also believes that in Europe there is a greater degree of "self-censorship" among diplomats that does not apply anywhere else in the world, saying "Europeans are especially sensitive".

However, he agrees that President Trump has changed things.

"Mr Trump has taken political language in the US to new depths," said Mr Kornblum. And he thinks diplomats abroad could be trying to emulate their president.

President Trump has infamously dubbed Mexicans "drug dealers" and "rapists", reportedly used derogatory language to describe some African countries and claimed knife crime in London had left a hospital there "like a war zone".



Undiplomatic diplomats:Are there more?

Yes.

In October 2017, US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa Scott Brown said he was under investigation for telling a woman at a Peace Corps event she was "beautiful" and could "make hundreds of dollars" if she worked as a waitress in the US.

In a video statement to New Zealand media, Mr Brown admitted he had made the comments, but only did so because the people he saw before the event "were all dirty and grungy, and when we walked in, they were all dressed to the nines; they looked great".

And US ambassador to the Netherlands Pete Hoekstra was recently caught out over his claims about "no-go zones" in the country due to Islamic extremism.

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Dancing FBI agent drops gun during backflip and shoots man in leg

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An off-duty FBI agent accidentally shot a bystander in the leg when his gun fell from its holster as he cavorted on the dance-floor of a bar in Denver, Colorado, police said.

Video widely shared on Twitter shows the agent strutting his stuff and then performing a backflip.

The gun falls to the floor and, as the agent goes to grab it, fires a shot.

The fellow customer hit by the bullet was taken to hospital with a non-life-threatening injury.

It is unclear if the agent, who has not been named, will face charges or disciplinary action.

The video shows that his wild moves on the dance-floor had attracted an appreciative crowd at the Mile High Spirits and Distillery bar on Saturday night.

But the mood quickly changed when the gun went off. As shocked patrons look on, the agent retrieves his weapon, holds up his hands and leaves the floor.

Denver Police Department said the agent "was dancing at a nightclub when his firearm became dislodged from its waistband holster and fell on to the floor. When the agent retrieved his handgun an unintended discharge occurred".

The statement added: "The victim was transported to the hospital with a good prognosis."

Police spokeswoman Marika Putnam said the agent was taken to a police station and later released to an FBI supervisor.

The Denver District Attorney's office said the incident remained under investigation.

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The United Nations says Trump is making life harder for the poor

- Sunday, June 03, 2018

Donald Trump Is "Punishing, Imprisoning The Poor", Says United Nations

The US has one of the highest youth poverty rates in the developed world.

About 41 million Americans live in poverty,according to government data.

The United Nations has never been shy about attacking the United States.

In recent years, U.N. officials accused the Obama administration of failing to address police brutality and sexual assault in the military. After a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, the U.N. team tasked with monitoring the implementation of the global convention against discrimination called on high-level U.S. politicians and public officials to unequivocally reject racial hate speech.Also last year, the world body called President Donald Trump's attacks on the media "dangerous."

Now, a top human rights investigator is criticizing the United States for failing the poor.

Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has spent the past several months visiting impoverished communities across the United States. In one visit to Alabama, he met a family struggling to maintain their home on an income of $958 a month.

On the day of his visit, he said, sewage was visible inches from the family's house - a reflection of their county's failing infrastructure - and mildew and mold were growing inside. Alston said he had never seen sewage problems like it in the developed world.

"There is a human right for people to live decently," he said at the time, according to AL.com, an Alabama news outlet.

Alston, a New York University law professor, also paid visits to slum areas in downtown Los Angeles and Puerto Rico.

Now, ahead of a presentation to the U.N. later this month, he is criticizing the Trump administration for gutting the United States' safety net by slashing welfare benefits and access to health insurance.

"If food stamps and access to Medicaid are removed, and housing subsidies cut, then the effect on people living on the margins will be drastic," he told the Guardian, saying the loss of those protections would lead to "severe deprivation."

Alston also lambasted the administration over its recent tax cut, saying that legislation will offer "financial windfalls" to the rich and large corporations, leading to even more inequality.

The government should think harder about how to help those in need rather than "punishing and imprisoning the poor," he said.

"The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned, rather than a right of citizenship," Alston said.

About 41 million Americans live in poverty, according to government data, about 12.7 percent of the population. One in three of those are children. The United States has one of the highest youth poverty rates in the developed world.

Critics of Alston point out that those statistics are from 2016, before Trump took office. On Twitter, Alston explained his reasoning this way:

"...The poverty figures for 2017 won't be published until Sept 2018. Poverty is a structural problem, but I strongly believe, backed up by extensive evidence, that a 1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich and the hollowing out of welfare benefits, will make things worse, not great."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. A U.S. official in Geneva disputed Alston's claims, saying that "the Trump Administration has made it a priority to provide economic opportunity for all Americans."

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Giuliani:Trump ‘Probably Does’ Have The Power To Pardon Himself,But Won’t

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Giuliani: Trump ‘Probably Does’ Have The Power To Pardon Himself, But Won’t

The president’s lawyer also defended Trump’s shifting explanations for a 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

President Donald Trump doesn’t intend to pardon himself, Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday ― but he “probably does” have the power to do so.

“He has no intention of pardoning himself ... not to say he can’t,” Giuliani, a lawyer and adviser to Trump on the Russia probe, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. He characterized the question of a self-pardon as a “really interesting constitutional argument.”

“I think the political ramifications of that would be tough,” he said. “Pardoning other people is one thing. Pardoning yourself is another.”

In another Sunday interview, this one on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Giuliani took a stronger stand on both the unlikeliness of such a move, and the possibility for political fallout.

“It’s not going to happen,” he said, arguing that Trump had done nothing wrong that would require him to pardon himself.

He added that “the president of the United States pardoning himself is unthinkable... it would probably lead to immediate impeachment.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also weighed in against the idea. “I don’t think a president should pardon themselves,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney fired by Trump, said on the same program that the idea of the president deciding to pardon himself as “almost self-executing impeachment.”

Giuliani said on “Meet The Press” that Trump has the power to terminate any federal investigation, although he described such a move as “a very unrealistic thing.”

“The Department of Justice is a creature of the president,” he said. “I know based on presidential rulings... [the] Justice Department is given a certain amount of independence. I am tremendously in favor of it, but that’s all the president’s decision.”

The president’s lawyer defended Trump’s shifting explanations about a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign that included his son, Donald Trump Jr. “This is the reason you don’t let the president testify” as part of the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Giuliani told ABC. “Our recollection keeps changing, or we’re not even asked a question and somebody makes an assumption.”

He predicted that special counsel Robert Mueller would wrap up his investigation by the start of this September. “He’s as sensitive as everybody to not doing another Comey and interfering horribly in the election,” Giuliani said.

He was referring to then-FBI Director’s Jim Comey announcement less than two weeks before the 2016 vote that the agency was reopening aspects of its probe into Democratic candidate’s Hillary Clinton’s private use of email when she served as secretary of state. Although days later Comey said the probe was again being closed without charges being filed, Clinton has blamed his initial announcement as a key reason Trump went on to defeat her.
Source

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Giuliani:Trump Could Have Shot Comey And Still Couldn’t Be Indicted For It

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Giuliani:Trump Could Have Shot Comey And Still Couldn’t Be Indicted For It

Congress would have to impeach Trump first before any criminal prosecution could move forward, the president’s lawyer says.


 Candidate Donald Trump bragged that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, and now President Donald Trump’s lawyer says Trump could shoot the FBI director in the Oval Office and still not be prosecuted for it.

“In no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted,” Rudy Giuliani told HuffPost Sunday, claiming a president’s constitutional powers are that broad. “I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is.”

Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.

“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”

Norm Eisen, the White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the silliness of Giuliani’s claim illustrates how mistaken Trump’s lawyers are about presidential power.

“A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?” he said. “It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”

Eisen and other legal scholars have concluded that the constitution offers no blanket protection for a president from criminal prosecution. “The foundation of America is that no person is above the law,” he said. “A president can under extreme circumstances be indicted, but we’re facing extreme circumstances.”

Giuliani’s comments came a day after The New York Times revealed that Trump’s lawyers in January made their case to special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump could not possibly have obstructed justice because he has the ability to shut down any investigation at any time.

“He could,if he wished,terminate the inquiry,or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired,” Jay Sekulow and John Dowd wrote in a 20-page letter. Dowd has since left Trump’s legal team, replaced by Giuliani.

The letter also admits that Trump “dictated” a statement that was then released by his son, Donald Trump Jr., regarding a meeting held at Trump Tower in June 2016 between top Trump campaign officials and Russians with links to that country’s spy agencies.

That meeting was scheduled after the Russians said they had damaging information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that would be of use to the Trump campaign. The Trump-dictated statement falsely claimed the meeting was primarily about the adoption of Russian children by American families ― the same topic that Trump claimed had been the substance of a conversation he had had with Russian leader Vladimir Putin the previous evening in Germany.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded during the 2016 campaign that not only was Russia interfering in the U.S. election, but was actively trying to help Trump win.

Both Sekulow and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed, falsely, that Trump had not dictated the statement, but had merely offered his son suggestions. Sanders on Sunday referred questions about the matter to Trump’s outside legal team.

Giuliani said Sekulow was misinformed about the Trump Tower meeting, which in any case was not that significant. “In this investigation, the crimes are really silly,” he said, arguing that the firing of Comey last year could not be construed as obstruction of justice because Trump had the right to fire him at any time and for any reason. “This is pure harassment, engineered by the Democrats.”

Comey had been leading the FBI probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence until his dismissal, which led to the appointment of Mueller to take it over. Within two days of the firing, Trump told both NBC News and Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office that he had done it because of the investigation.

Eisen said Giuliani’s assertion, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that a mob boss under investigation by the FBI could give Trump a bribe to fire the FBI director, Trump could explain on television that he had done so “because of this Mafia thing,” and then not face criminal charges.

“Well, of course it would be appropriate to initiate a prosecution,” he said. “I think the legally correct answer is, as usual, the opposite of Giuliani’s answer.”

Giuliani, once the mayor of New York City and prior to that the U.S. attorney there, took charge of Trump’s outside legal team in April, saying then that he planned to wrap the whole thing up within a few weeks. Now he said he is not sure when it will end because Mueller is taking too long and not turning over material to Giuliani ― such as a report of what was learned from an FBI informant who made contact with several members of the Trump campaign with links to Russia.

Giuliani said he has so far met with Trump about 10 times and spoken to him on the phone another 40 or so times, totaling at least 75 hours of conversation. “I’m not billing by the hour, otherwise I could tell you exactly,” he joked about the case he has taken on for free.

Mueller’s investigation has so far resulted in the guilty pleas of five people, including three former Trump campaign staffers, and the indictment of 14 other people and three companies. That total includes 13 Russians, Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” that was used to create and disseminate propaganda to help Trump win.

A related investigation by Giuliani’s former U.S. attorney’s office is examining the dealings of longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. A former business partner has agreed to cooperate in that probe and plead to New York state charges.
Source

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Training for the End of the World as We Know It

- Saturday, October 18, 2014

A shot rings out in the Orchard Lake Campground. The crack ricochets off of evergreens and elms and oaks.  No one hits the ground, screams, or ducks for cover. None of the 600 campers even seems fazed by the blast piercing through the stagnant humidity.After all,it’s just target practice.

Welcome to prepper camp.

For four days last month, the campground—nestled in a remote part of the foggy Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina—hosted a crash course in survival. Organized by “Prepper Rick” Austin and his wife, a blogger who goes by “Survivor Jane,” the weekend attracted participants from Tennessee, California, Kentucky, Texas, Ohio, and Georgia. When the sole Yankee outs herself, one person jokingly threatens to lynch her with a paracord.

Preppers have their own language.  They carry “BOBs,” or “bug-out bags,” knapsacks stuffed with provisions necessary to “get out of dodge” when “TSHTF” (the shit hits the fan). “TEOTWAWKI” is instantly recognizable as shorthand for “the end of the world as we know it.” But that “end” means something different to everyone. They’re not all anticipating a rapture. Preoccupations range from super-viruses like Ebola to natural disasters (solar flares, hurricanes) to man-made catastrophes (an ISIS attack, socioeconomic collapse leading to utter mayhem).

Ultimately, preppers are united by the goal of not going down without a fight. Some, like Rick and Jane, fled self-described “cushy, corporate lives” after a traumatic incident—in their case, getting roughed up in a parking garage. They left Florida for a 53-acre homestead in North Carolina, where they’ve planted “gardens of survival” designed to look like overgrown underbrush. Others come from a long line of live-off-the-land folk who want to continue the lineage and become less dependent on store-bought, prepackaged foods. Most distrust the political climate here and abroad.

If a disaster happens, they fear that neighbors will turn on each other. For most preppers, densely populated areas are nightmare scenarios. “Get you a paintball gun with pepper-spray balls, then get to New Jersey, steal a car, and head for the mountains,” suggests Doug, a potbellied, disheveled man staffing the Carolina Readiness Supply tent, peddling how-to manuals and dehydrated foods. There’s a sense of righteousness, of arrogance, of smug pity for people who don’t share the same certainty about the impending descent into anarchy. Many people are proudly wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “I’ll Miss You When You’re Gone.” One presenter sums up the preppers’ rallying cry: “If someone from the city tries to come to the rural areas we’ve settled, we’ll stand on the county line with our shotguns and tell them no.”

But the people at prepper camp are rational, reasoned, and eager to share their knowledge and skills, swapping tips about purchasing things like German surplus military phones—untraceable by the NSA—or night-vision goggles for spotting a sentry standing guard in a tree. They trade tips for stockpiling antibiotics without tipping off doctors or law-enforcement officials. These preppers are impassioned, but not hysterical or anxiously raving about the end of days—very different from the sensationalized caricatures portrayed on National Geographic’s hit TV show Doomsday Preppers. And they’re not so rare as you might think: In a 2012 nationally representative survey by Kelton Research, 41 percent of respondents said they believed stocking up on resources or building a bomb shelter was a more worthwhile investment than saving for retirement.

Six white tents are lined with folding chairs set up for rapt lecture audiences. In one, the lecturer keeps his dark sunglasses on. He’s not trying to conjure an air of mystery: Dale Stewart recently burned his retinas while kayaking in South Africa and shooting footage for an upcoming IMAX movie. It’s hard to imagine this calm man with a congenial Southern drawl, beatnik white beard, black tunic, and neckerchief grappling with hippos in the Nile or tagging vicious polar bears on ice floes. Although he has a homestead in Asheville, the former rodeo clown—who also happens to have a master’s in physics—spends much of his time on solo kayaking expeditions or teaching fear-inoculation tactics to the military.

Here, Stewart is lecturing about emergency conditioning. “You can have all the great gear, but if you don’t have the right mindset, you’re not gonna make it,” he says. He poses a question that preppers reiterate again and again: How far would you go to keep your family safe? The key is figuring out what will motivate you to fight, imagining every possible horrific scenario, and fantasizing about it in lurid detail until you’ve overridden your flight-or-fight response and replaced it with a carefully choreographed plan. This method of visualizing the worst altercation is called “battle-proofing.” Stewart’s rationale: If you play the scenario out in your head, it becomes part of your retinue of experiences, and you can practice reacting.

It’s not about tuning fear out. "I hope I never lose fear," he says. "Fear is a warning that something is about to happen." Instead, Stewart wants to teach people how to harness fear as a catalyst for action. Stewart wants to teach people how to combine physical prowess with thoughtful rationality. “You can drop me pretty much anywhere on the planet, and I’d be fine,” he says. “My wife would get lost in a parking lot.”

One observer’s cell phone keeps ringing. In an ironic ode to self-reliance and resilience, the sound is the Mockingjay’s song from TheHunger Games films, which imagine what it would be like to flourish in a post-apocalyptic world.

Thunder rolls gently in the distance as two dozen attendees walk through the rain to meet Richard Cleveland at the edge of the pond. Unsurprisingly, preppers aren’t fazed by a little drizzle. Most continue to stroll the knolls as though it’s 80 degrees and sunny. Cleveland has angry, red wounds on his knees—probably a result of enthusiastic off-road foraging. The founder of the Earth School in Asheville, North Carolina, has been teaching programs about wild edibles for more than two decades. His slate-blue eyes blaze when he complains that Big Pharma won’t subsidize studies about herbal medicines—he claims that he has a number of friends who have cured their prostate cancers by infusing their diet with dandelion leaves, something the University of Windsor is looking into. The group follows his lead, scanning the ground for trampled herbs. He stoops every few feet to scoop and chomp on a plant like jewelweed, after which he elicits a jovial whoop. “Luscious!” he exclaims.

The foragers tromp past the pond, where kids in bright bathing suits splash in the shallow water or drift in kayaks, their yellow paddles and orange life vests popping against a sea of khaki, army fatigues, and black t-shirts bearing the phrase, “It Wasn’t Raining When Noah Built The Ark.” Richard points to an evergreen, encouraging people to guess its medicinal use. Turns out the tree is tsuga canadensis, or eastern hemlock: The needles can be steeped in boiled water for an emergency dose of vitamin C as a way of preventing scurvy.

At its core, prepping is about wanting to be self-sufficient and self-reliant. The preppers aren’t all brawny men whose quick-twitch muscles appear ready to activate at a moment’s notice. Some are elderly, like a well-coiffed woman in her eighties with manicured nails and wrinkled fingers stacked with onyx-and-gold costume jewelry. It’s hard to envision her swinging a gun, but she carries one in her tasteful leather purse. Others are wheelchair bound, unable to navigate the grounds’ hilly terrain on their own.

On the final evening, people bundle up in heavy sweaters and coats and pack into the main tent for the keynote lecture by Dr. William R. Forstchen, a 63-year-old novelist and professor of history at Montreat College. His novel One Second After tracks the hypothetical aftermath of a fictional electromagnetic-pulse event in a sleepy American town. The gathering has the feeling of a sermon, with an impassioned question-and-answer session conjuring an evangelical call and response. There’s a sense of solemnity, responsibility, and chosen-ness hanging in the air. There’s also a feeling of painful loneliness—ostracism from other family members, the awkwardness of explaining your cache of semi-automatic weapons to a prospective lover—temporarily assuaged by this community, where everyone understands, and agrees. “Forget about political correctness,” Dr. Forstchen begs. “You are the future of America, and America is worth fighting for.”

As the fog rolls in again and lightning crackles higher up in the mountain, the crowd retreats to tents, trailers, and cars. Suddenly, the parking lot is empty and dark, the beam of a flashlight revealing just a swath of grass at the end of a dirt road in a small Southern town.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/welcome-to-prepper-camp/381351/

Tags: Destination / Nation / Travel

At U.S. college, Irish militant archive becomes diplomatic time bomb

- Thursday, May 08, 2014

The arrest of Irish politician Gerry Adams may have its roots in a closed archive of taped interviews with former paramilitaries in Northern Ireland that researchers now fear could be used to charge others over sectarian violence from decades ago.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams looks down during a meeting in Dublin, January 28, 2007, to vote on whether to support policing arrangements in Northern Ireland.

U.S. and British authorities last year won a court battle against Boston College in Massachusetts to obtain interviews from the oral history archive. They said the records were needed to investigate the 1972 killing of a widowed mother by the IRA, a notorious incident from the period known as "The Troubles."

The legal victory created a diplomatic time bomb. Material previously made public from the archive has linked Adams to the death of the woman, Jean McConville. Adams has always denied membership of the IRA and involvement in the murder.

The success of police from Northern Ireland in gaining access to the material now means that other interviews could in theory also be obtained from the archive and form the basis of new prosecutions, said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist now living in New York who helped oversee the oral history project that ran from 2001 to 2006.

The interview subjects included 26 IRA members and 20 members of the opposing Ulster Volunteer Force. All were promised confidentiality until their deaths.

"The American government has to make it clear this is not a repository of evidence the PSNI can come raid at will," Moloney said, referring to Northern Ireland's police force.

Moloney and another researcher, former-IRA-member-turned-historian Anthony McIntyre, say the U.S. government offered too much help to Northern Ireland's authorities without regard to the impact that it could have on peace agreements that were negotiated to end the decades long sectarian violence.

Adams' arrest has led to threats against McIntyre, his wife, said. He had been labeled an informer on Twitter, Carrie Twomey said in a telephone interview. McIntyre lives in the Republic of Ireland, in the district that Adams represents as a member of Ireland's parliament.

Boston College declined on Thursday to discuss the archive, a collection of digital and analog recordings and printed transcripts still kept by the institution, whose leafy campus sits just outside the city.

Moloney said some interviewees have sought to have their material from the archive returned. A college representative said he could not immediately comment on that point. Government officials had not sought more archive material, he added.

EARLIER THAN EXPECTED

The archive was begun just after the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement ended fighting in Northern Ireland. Its academic sponsors envisioned it being opened to the public decades later as an academic resource on the conflict that killed thousands.

Two events thrust the material onto the public stage sooner. First was a 2010 book by Moloney, "Voices from the Grave," that drew on interviews given for the archive by IRA commander Brendan Hughes and David Ervine, a UVF militant and later a political figure. Both had died, allowing their stories to be told under the terms of their agreements with the project.

In the book Moloney quotes Hughes connecting Adams to McConville's death and ordering her burial as an informer. Adams has always vigorously denied being involved in her death.

Separately, Irish newspapers in 2010 published reports about Dolours Price, an IRA member imprisoned for a 1973 London bombing, that tied Adams to McConville's death and other incidents.

The publications drew new police attention and led to the subpoenas, which Boston College sought to limit in what became a test of academic freedom.

Whatever confidentiality the interviewees expected, the researchers "made promises they could not keep: that they would conceal evidence of murder and other crimes until the perpetrators were in their graves," U.S. prosecutors said in a 2011 court filing.

They called the Belfast project "laudable" but added that "the promise of absolute confidentiality was flawed."

In 2012 a federal appeals court in Boston upheld the subpoenas, citing a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that journalists have no privilege against being forced to testify in a criminal proceeding.

The court later cut from 85 to 11 the number of interviews the college had to turn over. The interviews were given by seven individuals whose identities were kept secret and were referred to by a single letter.

ACADEMIC SPLIT

The legal battle by the researchers and Boston College drew support from some academics who worried the process could have a chilling effect on how historians study conflicts.

Without more protection, researchers face "potentially crippling uncertainty for those who gather information from confidential sources, including academic researchers," stated one amicus brief filed by a group of social scientists.

Others, however, felt the Boston College project fell outside the bounds of the usual academic practices.

Mary Marshall Clark, director of Columbia University's Center for Oral History Research, said professional oral historians should have strict guidelines to follow and aim to make their interviews public rather than keeping them secret for decades, as the Belfast Project planned.

"We cannot protect people," she said. If controversial subjects come up, she said, "we would tell them in the interview, when they talk about that, they better think about that and call their lawyers."

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Colorado lawmakers approve plan for pot banking

- Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Colorado lawmakers approved the world's first financial system for the marijuana industry Wednesday, a network of uninsured cooperatives designed to give pot businesses a way to access basic banking services.

The plan seeks to move the marijuana industry away from its cash-only roots. Banks routinely reject pot businesses for even basic services such as checking accounts because they fear running afoul of federal law, which considers marijuana and its proceeds illegal.

The result: Pot shop owners deal in large amounts of cash, which makes them targets for criminals. Or they try to find ways around the problem, like drenching their proceeds in air freshener to remove the stink of marijuana and try to fool traditional banks into accepting their money.

"This is our main problem: Financial services for marijuana businesses," said Sen. David Balmer, R-Centennial. "We are trying to improvise and come up with something in Colorado to give marijuana business some opportunity, so they do not have to store large amounts of cash."

Colorado became the first state to allow recreational pot sales, which started Jan. 1. Washington state will follow suit, with retail sales expect to start in July.

The U.S. Treasury Department said in February that banks could serve the marijuana industry under certain conditions. With the industry emerging from the underground, states want to track marijuana sales and collect taxes. It's a lot easier to do that when the businesses have bank accounts.

But most banks have shrugged at the Treasury guidelines, calling them too onerous to accept marijuana-related clients. The result is a marijuana industry that still relies largely on cash, a safety risk for operators and a concern for Colorado's pot regulators.

"This is not something that we can wait for any further," said another banking sponsor, Rep. Jonathan Singer, D-Longmont.

The bill approved Wednesday would allow marijuana businesses to pool money in cooperative s, but the co-ops would on take effect if the U.S. Federal Reserve agrees to allow them to do things like accept credit cards or checks.

Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper supports the pot bank plan and is expected to sign it into law, though a spokesman said Wednesday the governor had yet to review the final language.


Lawmakers from both parties supported the banking co-ops as a way to properly audit marijuana shops and to make sure they're paying all their taxes. Dispensary owners came to the Capitol this session to tell of their difficulties paying taxes and utilities in cash and the dangers of dealing in cash.

Robin Goldfarb smokes
 marijuana in Denver on April 19, 2014.

"It is very easy to see somebody get killed over this issue," Marijuana Industry Group Director Michael Elliott testified last month.

The plan had bipartisan support, though some Republicans said that the effort won't pass federal muster.

A few banks are accepting marijuana clients in light of the federal regulations.

Numerica Credit Union in eastern Washington state is accepting limited business from marijuana growers and processors, The Spokesman-Review reported Wednesday.

Colorado pot shop owners say a small number of credit unions will do business with them, too, though no banks or credit unions have said so publicly.

Countries that don't ban marijuana don't have banking systems unique to the drug.

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E-cig industry awaits looming federal regulation

- Tuesday, April 22, 2014

RICHMOND, Va.-Smokers are increasingly turning to battery-powered electronic cigarettes to get their nicotine fix. They're about to find out what federal regulators have to say about the popular devices.

The Food and Drug Administration will propose rules for e-cigarettes as early as this month. The rules will have big implications for a fast-growing, largely unregulated industry and its legions of customers.

Regulators aim to answer the burning question posed by Kenneth Warner, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health: "Is this going to be the disruptive technology that finally takes us in the direction of getting rid of cigarettes?"

The FDA faces a balancing act. If the regulations are too strict, they could kill an industry that offers a hope of being safer than cigarettes and potentially helping smokers quit them. But the agency also has to be sure e-cigarettes really are safer and aren't hooking children on an addictive drug.

Members of Congress and several public health groups have raised safety concerns over e-cigarettes, questioned their marketing tactics and called on regulators to address those worries quickly.

Here's a primer on e-cigarettes and their future:

WHAT ARE E-CIGARETTES?

E-cigarettes are plastic or metal tubes, usually the size of a cigarette, that heat a liquid nicotine solution instead of burning tobacco. That creates vapor that users inhale.

Smokers like e-cigarettes because the nicotine-infused vapor looks like smoke but doesn't contain the thousands of chemicals, tar or odor of regular cigarettes. Some smokers use e-cigarettes as a way to quit smoking tobacco, or to cut down.

The industry started on the Internet and at shopping-mall kiosks and has rocketed from thousands of users in 2006 to several million worldwide who can choose from more than 200 brands. Sales are estimated to have reached nearly $2 billion in 2013.

Tobacco company executives have noted that they are eating into traditional cigarette sales. Their companies have jumped into the business.

There's not much scientific evidence showing e-cigarettes help smokers quit or smoke less, and it's unclear how safe they are.

WHAT IS THE FDA LIKELY TO DO?

The FDA is likely to propose restrictions that mirror those on regular cigarettes.

The most likely of the FDA's actions will be to ban the sale of e-cigarettes to people under 18. Many companies already restrict sales to minors, and more than two dozen states already have banned selling them to young people.

Federal regulators also are expected to set product standards and require companies to disclose their ingredients and place health warning labels on packages and other advertising.

Where the real questions remain is how the agency will treat the thousands of flavors available for e-cigarettes. While some companies are limiting offerings to tobacco and menthol flavors, others are selling candy-like flavors like cherry and strawberry.

Flavors other than menthol are banned for regular cigarettes over concerns that flavored tobacco targets children.

Regulators also must determine if they'll treat various designs for electronic cigarettes differently.

Some, known as "cig-a-likes," look like traditional cigarettes and use sealed cartridges that hold liquid nicotine. Others have empty compartments or tanks that users can fill their own liquid. The latter has raised safety concerns because ingesting the liquid or absorbing it through the skin could lead to nicotine poisoning. To prevent that, the FDA could mandate child-resistant packaging.

The FDA also will decide the grandfather date that would allow electronic cigarette products to remain on the market without getting prior approval from regulators — a ruling that could force some, if not all, e-cigarettes to be pulled from store shelves while they are evaluated by the agency.

The regulations will be a step in a long process that many believe will ultimately end up being challenged in court.

WHAT ABOUT MARKETING?

There are a few limitations on marketing. Companies can't tout e-cigarettes as stop-smoking aids, unless they want to be regulated by the FDA under stricter rules for drug-delivery devices. But many are sold as "cigarette alternatives."

The FDA's proposals could curb advertising on TV, radio and billboards, ban sponsorship of concerts and sporting events, and prohibit branded items such as shirts and hats. The agency also could limit sales over the Internet and require retailers to move e-cigarettes behind the counter.

WHAT DOES THE INDUSTRY THINK?

The industry expects regulations, but hopes they won't force products off shelves and will keep the business viable.

E-cigarette makers especially want the FDA to allow them to continue marketing and catering to adult smokers — some of whom want flavors other than tobacco. They believe e-cigarettes present an opportunity to offer smokers an alternative and, as NJOY Inc. CEO Craig Weiss says, make cigarettes obsolete.

"FDA can't just say no to electronic cigarettes anymore. I think they also understand it's the lesser of the two evils," said James Xu, owner of several Avail Vapor shops, whose wooden shelves are lined with vials of liquid nicotine flavor, such as Gold Rush, Cowboy Cut and Forbidden Fruit.

WHAT DO PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS THINK?

Some believe lightly regulating electronic cigarettes might actually be better for public health overall, if smokers switch and e-cigarettes really are safer. Others are raising alarms about the hazards of the products and a litany of questions about whether e-cigarettes will keep smokers addicted or encourage others to start using e-cigarettes, and even eventually tobacco products.

"This is a very complicated issue and we must be quite careful how we proceed," said David Abrams, executive director of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at the American Legacy Foundation, in a recent panel discussion. "I call this sort of the Goldilocks approach.

The regulation must be just right. The porridge can't be too hot, and it can't be too cold."

In this Jan. 17, 2014 file photo, a smoker demonstrates an e-cigarette in Wichita Falls, Texas. Soon, the Food and Drug Administration will propose rules for e-cigarettes. The rules will have big implications for a fast-growing industry and its legions of customers.

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Canadian eco activist pleads guilty to US arsons

- Sunday, October 13, 2013

PORTLAND, Oregon-A Canadian environmentalist pleaded guilty Thursday to setting a string of fires across the U.S. West that torched a ski resort and other buildings in what the Justice Department has called the "largest eco-terrorism case" in U.S. history.

Rebecca Rubin, who surrendered to authorities a year ago after a decade on the run, was accused of helping the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front carry out 20 acts of arson across several U.S. states between 1996 and 2001.

Rubin, 40, pleaded guilty to 12 counts of arson and conspiracy as part of a plea deal that prosecutors said could see her spend between five and 7½ years in prison. She is scheduled to be sentenced in Portland Jan. 27.


Prosecutors have said that the arson campaign stood out for the number of fires set and damage caused, which was estimated at more than $40 million. The charges against Rubin were consolidated from cases filed in Oregon, Colorado and California.

Rubin, shackled at the ankles and wearing blue prison togs, pleaded guilty of involvement in an arson attack on the Bureau of Land Management Wild Horse Facility near Burns, Oregon, in 1998 and a similar facility in California in 2001. The horses were released in both incidents.

She also admitted involvement in the attempted arson of U.S. Forest Service Industries in Medford, Oregon, and pleaded guilty to eight counts of arson for the 1998 torching of a Vail ski resort in Colorado.


Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer said the Vail plan "was motivated by environment and animal welfare concerns" and that she had carried fuel up the mountain, where it was hidden in the snow for later use. She did not participate in the actual arson that took place later, he said.

Rubin did not speak in court other than to enter her pleas and to repeatedly say that she understood all the proceedings and provisions of her agreement and was not coerced.

In 2007, 10 other defendants in the group pleaded guilty to various counts and received prison terms from 37 to 156 months. Two others charged in the case remain at large.

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Drugs, crime rings follow US oil boom

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BILLINGS, Mont. — The booming Bakken oil patch that's given a major boost to U.S. energy production has emerged as a new front in the fight against drug trafficking.

Trucks sit outside temporary worker housing in North Dakota.

Organized crime rings are popping up in the Northern Plains, with traffickers sensing opportunity in the thousands of men and women lured there by the hope of a big paycheck.

Law-enforcement officers across the region have teamed up to crack down on the trafficking, netting one of their most significant indictments so far this week — a dozen drug arrests in Montana and four in North Dakota.

Authorities say more arrests are in the works as part of investigations conducted through a new interagency partnership. But with drug offenses, violence and property crimes on the upswing, they face an uphill climb to reduce the spiking crime rate.

Related: Oil boom traffic taxes rural police

The changes at play in once-quiet prairie communities were demonstrated this week with the shooting of an FBI agent in the small, unincorporated town of Keene, N.D. The agent, who was not seriously injured, was executing a search warrant as part of an oil patch-centered investigation, said U.S. Attorney for North Dakota Tim Purdon.

"More people equals more money equals more crime," Purdon said, adding that the federal shutdown is making the situation worse.

"We're in this very, very serious fight against organized crime for control of the streets of the oil patch, and I've got about half of my employees home on furlough," he said. "We're in this fight now with one arm tied behind our back."

The law enforcement partnership, known as Project Safe Bakken, has been at work since last year. Montana Attorney General Tim Fox said it could not be made public until arrests and indictments were made in the cases that were unsealed this week.

A parallel effort in North Dakota in July charged 22 people with conspiracy to sell heroin and other drugs on an Indian reservation in the heart of the oil patch. Authorities linked that case to a national drug trafficking ring seeking to make inroads in the Bakken.

In the Montana case, the government alleges that 49-year-old Robert Ferrell Armstrong, aka Dr. Bob, of Moses Lake, Wash., brought in large quantities of methamphetamine from his home state and distributed them in the Bakken and elsewhere in Montana through a network of couriers.

At the time of his arrest, Armstrong also was wanted for failing to check in with a community corrections officer in Washington state, where he has a history of drug, gun and assault charges, said Washington Corrections spokeswoman Norah West.

ND farmer finds oil spill while harvesting

Armstrong and several others among the 12 people arrested face federal drug conspiracy charges that carry potential sentences of 10 years to life in prison if they are convicted.

The severity of the potential sentences reflects the volume of drugs that the ring allegedly sold, said Armstrong's public defender, Tony Gallagher. Precise quantities were not detailed in the affidavit.

Armstrong and the other defendants pleaded not guilty during initial court appearances.

Gallagher and Montana U.S. Attorney Mike Cotter said they could not discuss details of the case beyond what was in the grand jury indictment unsealed Wednesday.

"Mr. Armstrong has tendered a plea of not guilty, which puts at issue each and every charge in the indictment," Gallagher said.

This week's arrests follow sharp increases in crime across the board since the Bakken boom began about five years ago.

A review of FBI crime reports show violent crime was up 64 percent and property crimes up 63 percent in Montana's four Bakken counties between 2009 and 2012, the period for which the most complete data was available. Both categories showed decreases elsewhere in the state in those years.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox acknowledged that law enforcement agencies have been forced to play catch-up with dramatic changes in the Bakken that few anticipated a decade ago.

But Fox stressed that the economic benefits from the boom have been substantial. More than 20,000 people have poured into eastern Montana and western North Dakota since oil production began its meteoric rise in 2008. Tens of thousands more are expected in the next several years as the boom continues.

"With the good, comes some bad," Fox said. "There's a lot to be done. I'm personally committed to making sure we address the public safety issues."

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Senate leads hunt for shutdown and debt limit deal

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WASHINGTON -Racing the calendar and the financial markets, Senate leaders have taken the helm in the search for a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avert a federal default.

Republican senators, from left, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida, leave the White House on Friday after meeting with President Barack Obama regarding the government shutdown and debt ceiling.

"This should be seen as something very positive, even though we don't have anything done yet, and long ways to go," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Saturday, describing his opening conversation hours earlier with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

"The real conversation that matters now is the one taking place between McConnell and Reid," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., were also involved in the high-level bargaining.

Sunday marked the 13th day of a federal shutdown that has continued to idle 350,000 government workers, left hundreds of thousands of others working without pay and curtailed everything from veterans' services to environmental inspections.

More ominously, Thursday drew another day closer — the day the Obama administration has warned that the U.S. will deplete its borrowing authority and risk an unprecedented federal default. Economists say that could send shockwaves throughout the U.S. and global economies.

The pressure was on both parties but seemed mostly on Republicans, who polls show are bearing the brunt of voters' wrath over the twin standoffs. And though the financial markets rebounded strongly late last week on word of movement in the talks, lawmakers of both parties were warily awaiting their reopening this week.

No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois said the financial markets did better last week because they assumed that "eventually the damsel will be plucked from the tracks."

Referring to the approach of Thursday's deadline, he added: "As we start hearing the train whistle, I think that there may be a different view. I don't want to see it happen because it's going to hurt a lot of innocent people."

Republicans are demanding spending cuts and deficit reduction in exchange for reopening the government and extending its borrowing authority. President Barack Obama and other Democrats say they want both measures pushed through Congress without condition and would agree to deficit reduction talks afterward.

Out of play, for now, was the Republican-led House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told GOP lawmakers early Saturday that his talks with the president had ground to a halt.

Though the Senate was leading the search for a deal, the House and its fractious Republicans remained a possible headache in the coming week.

"At the end of the day, whatever they do still has to come through here," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who is close to House leaders.

Congress lumbers while threatened default looms

Also sidelined, at least for now, was an effort by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to assemble a bipartisan coalition for a plan to fund the government briefly and extend the $16.7 trillion debt limit, in exchange for steps like temporarily delaying the medical device tax that helps fund the health care law.

Democrats said Collins' plan curbed spending too tightly and Reid said it was going nowhere. Collins said she would continue seeking support for it.

Senate Republicans dealt Democrats an expected setback on Saturday by derailing a Democratic measure extending the debt limit through 2014 without any conditions. The vote was 53-45 to start debating the Democratic measure — seven short of the 60 votes needed to overcome GOP obstruction tactics.

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Did prehistoric cavemen discover recycling?

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If you thought recycling was just a modern phenomenon championed by environmentalists and concerned urbanites — think again.

There is mounting evidence that hundreds of thousands of years ago, our prehistoric ancestors learned to recycle the objects they used in their daily lives, say researchers gathered at an international conference in Israel.

"For the first time we are revealing the extent of this phenomenon, both in terms of the amount of recycling that went on and the different methods used," said Ran Barkai, an archaeologist and one of the organizers of the four-day gathering at Tel Aviv University that ended Thursday.

Just as today we recycle materials such as paper and plastic to manufacture new items, early hominids would collect discarded or broken tools made of flint and bone to create new utensils, Barkai said.

The behavior "appeared at different times, in different places, with different methods according to the context and the availability of raw materials," he told The Associated Press.

From caves in Spain and North Africa to sites in Italy and Israel, archaeologists have been finding such recycled tools in recent years. The conference, titled "The Origins of Recycling," gathered nearly 50 scholars from about 10 countries to compare notes and figure out what the phenomenon meant for our ancestors.

Recycling was widespread not only among early humans but among our evolutionary predecessors such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals and other species of hominids that have not yet even been named, Barkai said.

Avi Gopher, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist, said the early appearance of recycling highlights its role as a basic survival strategy. While they may not have been driven by concerns over pollution and the environment, hominids shared some of our motivations, he said.

"Why do we recycle plastic? To conserve energy and raw materials," Gopher said. "In the same way, if you recycled flint you didn't have to go all the way to the quarry to get more, so you conserved your energy and saved on the material."

The clean side of Waste Management

Some cases may date as far back as 1.3 million years ago, according to finds in Fuente Nueva, on the shores of a prehistoric lake in southern Spain, said Deborah Barsky, an archaeologist with the University of Tarragona. Here there was only basic reworking of flint and it was hard to tell whether this was really recycling, she said.

"I think it was just something you picked up unconsciously and used to make something else," Barsky said. "Only after years and years does this become systematic."

That started happening about half a million years ago or later, scholars said.

For example, a dry pond in Castel di Guido, near Rome, has yielded bone tools used some 300,000 years ago by Neanderthals who hunted or scavenged elephant carcasses there, said Giovanni Boschian, a geologist from the University of Pisa.

"We find several levels of reuse and recycling," he said. "The bones were shattered to extract the marrow, then the fragments were shaped into tools, abandoned, and finally reworked to be used again."

At other sites, stone hand-axes and discarded flint flakes would often function as core material to create smaller tools like blades and scrapers. Sometimes hominids found a use even for the tiny flakes that flew off the stone during the knapping process.

At Qesem cave, a site near Tel Aviv dating back to between 200,000 and 420,000 years ago, Gopher and Barkai uncovered flint chips that had been reshaped into small blades to cut meat — a primitive form of cutlery.

Some 10 percent of the tools found at the site were recycled in some way, Gopher said. "It was not an occasional behavior; it was part of the way they did things, part of their way of life," he said.

He said scientists have various ways to determine if a tool was recycled. They can find direct evidence of retouching and reuse, or they can look at the object's patina — a progressive discoloration that occurs once stone is exposed to the elements. Differences in the patina indicate that a fresh layer of material was exposed hundreds or thousands of years after the tool's first incarnation.

Some participants argued that scholars should be cautious to draw parallels between this ancient behavior and the current forms of systematic recycling, driven by mass production and environmental concerns.

"It is very useful to think about prehistoric recycling," said Daniel Amick, a professor of anthropology at Chicago's Loyola University. "But I think that when they recycled they did so on an 'ad hoc' basis, when the need arose."

Participants in the conference plan to submit papers to be published next year in a special volume of Quaternary International, a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the study of the last 2.6 million years of Earth's history.

Norm Catto, the journal's editor in chief and a geography professor at Memorial University in St John's, Canada, said that while prehistoric recycling had come up in past studies, this was the first time experts met to discuss the issue in such depth.

Catto, who was not at the conference, said in an email that studying prehistoric recycling could give clues on trading links and how much time people spent at one site.

Above all, he wrote, the phenomenon reflects how despite living millennia apart and in completely different environments, humans appear to display "similar responses to the challenges and opportunities presented by life over thousands of years."

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Google unveils plans for user identity to appear in ads

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SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc plans to launch new product-endorsement ads incorporating photos, comments and names of its users, in a move to match the "social" ads pioneered by rival Facebook Inc that is raising some privacy concerns.

The Google logo is seen on the top of its China headquarters building behind a surveillance camera in Beijing.

The changes, which Google announced in a revised terms of service policy on Friday, set the stage for Google to introduce "shared endorsements" ads on its sites as well as millions of other websites that are part of Google's display advertising network.

The new types of ads would use personal information of the members of Google+, the social network launched by the company in 2011.

If a Google+ user has publicly endorsed a particular brand or product by clicking on the +1 button, that person's image might appear in an ad. Reviews and ratings of restaurants or music that Google+ users share on other Google services, such as in the Google Play online store, would also become fair game for advertisers.

Facebook no longer lets users hide from search

The ads are similar to the social ads on Facebook, the world's No. 1 social network, which has 1.15 billion users.

Those ads are attractive to marketers, but they unfairly commercialize Internet users' images, said Marc Rotenberg, the director of online privacy group EPIC.

"It's a huge privacy problem," said Rotenberg. He said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission should review the policy change to determine whether it violates a 2011 consent order Google entered into which prohibits the company from retroactively changing users' privacy settings.

Users under 18 will be exempt from the ads and Google+ users will have the ability to opt out. But Rotenberg said users "shouldn't have to go back and restore their privacy defaults every time Google makes a change."

Information Google+ users have previously shared with a limited "circle" of friends will remain viewable only to that group, as will any shared endorsement ads that incorporate the information, Google said in a posting on its website explaining the new terms of service.

Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, operates the world's most popular Web search engine as well as other online services such as maps, email and video website YouTube.

The revised terms of service are the latest policy change by Google to raise privacy concerns. Last month, French regulators said they would begin a process to sanction Google for a 2012 change to its policy that allowed the company to combine data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+. Google has said its privacy policy respects European law and is intended to create better services for its users.

Google's latest terms of service change will go live on November 11.

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It's not just us:Even American animals are getting fatter

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Everyone knows Americans are fat and getting fatter, and everyone thinks they know why: more eating and less moving.

Norm Lopez cleans himself in front of his Sacramento home in August. Lopez has a fervent, almost cult-like following in the community. Do the same factors that influence human weight gain influence pet weight gain?

But the "big two" factors may not be the whole story. Consider this: Animals have been getting fatter too. The National Pet Obesity Survey recently reported that more than 50 percent of cats and dogs—that's more than 80 million pets—are overweight or obese. Pets have gotten so plump that there's now a National Pet Obesity Awareness Day. (It was Wednesday.) Lap dogs and comatose cats aren't alone in the fat animal kingdom. Animals in strictly controlled research laboratories that have enforced the same diet and lifestyle for decades are also ballooning.

In 2010, an international team of scientists published findings that two dozen animal populations—all cared for by or living near humans—had been rapidly fattening in recent decades. "Canaries in the Coal Mine," they titled the paper, and the "canaries" most closely genetically related to humans—chimps—showed the most troubling trend. Between 1985 and 2005, the male and female chimps studied experienced 33.2 and 37.2 percent weight gains, respectively. Their odds of obesity increased more than 10-fold.

How People and Animals in Isolation Die Sooner

To be sure, some of the chimp obesity crisis may be caused by the big two. According to Joseph Kemnitz, director of the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, animal welfare laws passed in recent decades have led caretakers to strive to make animals happier, often employing a method known to any parent of a toddler: plying them with sugary food. "All animals love to eat, and you can make them happy by giving them food," Kemnitz said. "We have to be careful how much of that kind of enrichment we give them. They might be happier, but not healthier."

And because they don't have to forage for the food, non-human primates get less exercise. Orangutans, who Kemnitz says are rather indolent even in their native habitats in Borneo and Sumatra, have in captivity developed the physique of spreading batter.

Still, in "Canaries in the Coal Mine," the scientists write that, more recently, the chimps studied were "living in highly controlled environments with nearly constant living conditions and diets," so their continued fattening in stable circumstances was a surprise. The same goes for lab rats, which have been living and eating the same way for thirty years.

The potential causes of animal obesity are legion: ranging from increased rates of certain infections to stress from captivity. Antibiotics might increase obesity by killing off beneficial bacteria. "Some bacteria in our intestines are associated with weight gain," Kemnitz said. "Others might provide a protective effect."

What's Really Making Us Fat?

But feral rats studied around Baltimore have gotten fatter, and they don't suffer the stress of captivity, nor have they received antibiotics. Increasingly, scientists are turning their attention toward factors that humans and the wild and captive animals that live around them have in common: air, soil, and water, and the hormone-altering chemicals that pollute them.

Hormones are the body's chemical messengers, released by a particular gland or organ but capable of affecting cells all over the body. While hormones such as testosterone and estrogen help make men masculine and women feminine, they and other hormones are involved in a vast array of functions. Altering or impeding hormones can cause systemic effects, such as weight gain.

More than a decade ago, Paula Baille-Hamilton, a visiting fellow at Stirling University in Scotland who studies toxicology and human metabolism, started perusing scientific literature for chemicals that might promote obesity. She turned up so many papers containing evidence of chemical-induced obesity in animals (often, she says, passed off by study authors as a fluke in their work) that it took her three years to organize evidence for the aptly titled 2002 review paper: "Chemical Toxins: A Hypothesis to Explain the Global Obesity Epidemic." "I found evidence of chemicals that affect every aspect of our metabolism," Baille-Hamilton said. Carbamates, which are used in insecticides and fungicides, can suppress the level of physical activity in mice. Phthalates are used to give flexibility to plastics and are found in a wide array of scented products, from perfume to shampoo. In people, they alter metabolism and have been found in higher concentrations in heavier men and women.

The FDA Did Not Do Enough to Restrict Antibiotics Use in Animals

In men, phthalates interfere with the normal action of testosterone, an important hormone for maintaining healthy body composition. Phthalate exposure in males has been associated with a suite of traits symptomatic of low testosterone, from lower sperm count to greater heft. (Interference with testosterone may also explain why baby boys of mothers with higher phthalate levels have shorter anogenital distances, that is, the distance between the rectum and the scrotum. Call it what you want, fellas, but if you have a ruler handy and find that your AGD is shorter than two inches, you probably have a smaller penis volume and a markedly higher risk of infertility.)

Baille-Hamilton's work highlights evidence that weight gain can be influenced by endocrine disruptors, chemicals that mimic and can interfere with the natural hormone system.

A variety of flame retardants have been implicated in endocrine disruption, and one chemical originally developed as a flame retardant—brominated vegetable oil, or BVO—is banned in Europe and Japan but is prevalent in citrusy soft drinks in the U.S. Earlier this year, Gatorade ditched BVO, but it's still in Mountain Dew and other drinks made by Gatorade's parent company, PepsiCo. (Many doctors would argue that for weight gain, the sugar in those drinks is the primary concern.) PepsiCo did not respond to a request for comment, but shortly after the Gatorade decision was made a company spokeswoman said it was because "some consumers have a negative perception of BVO in Gatorade."

And then there are the newly found zombie chemicals, which share a nasty habit—rising from the dead at night—with their eponymous horror flick villains. The anabolic steroid trenbolone acetate is used as a growth promoter in cattle in the U.S., and its endocrine disrupting metabolites—which wind up in agricultural run-off water—were thought to degrade quickly upon exposure to sunlight. Until last month, when researchers published results in Science showing that the metabolites reconstitute themselves in the dark.

Says Emily Dhurandhar, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama-Birmingham: "Obesity really is more complex than couch potatoes and gluttons."

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Arrest in "Baby Hope" Case:NYPD

- Saturday, October 12, 2013

'Baby Hope' case: Cousin confesses to sexually assaulting, killing toddler Anjelica Castillo more than two decades ago

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announces dishwasher Conrado Juarez, 52, of the Bronx, has been arrested in connection with the murder. The 4-year-old's remains were found rotting in a picnic cooler along Henry Hudson Parkway on July 23, 1991.

Police say they have solved the 22-year-old mystery of "Baby Hope," the child whose body was found dumped in a cooler in the woods in upper Manhattan in 1991, announcing the arrest Saturday of a cousin they say sexually assaulted and smothered the 4-year-old girl.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said 52-year-old Conrado Juarez was visiting relatives, staying at his sister's house in Queens, when he attacked the girl, whose real name is Anjelica Castillo.

Juarez allegedly told police on Friday that when Anjelica went motionless, he summoned his sister into the room, and she ordered him to get rid of the body, bringing him the cooler. The pair then took a livery cab to Manhattan from the sister's Queens home, and dumped the cooler, he said.

It was not clear if he had a lawyer. Kelly said Juarez's sister is no longer alive.

The girl's body was found by construction workers on July 23, 1991 along the Henry Hudson Parkway near Dyckman Street.

Her identity was not known until this week. Detectives in the cold case had even paid for her headstone, inscribing it with the message "Because We Care," Kelly said.

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Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement Saturday that investigators never gave up.

"They made it their mission to identify this young child, to lay her to rest and to bring her killer to justice," he said.

Investigators launched a renewed push this summer for leads in the case, and it was amid that publicity for "Baby Hope" that a tipster contacted police, saying she thought she might know the child's sister, now an adult.

That tip led detectives to relatives of the girl, and eventually her mother. This week, the child's real name was finally learned.

Police said Anjelica was staying with Juarez's sister because her parents had recently split up.

A law enforcement official tells NBC 4 New York that the mother claims she lived in fear of the baby's father and was afraid to go to police after her daughter disappeared.