Pilotless Drones to Battle Pot Growers

Forest Service Buys a Pair of Flying Drones to Help Find Marijuana Growers in California

By MATTHEW BROWN The Associated Press BILLINGS, Mont.

The U.S. Forest Service has bought a pair of flying drones to track down marijuana growers operating in remote California woodlands.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the pilotless, camera-equipped aircraft will allow law enforcement officers to pinpoint marijuana fields and size up potential dangers before agents attempt arrests.

Rey said there are increasing numbers of marijuana growers financed by Mexican drug cartels using California's forests to stage their operations.

"We're dealing with organized efforts now — not just a couple of hippies living off the land and making some cash on the side," Rey said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

The purchase of the two SkySeer drones, for a combined $100,000, reflects rising interest in remote-controlled aircraft among law enforcement, science and other government agencies.

Once used almost exclusively by defense and intelligence agencies, drones are now routinely flown by the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the Mexican border. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hopes to use them on weather missions.

The two Forest Service drones differ from those used by other agencies. They're lighter — less than five pounds apiece — and can fly for only about an hour.

Sold by Octatron of La Verne, Calif., the battery-powered SkySeer can fly at under 30 miles per hour, has a two-mile range and is operated by a two-man crew on the ground, according to the company. One of the drones bought by the Forest Service was equipped with a thermal camera for nighttime flights.

The purchase was disclosed in documents obtained through a freedom of information request filed by the group Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility.

The group's executive director, Jeff Ruch, questioned whether the Forest Service needed the machines. He said the purchase reflected a "boys with toys" mentality within the agency and that manned aircraft flyovers were adequate.

Rey dismissed the criticism. "The fact is, our guys work in remote locations and knowing more about what they're going to confront will make them a lot safer," he said.

More than 2.3 million marijuana plants were eradicated from Forest Service lands nationwide last year, according to figures provided by the office of Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell.

In California's 18 national forests, an estimated 6 million marijuana plants have been removed since 2000. Rey said forests in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains have seen the most activity.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ron Paul at Joint Economic Committee - April 2

Poll: 81 Percent Think US on Wrong Track

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.

The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.

The survey comes as housing turmoil has rocked Wall Street amid an economic downturn. The economy has surpassed the war in Iraq as the dominating issue of the U.S. presidential race, and there is now nearly a national consensus that the United States faces significant problems, the poll found.

A majority of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school say the United States is headed in the wrong direction, according to the survey, which was published on The New York Times' Web site.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was doing better.

The newspaper said Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the poll's inception in the early 1990s. Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992. Two in three people said they believed the economy was already in recession.

Still, the approval rating of President George W. Bush did not change since last summer, with 28 percent of respondents saying they approved of the job he was doing.

The poll also found that Americans blame government officials for the housing crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.

Americans favored help for people but not for financial institutions in assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.

Respondents were considerably more open to government help for homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.

The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Economy loses 80,000 jobs

Employers trim jobs for third straight month in March while unemployment jumps to 5.1%, a nearly three-year high.

Last Updated: April 4, 2008: 9:08 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- U.S. employers slashed jobs on their payrolls for the third straight month in March and unemployment rose to a nearly three-year high, offering the latest signs that the economy has fallen into a recession.

The Labor Department's much anticipated report showed a net loss of 80,000 jobs in the month, marking the longest period of decline since early 2003.

February's loss was revised to 76,000 jobs. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast that payrolls would fall by 50,000 in the latest reading.

The job losses in both January and February were revised sharply higher, adding an additional 67,000 job losses to the previous readings. The Labor Department now estimates that the economy has shed 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.

The job losses were widespread, with the battered construction sector losing 51,000 jobs and manufacturing employment falling by 48,000. But there were also losses in key service sector industries. Retail employment dropped by 12,000 jobs, and business and professional service employers cut staff by 35,000.

The unemployment rate jumped from the 4.8% reading in February to 5.1%, the highest level since May 2005. Economists had forecast that unemployment would rise to 5%.

The unemployment rate is based on a separate survey of households, rather than the employer survey that produces the closely watched payroll number.

The household survey gave an even grimmer view of the job losses in the economy, with the number of Americans saying they were unemployed soaring by 434,000, the biggest jump in that reading since October 2001, right after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The job outlook will be a key factor influencing interest rate decisions by the Federal Reserve when it meets on April 29 and 30.

Earlier this week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made his bleakest and bluntest assessment on the economy's condition. The central bank chief told a joint Congressional committee that a recession is possible in the first half of this year.

First Published: April 4, 2008: 8:39 AM EDT

Find this article at: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/04/news/economy/jobs_march/?postversion=2008040409

NAFTA Countries to Introduce Simultaneous Legislation to Stop SPP

Dana Gabriel
OpEdNews
April 3, 2008

Elected representatives from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico have agreed to a plan to introduce simultaneous legislation in an effort to stop the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America. This cross border cooperation will go a long way in further exposing the North American Union agenda.

In addition, legislators have agreed to launch a Task Force to renegotiate NAFTA that will be chaired by NDP Trade Critic Peter Julian. It also includes U.S. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the Honourable Yeidckol Polevnsky (Senator of Mexico State and Vice-president of the Mexican Senate) and the Honourable Victor Quintana (Deputy of the State Chihuahua, Mexico). This is all in an effort to overhaul NAFTA and make it a more fair trade deal. Julian will also be working with Kaptur and Mike Michaud (D-ME) to try and defeat the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Julian said, “The NDP has been campaigning across Canada to expose and stop the SPP. We’ve held over 20 public forums in more than twenty cities and a dozen more are being planned for the spring of 2008. These forums have been held to speak out on the grave concerns surrounding the SPP and to help ensure that Canadians from coast to coast to coast get informed and have their say. This trinational initiative with colleagues from the U.S. and Mexico takes us to a new stage in our fight to stop the SPP.”

Discontent towards NAFTA is festering in Mexico, which has seen huge protests by farmers. Since 1994, one quarter of the rural population of Mexico and two million jobs have left the country. Mexican Senator Polevnsky said, “It is indispensable that legislators from all three North American partner countries work together to design an alternative project that takes into account each nations sovereignty, environmental protection, economic competitiveness, migration, and labor rights.”

With all this talk about renegotiating NAFTA, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins recently acknowledged that he believes that it is too important to do away with or make any dramatic changes to. He pointed to the fact that, regardless who wins the American presidential election, NAFTA will stand. The SPP is an expansion of NAFTA, and is essentially the framework for a North American Union. On the heels of the next SPP Leader Summit that will be held in New Orleans on April 21 and 22, opposition towards a North American Union is growing in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.

The citizens of all three NAFTA countries must demand more transparency in regards to the SPP. Some believe that it might be better to scrap NAFTA and just start from scratch. The reality remains the same - in a North American Union, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico would cease to exist as sovereign nations. This is a decision that should not be left up to corporate elites, bureaucrats or politicians, but to the will of the people.

Individual bankruptcy filings up 27%

CNNMoney
April 3, 2008

NEW YORK — The number of individuals filing for bankruptcy surged during the first-quarter as American households struggled to stay on top of debt, according to a report released Wednesday.

The American Bankruptcy Institute said that consumer bankruptcy filings increased 27% nationwide in the first three months of the year, compared with the same period last year. In March alone, 86,165 individuals filed for consumer bankruptcy - a 13% increase over the 76,120 cases filed in February.

“Bankruptcies are rising due to the heavy burden of household debt and growing mortgage problems,” said ABI Executive Director Samuel J. Gerdano. “We expect this trend to continue through 2008.”

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Another KBR Rape Case

Karen Houppert
The Nation
April 3, 2008

Editor’s Note: Lisa Smith is a pseudonym used on request. Additional reporting by Te-Ping Chen. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Houston

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. “Right then my whole life was turned upside down,” she says.

What follows is the story she told me in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Smith says.

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