6. Obama administration pushed cooked intelligence about gas attack in Syria, says Seymour Hersh.
For most of 2013, U.S. president Obama and secretary of state John Kerry beat the war drums for an attack on Syria. Mainstream media drones dutifully performed the usual stenography for the Powers that Bomb, uncritically repeating the Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s claim that Syrian president Assad had used “unconventional weapons” against his own people — specifically, sarin gas.
Months after this narrative was discounted in a quickly forgotten AP news report, respected investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that Obama refused to acknowledge that classified U.S. intelligence reports had identified the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliated group, as having the technical means of producing sarin gas. “When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad,” Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books in December.
5. Harper government dismantling world-class fisheries library.
As reported last December by Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, the Harperites are “dismantling one of the world’s top aquatic and fishery libraries as part of its agenda to reduce government as well as limit the role of environmental science in policy decision-making.” Five of the seven libraries are being sold off, including the Eric Marshall Library of Freshwater Institute at the University of Manitoba, where the public has been allowed to scavenge through rare and irreplaceable volumes and documents. “Nearly 40,000 books and papers were relocated to a federal library in Sidney, B.C” but some material was dumpster-bound, Nikiforuk reports.
4. Harper government “Library of Alexandria” fire sale, part 2.
This astounding act of scientific immolation involving the fisheries library followed a September item in the Ottawa Citizen that Library and Archives Canada entered into a secret deal that would hand over exclusive rights to books and documents owned by Canadian taxpayers to a private firm for digitization. Critics fear this 10-year deal will result in a monthly fee for Canadian taxpayers attempting to access information that is rightfully theirs. Bureaucrats reportedly put the secret negotiations on hold once it caught attention in the Canadian press.
3. U.S. Department of Homeland Security is preparing for another financial collapse and/or public insurrection... or something.
In February 2013, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed an open purchase order by DHS for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition — enough firepower to conduct an Iraq-sized war for two decades, according to a Forbes magazine analysis. The military purchases by DHS, which includes heavily armoured vehicles, echoes another underreported story: the increasing militarization of U.S. police departments by Pentagon-acquired materiel, to the point where SWAT teams in American towns and cities have begun to resemble U.S. covert strike forces working in foreign war zones.
2. Former Canadian government scientists condemn GMOs.
With the exception of a few smaller Canadian papers and a small calendar item in the Globe and Mail, a western Canada tour by two former federal scientists on food security and genetic tampering failed to register a blip on the newsroom radar. Dr. Shiv Chopra, a scientist with Health Canada for 35 years, was fired after going public with concerns about potential human health risks from bovine growth hormone. Dr. Thierry Vrain is a retired soil biologist and genetic engineer with a 30-year career with Agriculture Canada. “I am informing them that 80 per cent of the food we now eat contains herbicides — including Monsanto’s Roundup — which are also antibiotics. There are traces of these toxins in all our bodies, doing damage to our gut, a slow, insidious process,” Vrain claimed in a press release for the talk.
1. Solar installation costs fall through the floor.
Some good news. In the U.S. in 2013, solar power produced the energy equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors. “The cost of installing photovoltaic solar arrays has dropped to $3 per watt of electricity they produce — about the same as coal-powered plants cost to build — creating a watershed moment in the development of clean energy,” according to tech writer Lucas Mearian in ComputerWorld. The exponential growth of solar tech suggests the energy sector is approaching the extraction and production peak of King Cong (Coal Oil Nuclear Gas).
