Tuesday, Dec 16th
Last update11:31:28 PM GMT
Greenpeace should be worried. A second large company has accused the prominent environmental group of violating the potent U.S. racketeering law. In a lawsuit filed August 22, Energy Transfer Partners accused Greenpeace of spreading lies and inciting vandalism to raise money and hamper completion of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.
The legal attack follows a similar suit against Greenpeace brought last year on behalf of the Canadian timber company Resolute Forest Products Inc.
Houston is facing worsening historic flooding in the coming days as Tropical Storm Harvey dumps more rain on the city, swelling rivers to record levels and forcing federal engineers on Monday to release water from area reservoirs in hopes of controlling the rushing currents.
Harvey was the most powerful hurricane to strike Texas in more than 50 years when it came ashore on Friday near Corpus Christi, about 220 miles (354 km) south of Houston, and has killed at least two people. It has since lingered around Texas’ Gulf Coast, where it is forecast to remain for several more days, drenching parts of the region with a year’s worth of rain in the span of a week.
So are we heading for a Mad Max-style future? I don’t think so. After having lived through Donald Trump we’ll surely just call him Max. Trump is behaving so strangely, we’re probably about a month away from not being allowed to make jokes about him.
He’s gone past Charlie Sheen and we’re now entering the bald Britney phase. It’s hard to imagine how America can go back to having a normal president after this. The next president will have to be a car with guns for wheels. After Trump, a Saturday Night Live sketch about Mike Pence would look like something by Samuel Beckett.
Caps on troop levels in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria mandated by the Obama administration have led to an elaborate Pentagon accounting system that conceals thousands of troops from the public — one that is quickly unraveling as the Trump administration prepares to send more troops to the region.
With new plans to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, the military is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain a practice that purposely doesn't count certain troops in the battle zone that military officials insist was not designed to be misleading but many critics now assert is at best an officially sanctioned charade.
Officials at the Counterintelligence Mission Center—which Pompeo has asked to report directly to him—say they are wary of a director overseeing their work who seems intent on appeasing the president. “People have to watch him,” one official said in the report, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It’s almost as if he can’t resist the impulse to be political.”
Former FBI Director James Comey will deliver a keynote address to Howard University students in the coming weeks and take on a part-time post giving lectures at the school.
The university said Wednesday that Comey, who was fired earlier this year by President Donald Trump, would speak at the convocation slated for Sept. 22, which is designed to welcome students to the historically black university.
Workers in Charlottesville draped giant black covers over two statues of Confederate generals on Wednesday to symbolize the city's mourning for a woman killed while protesting a white nationalist rally.
The work began around 1 p.m. in Emancipation Park, where a towering monument of Gen. Robert E. Lee on horseback stands. Workers gathered around the monument with a large black drape. Some stood in cherry-pickers and others used ropes and poles to cover the statue as onlookers took photos and video. Some of the crowd cheered as the cover was put in place.
Snack company KIND dumped 45,485 pounds of sugar in Times Square Tuesday to spark conversation about how much added sugar children consume.
The American Heart Association recommends children eat no more than 100 calories (about six teaspoons) of added sugars, also known as free sugars, daily. But, children are eating much more than that — over 270 calories according to data in the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Most comes from sweetened drinks.
The Trump administration has ordered researchers to stop work on an independent evaluation of potential health effects from mountaintop removal coal mining.
The Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) last year, under then-President Barack Obama, had commissioned the research into the possible connections between certain health risks and living near current or former surface mining sites in Appalachia.
But the agency sent a letter Friday to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which it had contracted to do the independent review, asking it to stop its work immediately.
TVNL Comment: This is an outrage. People are dying so that others can profit. Donald Trump is an evil influence on this country and the world.
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