Colorado Legalizes Recreational Marijuana and Industrial Hemp

In a victory for freedom and common sense, it appears that marijuana will be legalized for recreational use in Colorado. Amendment 64: Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is leading 53.18% to 46.82% with 56% of counties partially reporting.

Amendment 64 legalizes the personal use, possession, and limited home-growing of marijuana legal for adults 21 years of age and older; establishes a system in which marijuana is regulated and taxed similarly to alcohol; and allows for the cultivation, processing, and sale of industrial hemp.

In particular, the law removes all legal penalties for personal possession of up to one ounce of marijuana and allows people to grow up to six marijuana plants at their home in an enclosed locked space.

A study by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy found that marijuana legalization could produce more than $120 million annually in new revenue and savings within the first five years. Wholesale recreation cannabis in Colorado will be taxed at 15% with the first $40 million allocated to the Public School Capital Construction Assistance Fund.

In addition, its passage is expected to create a plethora of new jobs, especially in industrial hemp. Hemp is a non-psychoactive strain of the cannabis plant and an agricultural crop that is widely cultivated across the globe for its seed and fiber. Hemp has thousands of modern industrial uses from paper, textiles, construction materials, fuel, to dietary supplements. Significantly, it is much more sustainable than current competitor materials. Watch the video below for the potential of industrial hemp:



Two other states, Oregon and Washington, are also voting on similar measures. Early results show Washington state will likely legalize marijuana as well with the Yes votes leading by double digits for Initiative Measure 502. Meanwhile it appears Oregon's Measure 80 is headed for defeat.

Massachusetts also voted by a dominant margin (63%) to legalize medical marijuana bringing the total number of medical cannabis states to 18.

Source: Activist Post

Pot Legalization Vote State by State

Synthetic Biologist: Cloned Children, ‘Handpicked Genes’ Right Around the Corner

If you’ve been following the sci-tech section of any major news site over the past few years, chances are you have seen more than a few stories discussing the possibility of extending the highly problematic act of genetic modifications onto the human race. A step that has been foretold by science fiction novels and simultaneously discounted as conspiracy for years. According to one leading synthetic biologist with a passion for eugenics (meaning ‘selective breeding’) and cloning technology, it may be just around the corner.

Scientist George Church envisions a world where traits are pre-determined by parents for their offspring — children created via cloning technology to create ‘better’ humans. He also claims to be creating Neanderthal cells within his laboratory, holding an inventory of Neanderthal ‘parts’ across the lab space. In the near future, he even plans to ‘create’ a Neanderthal baby within his lab.

You may think that Church is just some mad scientist cooped up in his lab experimenting with genetics in his spare time, but he actually is heavily recognized within the scientific community where like-minded eugenicists seek to push cloning technology into the moral and social stratosphere in order to fulfill their visions. Working as a professor at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to more than 20 major corporations, Church thinks that it’s only a matter of time until someone injects an argument into the mainstream media that allows for full-scale cloning technology to be unleashed upon the world.

In an interview with Bloomberg, he said:

“At some point, someone will come up with an airtight argument as to why they should have a cloned child. At that point, cloning will be acceptable. At that point, people will already be choosing traits for their children.”

Of course over 40,000 patents currently exist on human genetics, granting the very ownership of the human genome to major corporations who have been seeking to secure a monopoly over the human coding for over 100 years. Altogether, more than 20 percent of the human genome belongs to corporations. This would give major corporations the ability to actually ‘sell’ genes to parents for their new cloned offspring, generating an entire new market for biotechnology giants.

‘Faulty Genetics’ Means no Right to Fertility

And as for those with ‘faulty’ genetics, they may actually not even be allowed to reproduce. In a similar fashion to the rampant eugenics campaign that ran from 1929 to 1974 and claimed a ‘better society’ through forcing sterilizations upon criminals and those with mental health disorder. All in all, more than 60,000 were sterilized nationwide. But now modern technology exists to actually claim that certain individuals will be criminals or suffer from disease in the future. This, in the mind of the eugenicists, gives them the authority to preemptively sterilize certain sectors of the population. This is the same thinking that is used to remove body parts preemptively in those with a particular cancer gene to avoid the onset of cancer.

But the madness doesn’t end there. According to George Church, they also may create various ‘types’ of cloned children such as Neanderthal babies. He stated:

“We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let’s say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid.”

It has already been revealed that many scientists have already secretly created human-animal hybrid experiments in the lab using similar technology. In fact, the ‘horrendous’ creations actually led to some scientists to call for new rules on the subject. Creations that Church asserts will eventually be commonplace if he and his group of Monsanto-esque scientists get their way.

It is concerning enough that genetic modification within crops has led to the onset of tumors, organ damage, and other serious concerns. The health implications alone surrounding the direct genetic modification of humans is enough to sound the alarm. When considering the Orwellian aspects of reproduction control and rampant cloning mixed in with outlandish hybrid experiments, it’s easy to see that there’s simply no place for the unscrupulous usage of such biotechnology. The argument will, however, be thrown right into the mainstream media using a heartwarming story about how cloning can help fuel research for heart disease and cancer — yet another scam.

And if George Church is right, such a scenario could be right around the corner.

Source: Natural Society

Report reveals Japanese nuclear safety experts received large sums of money from nuclear industry

Destroyed unit 3 reactor building of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is seen in Fukushima prefecture, Monday, Feb. 20, 2012. (Issei Kato)

While the “profoundly man-made disaster” at the Fukushima nuclear power plant continues unabated with independent experts continually blocked from gaining access, it has now been revealed that the six members of a Japanese government team drafting the new nuclear reactor safety standards have received tens of thousands of dollars from the nuclear industry.

According to a report put out by Japan’s Kyodo News a whopping four out of six experts on the panel drafting new safety standards have received funds from companies directly involved in the nuclear industry.

The grants, donations and compensation range from 3 million yen (around $37,290) to over 27 million yen (around $335,600) each, according to data released by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA).

While the NRA claimed that the members of the panel “have been selected in line with rules, and there should be no problem,” Kyodo News rightly points out that critics “say the members’ judgments might be swayed by the wishes of donors, exposing safety regulations to the risk of being watered down.”

Indeed it seems so painfully obvious that it is somewhat laughable to even qualify such a statement with the word “might.”

The NRA requires experts like the ones assigned to draft the new safety standards to disclose the funds they receive but they have “no rules for disqualifying them in light of such information,” according to AFP.

One of the experts, Akira Yamaguchi, a professor at Osaka University, received at least 27.14 million yen in both donations and research grants from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., a company which just happens to manufacture nuclear plant equipment, along with “other relevant entities,” according to the report.

Akio Yamamoto, a professor at Nagoya University, received 10.1 million yen, also from a builder and operator of nuclear plants, Japan Atomic Power Co., along with other companies.

Yutaka Abe, a professor at Tsukuba University, received 5 million yen from various entities including a laboratory of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the same company behind the atrocious Fukushima disaster.

Tomoyuki Sugiyama, a Japan Atomic Energy Agency researcher, received 3 million yen from Nuclear Fuel Industries, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the spent fuel pool at reactor four remains precarious and technology is being developed which, in theory at least, could assist the disturbingly slow cleanup process.

TEPCO, in what appears to be an attempt to maintain at least some shred of legitimacy, “plans to set up a regional headquarters in Fukushima prefecture to better oversee local reconstruction, decontamination and compensation payments, Kyodo and other media said,” according to AFP.

Do you think these apparent conflicts of interest can be considered unimportant or justifiable as the Japanese authorities apparently do? Let us know in the comments section.

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Source: End the Lie

ICE Releases Documents Detailing Electronic Surveillance Problems . . . and then Demands Them Back a Year Later

This is a first for us in all of EFF's history of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has demanded we return records it gave us more than a year ago. The release of these documents doesn't endanger national security or create a risk to an ongoing law enforcement investigation. Instead, it seems that ICE simply wants to stymie further FOIA requests from EFF as we try to get answers about the government's electronic surveillance procedures.

It started a year ago when ICE produced records in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. The records show that companies like Comcast, Cricket Communications, Metro PCS, Southern Linc Wireless, and T-Mobile either pushed back on or failed to comply with specific requests for information on their customers. For example, in response to one of ICE’s pen register/trap and trace orders, Southern Linc said it “did not like the wording of [the] order” and “would not give ‘real time’ ping location for [the] phone, [it] would only give 1 hour old history.” ICE also reported that it experienced “technical issues . . . on almost a daily basis” trying to get data on a suspect from Cricket Communications.” And Comcast gave ICE the runaround for a month before it turned over IP log history.

These records are the first we’ve received in response to our FOIA litigation that actually provide some of the information we asked for—specific examples of problems federal agents have faced getting companies to comply with communications surveillance orders. We filed this request two years ago after the New York Times reported that the FBI and other agencies were pushing Congress to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to require companies like Blackberry, Skype and Google to build back doors into their systems. And ICE should be commended for releasing these records with only minimal redactions.

However, ICE should not be commended for what happened next. Based on the important information revealed in this limited set of records, we asked ICE to give us copies of all other records that looked like these. It didn’t seem like a tough request to fill, given that these seem to be standardized reports—and that we included a copy of the records so that ICE would know what to look for.

But ICE refused. First the agency argued EFF’s request was too broad—that it couldn’t possibly search through all its individual offices to find these forms (despite the fact that ICE officers seemed to be encouraged to send the forms to a central fax number). So, to lessen the burden on the agency, we narrowed our FOIA request to cover only a handful of specific ICE offices that reported having problems.

It took ICE almost a year to get back to us on the narrowed request, and when it did, its response was frustrating. Not only did the agency decide that it would still be too burdensome to conduct any kind of a search for similar records, but ICE also told us it never should have turned over the original records in the first place—and it wanted them back. The problem for ICE is, these records have already been in the public’s hands for over six months—we filed them as an exhibit (pdf) in our FOIA litigation (pdf) in March 2012, and they’re readily available on the PACER docket for the case (or from the Internet Archive).

This is yet another example of the federal government failing to comply with the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act—reverting to secrecy when it should be promoting transparency. It’s hard to imagine what harm could come from the release of these documents. ICE was careful to block out any information in the records that would identify the target of the investigation, and the information that isn't blocked out seems to reinforce the government's position on CALEA.

And it’s another disappointment from an administration that lauded its commitment to transparency on the first day the President took office four years ago. We can only hope that if the President wins this tight election, he’ll use the next four years to fulfill this commitment.

Read ICE's reports here and the agency's letters to EFF here, here, and here.

Source: EFF