Protesters against Arizona’s new immigration law have held rallies at Union Square in New York and other places across the country.

If you cross the North Korean border illegally, you get 12 years hard labor.

If you cross the Iranian border illegally, you are detained indefinitely.

If you cross the Afghan border illegally, you get shot.

If you cross the Saudi Arabian border illegally, you will be jailed.

If you cross the Chinese border illegally, you may never be heard from again.

If you cross the Venezuelan border illegally, you will be branded a spy and your fate will be sealed.

If you cross the Mexican border illegally, you will be thrown into a political prison to rot.

If you cross the U.S. border illegally, you get:

1. A job
2. A Drivers license
3. A social security card
4. Welfare,
5. Food stamps
6. Credit cards
7. Subsidized rent or a loan to buy a house
8. Free education
9. Free health care
10. A lobbyist in Washington
11. Billions of dollars worth of public documents printed in your language
12. The right to carry your country’s flag while you protest that you don’t get enough respect.

Of course, North Korea, China, and the others are communist dictatorships, but the fact remains that our immigration policy is self-destructive. It encourages illegal immigration and the bankruptcy of the states. It also creates social and racial tensions.

Once upon a time, legal immigrants flocked to America to escape authoritarian government and persecution. The huddled masses cited on the Statue of Liberty were in search of liberty, independence, and prosperity.

Most illegal immigrants are not in search of liberty. They are looking for economic opportunity and in many instances the freebies handed out by the state at the expense of the producers.

No nation can survive with an unchecked and unrestrained tidal wave of poverty-stricken foreigners flowing over its borders.

Once upon a time, immigration policies ensured that immigrants arriving on our shores were not only free of disease, but had marketable skills and would not impose an economic burden on the country. Immigrants were expected to accept American culture and speak the language.

Now the exact opposite is the case.

“An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide,” wrote the famed British historian Arnold Toynbee. America — through its immigration and economic policies — is well on its way to committing suicide.

“The histories of bilingual and bi-cultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy,” writes historical scholar Seymour Lipset.

Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon have all faced crises of national existence as minorities have pushed for autonomy and independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. France confronts recurring problems with Basques, Bretons, Corsicans, and most recently a growing Muslim minority that has resulted in violence.

“Globalization is defined by cross-border connectivity, including porous borders, which serve to expedite flows of goods while at the same time increase the level of immigration – both legal and illegal,” explains Paul A. Harris, Assistant Professor of Public Administration, International Studies and Philosophy at Augusta State University.

Former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm explains how the process of destroying America works. “Turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country,” he says. “History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.”

The most effective weapon in this process of destruction, Lamm explains, is multiculturalism — the demand that all arriving people retain their culture at the expense of the prevailing culture. “Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together,” writes Benjamin Schwarz.

Louis Beam writes:

In modern times multiculturalism is instituted from the top down as an elitist ruling class tool used to play one or more racial or ethnic groups against another

The ensuing cultural melee serves the political designs, economic goals and power needs of elitist rulers and their sponsors. This technique was developed by Marxist ideologues who used multiculturalism in Russia to divide and conquer resistance to the institution of a communist state.

The same internationalists that sponsored Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin as the multicultural leaders of the Soviet state from their banking houses in New York, similarly sponsor the multicultural leaders of the United States, Canada, and Europe today.

Beam explains how an interlocking network of foundations such as Ford and Carnegie, international banking empires such as Rockefeller and Rothschild, and government agencies firmly in their control work in tandem with corporate media outlets such as the New York Times, CBS, and Hollywood, to promote, foster, and institute multiculturalism.

La Raza , Spanish for “The Race”, is an organization at the forefront of the effort to flood America with illegal immigrants and institute “amnesty,” is a creature of the Ford Foundation. La Raza is lavishly funded by the bankers at Citigroup and multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart. To date, the Ford Foundation has showered $12.9 million on the National Council of La Raza.

It is not coincidental the immigration issue has reached a breaking point at the same time as much of the world is wracked by economic crisis. In response to this manufactured crisis, the elite have called for “global governance” and a “unified global approach” to economic and social issues. Immigration is part of the effort to merge nations into a union.

In the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere, thousands of pro-illegal immigration demonstrators have called for “amnesty” and demanded the tidal wave of illegal immigrants continue it destructive course. Arizona’s attempt to control its border — in lieu of the federal government refusing to do so — is the lightning rod that has catapulted to the point of violence.

This is the beginning of national suicide, as Toynbee has suggested.

The rights group submitted their report this week, titled “Torture not Treatment: Electric Shock and Long-Term Restraint in the United States on Children and Adults with Disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Center,” after an in-depth investigation revealed use of restraint boards, isolation, food deprivation and electric shocks in efforts to control the behaviors of its disabled and emotionally troubled students.

Findings in the MDRI report include the center’s practice of subjecting children to electric shocks on the legs, arms, soles of feet and torso — in many cases for years — as well as some for more than a decade. Electronic shocks are administered by remote-controlled packs attached to a child’s back called a Graduated Electronic Decelerators (GEI).

The disabilities group notes that stun guns typically deliver three to four milliamps per shock. GEI packs, meanwhile, shock students with 45 milliamps — more than ten times the amperage of a typical stun gun.

A former employee of  the center told an investigator, “When you start working there, they show you this video which says the shock is ‘like a bee sting’ and that it does not really hurt the kids. One kid, you could smell the flesh burning, he had so many shocks. These kids are under constant fear, 24/7. They sleep with them on, eat with them on. It made me sick and I could not sleep. I prayed to God someone would help these kids.”

Noting that it believes United States law fails to provide needed protections to children and adults with disabilities, MDRI calls for the immediate end to the use of electric shock and long-term restraints as a form of behavior modification or treatment and  a ban on the infliction of severe pain for so-called therapeutic purposes.

“Torture as treatment should be banned and prosecuted under criminal law,” the report states.

The U.S. Department of Justice opened a “routine investigation” of the center in February of this year in response to a September 2009 letter signed by 31 disability organizations claiming that the center violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Judge Rotenberg CEO and founder Dr. Matthew L. Israel began his first program in California back in 1977. In 1981, a 14-year old boy died face down, tied to his bed, while living in the California center.  Dr. Israel was not held responsible for the death. After an investigation by the State of California, Israel relocated to Rhode Island, and then to Massachusetts, where his facility still operates today.

Mother Jones magazine published an extensive investigative report on the Rotenberg Center in 2007 titled “School of Shock.” Reporter Jennifer Gonnerman asked, “How many times do you have to zap a child before it’s torture?”

Children at the Judge Rotenberg Center are often shackled, restrained and secluded for months at a time, the report says.  Social isolation, and food deprivation as forms of punishment are common.  Mock and threatened stabbings — to forcibly elicit unacceptable behaviors resulting in electric shock punishments (Labeled as Behavioral Research Lessons or BRLs, by the center) were reported to MDRI as well as state regulatory bodies.

A former student of the center reportedly tells MDRI, “The worst thing ever was the BRLs. They try and make you do a bad behavior and then they punish you. The first time I had a BRL, two guys came in the room and grabbed me – I had no idea what was going on. They held a knife to my throat and I started to scream and I got shocked. I had BRLs three times a week for stuff I didn’t even do. It went on for about six months or more. I was in a constant state of paranoia and fear. I never knew if a door opened if I would get one. It was more stress than I could ever imagine. Horror.”

Behaviors that the center deemed “aggressive,” as well as those considered “minor,” or “non-compliant” — such as raising one’s hand without permission — are all considered punishable by electric shocks, restraints, and other punishments to students.

“One girl who was blind, deaf and non-verbal was moaning and rocking,” a former teacher says in the report. “Her moaning was like a cry. The staff shocked her for moaning. Turned out she had broken a tooth. Another child had an accident in the bathroom and was shocked.”

The rights group investigation found that the Rotenberg center is the only known facility in the United States, “Or perhaps the world,”  that employs the use of electricity, long-term restraints and other punishments to deliberately inflict pain upon its children and then refer to it as “treatment.” The electric shocks alone are cited as having possible long-term effects such as muscle stiffness, impotence, damage to teeth, scarring of the skin, hair loss, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), severe depression, chronic anxiety, memory loss and sleep disturbances.

The MDRI report states that more than any other source for its information, they relied upon information readily obtained from the Judge Rotenberg Center’s own website.

In response to MDRI’s report, the Judge Rotenberg Center said, “There is no credible evidence that for these most severe forms of behavior disorders, there is any pharmacological or psychological treatment that can effectively treat these students or even keep them safe. JRC is the only program willing to address the reality of these children’s disorders and endure the political firestorm in order to save these children and give them an education and a future.”

The complete rebuttal from the center can be read in full at JRC’s website.

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Stunned witnesses reported seeing a comet-like fireball in the sky and a number of local residents took photos of the strange ball of light.

A local bus driver, giving his name only as Yu, said he had seen a strange glowing object in the sky late on Wednesday afternoon.

‘The thing suddenly ran westwards fast, like it was escaping from something,’ he said.

Inbound flights were diverted to nearby airports while outbound flights were delayed for three to four hours.

Some Chinese experts claimed that the strange sight was actually debris from a US intercontinental ballistic missile.

Chinese officials later said that they knew what the object had been but were unable to make it public because there was a ‘military connection.’

A Chinese airport was closed after this mysterious object was spotted in the sky.

Arcing over Zhejiang’s provincial capital Hangzhou, the UFO appeared to glow with an eerie white light and left a bright trail in its wake.

Xiaoshan Airport was closed after the UFO was detected at around 9 pm and dozens of flights had to be diverted.

Photo’s Of The Chinese UFO

There were 2 published photo’s of the Unidentified Object. However the first is rumored to be a fake time-lapsed photo of a helicopter. The Second photo has yet to be explained and more accurately depicts what was captured by amateur video.

Photo 1:

Photo 2:

Time Lapse Photo’s Of Helicopters

Amateur Video Of The Chinese UFO

Joe Kernan said “Your basic tenant here is that we havent really fixed anything….for what caused the problems during the crisis and we’re going to see it rear its ugly head again here soon?”

Vickers later replied: “Unless the plunge protection team comes in over the next couple of days, the markets are looking very dicey here.”

When a disgusted Joe Kernan asks if Vickers was making a joke about the PPT, the response is “absolutely not – it’s common knowledge that the government steps in and does things to step on the gas and buy stock here and there.” To which Byron Wien has a strong retort: “I don’t believe it.” All that and much more in the clip below. In the meantime, the market is sure having a field day with stocks as once again bad news are discarded and the smallest glimmer of positivity serves as a springboard for yet another ramping short covering spree.

At most, pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, expected a slap on the wrist for breaking new animal welfare laws which ban the sale of pets to under-16s.

Instead, the great-grandmother was taken to court, fined £1,000, placed under curfew – and ordered to wear an electronic tag for two months.

The punishment is normally handed out to violent thugs and repeat offenders.

The prosecution of Mrs Higgins and her son Mark is estimated to have cost taxpayers £20,000 and has left her with a criminal record.

Mark, 47, was also fined and ordered to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work in the community. Last night, as an MP criticised the magistrates, Mrs Higgins – who has run the pet shop for 28 years – said the family’s eight-month ordeal had left them traumatised.

She added: ‘It’s ridiculous. I mean, what danger am I that I have to wear an electronic tag? These last few months have been a very stressful time.’

The seven-week curfew imposed by the court means she is unable to babysit her great-grandson at his home or go to bingo sessions with her sister, and will be unable to attend a Rod Stewart concert after tickets were bought for her by her nephew, actor Will Mellor.

Her son said: ‘I think it’s a farce. What gets me so cross is that they put my Mum on a tag – she’s nearly 70, for goodness’ sake.

‘She’s a great-grandma so she won’t be able to babysit a newborn baby. You would think they have better things to do with their time and money.’

Mr Higgins claimed the undercover operation was a clear case of entrapment – when a person is encouraged by someone in some official capacity to commit a crime – and said the case should never have gone to court.

He said: ‘The council sent the 14-year-old in to us. It is hard to tell how old a lad is these days. He looked much older than 14.’

He added that his mother almost fainted in the dock when magistrates told her she could go to prison for the offence. ‘I told her they wouldn’t send her to prison but she was still worried,’ he said. ‘The only other time she has been in court is when she did jury service.’

Under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 it is illegal to sell pets – including goldfish – to children under the age of 16 unless they are accompanied by an adult. Pet shops must also provide advice on animal welfare to buyers. The maximum penalty is imprisonment for up to 12 months, or a fine of up to £20,000, or both.

The Higgins family’s ordeal began when council officials heard that Majors Pet Shop in Sale, Greater Manchester, was selling animals to children.

They sent the 14-year-old schoolboy into the shop to carry out a test purchase and Mr Higgins sold him the goldfish without questioning his age or providing any information about the care of the fish.

A council officer in the shop at the time also noticed a cockatiel in a cage that appeared to be in a poor state of health. A vet found the bird had a broken leg and eye problems. It was later put down.

Mrs Higgins and her son were charged with selling the fish to a person aged under 16 and with causing unnecessary suffering to a cockatiel by failing to provide appropriate care and treatment.

Pleading guilty, Mrs Higgins told Trafford magistrates the cockatiel had not been for sale and she had been bathing its eye daily.

She had intended to take it to the vet but had been distracted and worried because her other son was in hospital.

The court heard that Mrs Higgins had possessed a licence to sell animals for many years and had never had any problems before.

She was fined £1,000 and given a community order with a curfew requiring her to stay home between 6pm and 7am for seven weeks.

Mrs Higgins did not have her licence to sell animals removed, but both she and her son were told that if they ever appeared in court for a similar offence they could face a jail sentence.

David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth, said: ‘You simply couldn’t make it up. It is absolutely ludicrous that old ladies should be hounded through the courts and electronically tagged for something like this.

‘At a time when courts are being told not to lock up career burglars we have them issuing severe punishments like this on little old ladies.’ Mr Davies, who has served as a special constable for three years, said: ‘Not only is it traumatic for her but it is a complete waste of time and taxpayers’ money. It is ridiculous.
‘Instead of getting 14-year-old boys to act in this type of sting they should have them trying to nail people who sell drugs outside our schools.’

Trafford Council said it launched an investigation after an unsubstantiated complaint that the shop had sold a gerbil to a 14-year-old girl with learning disabilities. The council claimed the animal later died after the child placed it in a disposable coffee cup with a plastic lid on top.

But the complaint did not form part of the legal action in court and its truth cannot be verified.
Mrs Higgins said the shop had not stocked gerbils for months before the complaint anyway.

Defending the goldfish case, Iain Veitch, head of public protection at Trafford Council, said: ‘The evidence presented for this conviction clearly demonstrates that it is irresponsible to sell animals to those who are not old enough to look after them.

‘Let this conviction send out a message that we will not tolerate those who cause unnecessary suffering to animals. The council will always try to support pet and business owners so that they are able to care for their animals properly, but where they continually ignore the advice they are given, we will not hesitate to use our statutory powers.’

The goldfish was later adopted by an animal welfare officer and is in good health.

Criminals who committed more serious offenses but received lesser punishments.

Industry sources said the flour shortage was a direct result of the order by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) forcing flour millers to cut their price by as much as P160 per bag.

Philippine Baking Industry (Philbaking) president Walter Co said five millers have stopped deliveries as of Tuesday night and they account for about 50 percent of total supply in the market.

Co said they have sent a letter to the DTI last Wednesday. “The directive to millers by DTI is to sell at P680 per bag and if they charge higher then they will be sanctioned so flour millers decided not to sell rather than be charged in court,” Co said.

Likewise, Philippine Baking Industry (Philbaking) past president and Gardenia president Simplicio Umali said that flour millers are already cancelling their deliveries. “Five millers have informed our group that they will not be able to deliver,” Umali said.

Umali warned that they can shut down their operations next week if the shortage continues. “This is the first time in 11 years that we come into a situation so we are in a panic situation now,” he explained.

“We have started to reduce the output to stretch the availability of bread for a longer time. We can supply bread until Saturday and Sunday but by Monday we are not sure anymore if we can operate if the supply does not come,” Umali said.

Umali said that the order price is at P740 which is above the DTI mandated P630 to P680 per bag. With the current situation, Umali urged the government and the flour millers to come out with a price that is acceptable to both parties.

“I am in favor that prices should be evaluated but it should not affect the supply. DTI should listen as to what the real prices in the world market is,” he noted.

In a separate interview, Trade Undersecretary Zenaida C. Maglaya said that they are looking into the shortage allegations. “We have to verify.” She said DTI operatives are currently checking on the millers.

If it is true that millers are refusing to sell their flour, Maglaya said the DTI will charge them with hoarding. “If we need to forcibly enter their plants to check if there is really no flour we will,” she said. “We have police power,” Maglaya stressed.

Maglaya said one miller has already agreed to lower their price. Delta Milling Corp. is now selling flour for P650 per bag.

Meanwhile, Universal Robina Corp. (URC), one of the five flour millers accused of holding the supply which created the artificial shortage said yesterday they are not hoarding flour.

URC together with Morning Star Flour, Philippine Foremost Milling Corporation, Liberty Mills and Wellington Flour Mills were accused of not selling flour after the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) ordered that flour be sold at P630 to P680 per bag. The five control 50 percent of the market.

Philippine Association of Flour Millers (PAFMIL) executive director Ric M. Pinca said that was wrong in accusing the flour millers of not delivering flour.

“They have all denied that they are not selling flour,” Pinca said. Trade officials cracked down on flour millers after the reported shortage. Pinca said Aileen Ongkauko, president of Philippine Foremost said trade inspectors were at their plants yesterday and witnessed the delivery of flour.

At the same time, Pinca said millers will follow the order of the DTI. “At first we did not understand the order but now we are complying.”

If you thought that “one man, one vote” reflected the full flowering of representative democracy, think again. In the village of Port Chester, N.Y., just a few towns north of my locality in Westchester County, there is a new system. It’s “one (minority) man, six votes” — brought to us courtesy of the U.S. Department of Injustice and a lunkhead of a federal judge named Stephen Robinson.

Here’s the story: In 2006, the Injustice Department alleged that Port Chester’s election system was “unfair.” The problem? While the village is almost half Hispanic, no Hispanic had ever been elected as a trustee.

Now, how this hapless village got on the feds’ radar screen, I have no idea. Were Hispanics intimidated into avoiding the polls? Were there literacy tests? Poll taxes? No, this story will not inspire a movie by the name of Port Chester Burning. Instead, it seems the problem Uncle Scam had was that the town’s slim white majority — who turn out to vote in greater numbers than their Latino neighbors (Hispanics also account for only about 20 percent of Port Chester’s voting-age population), along with whatever Hispanics join them — have thus far chosen to elect only white candidates. That pesky majority rule can be a real bummer, can’t it?

So the Injustice Department — using our tax money — dragged Port Chester into court, which, presumably, cost the village tax money in litigation costs (ain’t being a civil rights lawyer grand?). It’s enough to make you wonder if the Injustice Department has too much time and money on its hands, except that it doesn’t seem to have time to tackle real voter intimidation. Remember that this is the bureaucracy that refused to pursue the case against the Black Panthers who tried to scare white voters away from a polling place in Philadelphia.

This brings us to Federal Judge Stephen Robinson. He ruled — get the Digitalis — that the village’s practice of having conventional at-large elections violated the Voting Rights Act. Now, let me put this in the simplest terms possible. The Voting Rights Act’s purpose was to ensure that everyone would have the opportunity to vote. Yet this “judge” decreed that “one man, one vote,” and the attendant majority rule, violate the act if they don’t yield a politically correct result.

And the kicker is Robinson’s remedy: He approved a plan to give every resident six votes, which they can apportion among the six trustees to be elected any way they wish. It’s known as “cumulative voting.” No, we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Heck, I’m not even so sure we’re in America.

What’s the thinking? I suppose the idea is that many Hispanics will exhibit great ethnic patriotism and give all their votes to one Hispanic candidate, whereas whites don’t vote as a block to the extent other groups do. Perhaps we’re seeing an example of leftists nobly shouldering the Liberal White Man’s Burden.

Judge Robinson also ruled that Port Chester must allow residents to show up on any one of five days to cast ballots, a system called “in-person early voting.”

So first the left gave us quotas in schools and businesses, and now we have them in elections. I wonder, if there is a locality in which whites are almost half the population, with a black majority that has never elected a white candidate, will the feds roll into town and work the same voodoo? What if it’s an area that’s almost 50 percent female but that has never voted a woman into office? Maybe we should just mandate that public officials must reflect the demographic composition of their constituencies.

You could also say that this is the next step in the evolution of get-out-the-vote drives. It used to be that such endeavors were geared merely toward motivating the ignorant and apathetic to cast ballots, as we know that such people will make thoroughly stellar voting decisions if we can only somehow cajole them into the polling place. But this is so much simpler: Get out the vote by multiplying it. We don’t need dead people in Chicago anymore — we have deadheads in the Injustice Department.

Really, this scheme visited upon Port Chester is just another example of liberal bigotry. The leftist social engineers are again dividing people into groups, tacitly claiming that a person of one race cannot adequately represent a person of another, and changing the melting pot into a cauldron of ethnic tension.

So on Tuesday, June 15, there was an election in a village in New York. In preparation, the locality had six forums in English and six in Spanish to explain a new, federally mandated scheme to the voters. It created various ways of publicizing the election — with tote bags, lawn signs, and tee shirts stating “Your voice, your vote, your village”; and reminders in the form of TV spots, brochures, and handouts given to schoolchildren, in both English and Spanish — all of which had to be approved by the Department of Injustice. It also hired a “non-profit” election research and reform group called FairVote to provide consultation services (our tax money at work — again). And when it came time to cast the votes, “federal observers” were on site…watching.

The left is Balkanizing us. I just wonder what their quota prescription will be when it comes time to partition the nation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a new system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas.

Furano and his wife, Gloria Furano, voted Thursday.

“That was very strange,” Arthur Furano, 80, said after voting. “I’m not sure I liked it. All my life, I’ve heard, `one man, one vote.’”

It’s the first time any municipality in New York has used cumulative voting, said Amy Ngai, a director at FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group that has been hired to consult. The system is used to elect the school board in Amarillo, Texas, the county commission in Chilton County, Ala., and the City Council in Peoria, Ill.

The judge also ordered Port Chester to implement in-person early voting, allowing residents to show up on any of five days to cast ballots. That, too, is a first in New York, Ngai said.

Village clerk Joan Mancuso said Monday that 604 residents voted early.

Gloria Furano gave one vote each to six candidates. Aaron Conetta gave two votes each to three candidates.

Frances Nurena talked to the inspectors about the new system, grabbed some educational material and went home to study. After all, it was only Thursday. She could vote on Friday, Saturday or Tuesday.

“I understand the voting,” she said. “But since I have time, I’m going to learn more about the candidates.”

“I hope that if Hispanics get in, they do something for all the Hispanic people,” Sandoval said in Spanish. “I don’t know, but I hope so.”

FairVote said cumulative voting allows a minority to gain representation if it organizes and focuses its voting strength on specific candidates. Two of the 13 Port Chester trustee candidates — one Democrat and one Republican — are Hispanic. A third Hispanic is running a write-in campaign after being taken off the ballot on a technicality.

Campaigning was generally low key, and the election itself was less of an issue than housing density and taxes.

Hispanic candidates Fabiola Montoya and Luis Marino emphasized their volunteer work and said they would represent all residents if elected.

Gregg Gregory gave all his votes to one candidate, then said: “I think this is terrific. It’s good for Port Chester. It opens it up to a lot more people, not just Hispanics but independents, too.”

Vote coordinator Martha Lopez said that if turnout is higher than in recent years, when it hovered around 25 percent, the election would be a success — regardless of whether a Hispanic was elected.

“I think we’ll make it,” she said. “I’m happy to report the people seem very interested.”

But Randolph McLaughlin, who represented a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the goal was not merely to encourage more Hispanics to vote but “to create a system whereby the Hispanic community would be able to nominate and elect a candidate of their choice.”

That could be a non-Hispanic, he acknowledged, and until exit polling is done, “it won’t be known for sure whether the winners were Hispanic-preferred.”

The village held 12 forums — six each in English and Spanish — to let voters know about the new system and to practice voting. The bilingual ballot lists each candidate across the top row — some of them twice if they have two party lines — and then the same candidates are listed five more times. In all, there are 114 levers; voters can flip any six.

Besides the forums, bright yellow T-shirts, tote bags and lawn signs declared “Your voice, your vote, your village,” part of the educational materials also mandated in the government agreement. Announcements were made on cable TV in each language.

All such materials — the ballot, the brochures, the TV spots, the reminders sent home in schoolkids’ backpacks — had to be approved in advance, in English and Spanish versions, by the Department of Justice.

Conetta said the voter education effort was so thorough he found voting easier than usual.

“It was very different but actually quite simple,” he said. “No problem.”

It’s been 37 days since BP’s offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem — unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.

Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we’d know more if BP hadn’t barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country’s last big oil spill — Exxon-Valdez in 1989 — the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf’s waters.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen — and will continue to happen — when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure.

The corporate media is tracking the disaster with front-page articles and nightly news headlines every day (if it bleeds, or spills, it leads!), but the under-reported aspects to this nightmarish tale paint the most chilling picture of the actors and actions behind the catastrophe. In no particular order, here are 10 things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know — but you should.

1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it’s no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped… nine months later.

This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean’s decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It’s not hard to bet on failure when you know it’s somewhat assured.

2. BP has a terrible safety record

BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP’s Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)

With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn’t break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper – and less safe — casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one — even though they only cost $500,000.

SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.

3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP

According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number — which doesn’t include the immeasurable environmental damages — to the current cap on BP’s liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.

The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.

This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: “Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity.”

4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit

It’s no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line — but it’s at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.

Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a “safety alert” but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: “[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant.”

The Interior Department’s Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives’ private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. “Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties” were also common.

Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?

It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here’s the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.

But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.

5. Clean-up prospects are dismal

The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the “top kill” method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.

But here’s the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let’s be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.

Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.

6. BP has no real cleanup plan

Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable “Oil Spill Response Plan” which is, in fact, no plan at all.

Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon’s plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.

The whole thing totals 600 pages — a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.

7. Both Transocean and BP are trying to take away survivors’ right to sue

With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.

So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won’t be held liable for those same impacts.

Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while Transocean flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.

If there’s anything to learn from this disaster, it’s that companies like BP don’t make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.

8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money — and doesn’t care if they get sick

When BP unleashed its “Beyond Petroleum” re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.

An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster — the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 — when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.

A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not “blast resistant.” In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.

Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?

Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren’t provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn’t sign waivers.

9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe

It’s hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.

In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren’t all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.

On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas — 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.

Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.

10. No one knows what to do and it will happen again

The very worst part about the Deepwater Horizon calamity is that nobody knows what to do. We don’t know how bad it really is because we can’t measure what’s going on. We don’t know how to stop it — and once we do, we won’t know how to clean it up.

BP is at the helm of the recovery process, but given its corporate track record, its efforts will only go so far — it has a board of directors and shareholders to answer to, after all. The U.S. government, the only other entity that could take over is currently content to let BP hack away at the problem. Why? Because it probably has no idea what to do either.

Here’s the reality of the matter — for as long as offshore drilling is legal, oil spills will happen. Coastlines will be decimated, oceans destroyed, economies ruined, lives lost. Oil companies have little to no incentive to prevent such disasters from happening, and they use their money to buy government regulators’ integrity.

Deepwater Horizon is not an anomaly — it’s the norm.

Watch The Official Story Behind The BP Oil Spill

“Behave yourself and be polite” is how Representative Ron Paul describes his regulatory philosophy about rearing five children. Mr. Paul, a Republican, and his wife of 53 years, Carol, never believed in assigned chores or mandates.

They did not give out allowances, which they viewed as a parental version of a government handout. They did not believe in strict curfews; Mr. Paul says that unintended consequences — like speeding home to beat the clock — can result from excessive meddling from a central authority.

While Mr. Paul’s laissez-faire views produced a family of likeminded thinkers — “We’re all on board,” says the oldest son, Ronnie Paul — they inspired the middle child, Rand, to follow his father’s career path, first into medicine and now politics. If he prevails in November after winning the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Kentucky last month, he and his father would form a two-man libertarian dynasty.

Father and son are described as each other’s political sounding boards, confidants and support systems. “Dad and Rand spent hours having great philosophical discussions about issues,” said Joy Paul Leblanc, the youngest sibling.

“Everyone always said, ‘If anyone runs for anything, it will be Rand,’ ” the congressman said.

The two Pauls have similar economic ideologies, overlapping organizations and Internet-based fund-raising apparatuses. The elder Mr. Paul, 74, dispensed behind-the-scenes advice during his son’s bid for the Senate seat, in which he upset the favorite, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson.

In an interview with The NY Times, Dr. Paul, the two-time libertarian presidential candidate, referred to his son’s campaign as “our race.” When his son faced criticism recently over comments that some interpreted as skeptical of federal civil rights laws, the congressman was shaken.

Rand Paul, 47, has described his father as his political hero. But he is quick to emphasize that he has never been dependent on him. “I think my dad has helped me tremendously,” he said in a joint interview with his father for a Kentucky television station this year. “But the only way I win is on my own two feet.”

He decided to go into politics despite his lineage as much as because of it, family members said. “Ron believes that you are not supposed to initiate force on anyone else,” Mrs. Paul said. Her husband promoted self-reliance in his children, and their choices and views flowed from that, she said.

Friends of the family describe a traditional household with early American décor and the frequent aroma of Mrs. Paul’s chocolate chip cookies, if not fish sticks. They have lived since July 4, 1968, in the same middle-class enclave of Lake Jackson, where the streets are named for trees, flowers and fauna (the Pauls live on Blossom). They owned a series of collies (Julie, Kippy and Cricket) and a Maltese (Liberty), and the kids were expected, though not required, to feed the pooches, make their own beds, clear their own dishes from the table and not talk back to their elders.

As a member of Congress, Dr. Paul spent most of his time in Washington, upon returning to Texas he often crisscrossed his sprawling district attending political events. At home, he prized the solitude of his lawnmower. Mrs. Paul was a stay-at-home mom, longtime Girl Scout troop leader and self-described “busybody” who prided herself on knowing exactly what everyone was doing. If a child misbehaved, her husband did not spank or yell. Instead, he gave them written assignments, “He believed in exercising the brain.”

Ron Paul said he was not philosophically opposed to centralized authority, as long as it existed close to home, or within it. “We didn’t say the kids could do anything they wanted,” he said.

“They were a very Brady Bunch-type American family,” said Eric Dondero, a longtime former aide to Ron Paul. “As different as their politics are, their personal life was very normal.”

A strong libertarian bent ran through the Paul brood, and there are no apparent outliers. “Once you learn about the broken monetary policy, there is no other way,” said Ronnie Paul, a retired engineer at Dow Chemical in nearby Freeport. “We believe that stealing from people is not good, whether you’re the government or whether you have a mask on your face.”

Rand particularly absorbed the family ethic of exerting his free will. Though never rebellious, he sometimes bristled at being given too many directions. As a junior in high school, his mother recalled, he got a paper back from a geometry teacher that, while largely correct, was filled with what he considered to be unnecessary red marks. He walked into the principal’s office and asked to be moved into another class. “He and that teacher were not on the same wavelength,” said Mrs. Paul, who added that she and her husband supported Rand’s actions. “Rand was someone who took care of his own problems.”

As a teenager, he studied the Austrian economists that his father revered, as well as the iconic free-market novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand (she was not the inspiration for Rand’s name, which is short for Randall; he was called Randy growing up).

Rand walked door to door in support of his father’s first Congressional race, in 1974, and while a student at Baylor University, he helped in his father’s unsuccessful Senate race against Phil Gramm in 1984. (When Ron Paul had to be in Washington for a Congressional vote, Rand stepped in for him in a debate against Mr. Gramm — it was his first public speaking appearance). Rand would take it upon himself to organize the other family members on neighborhood walking tours, canvasses and appearances.

“We would all be home for a big Christmas dinner,” his father said. “And Rand would be talking politics. He educated himself on politics in ways that I’ve never even cared about.”

More recently, Rand traveled to several states in 2008 on behalf of his father’s insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination — an enterprise that gained surprising traction at the grass roots and brought in over $35 million in campaign donations.

Mr. Paul was loath to guide his five children in any vocational direction, although three of them followed him into careers in medicine. (Rand is an ophthalmologist, who like his father attended Duke University Medical School and is often referred to as Dr. Paul by his staff and supporters; Joy is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and Robert is a family doctor.)

The father was insistent about allowing his children as much autonomy as possible and he believed, for instance, that economic subsidies (like allowances) could foster dependence. He discouraged Rand or any of his siblings from accepting financial aid to attend college, nor would he accept Medicare or Medicare payments from patients, calling it “stolen money” in a 1996 interview with The Austin American-Statesman. (Rand Paul, however, was criticized recently for opposing cuts to Medicare physician payments.)

While Ron Paul supports his son’s Senate campaign, his participation has been noticeably arms-length, owing to a concern that his views might be too outside the mainstream for a general electorate, particularly on foreign policy. He has suggested, for example, that the United States needs to explore Al Qaeda’s motives. “Nobody wants to talk about the motive,” he said last January. “But it’s out there, it’s laid on a platter. Bin Laden writes of it.”

When asked whether anyone told him to keep his distance from Kentucky, the elder Mr. Paul said: “I’ve got a life to lead. I have a job. And when I’m off, I want to be in Texas.”

He added that there are perils for political heirs relying too heavily on their patrons. “It can be very dangerous when somebody thinks they inherit these things,” he said.

Family members say the congressman has been shaken by the recent storm his son has faced over remarks in which he seemed to take issue, on libertarian grounds, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At the outset of an interview on Capitol Hill, Mr. Paul placed the controversy — “the agitation,” he called it — off limits. But then he immediately referred to a recent column supportive of his son in the Congressional newspaper, The Hill, and volunteered that he had just telephoned the column’s author, Lanny Davis, a Clinton White House aide, to thank him.

Mr. Davis said, “I heard a father’s concern more than I did any political concern,” and described the conversation as emotional.

Mr. Paul conceded that it is easier to be the candidate under attack than to be a family member of one. “No matter how well you arm yourself, no matter how well you know the system,” he said in the interview, “it really hurts when it’s your son.”

TMZ:

I have multiple mortgages. This house actually was my most expensive mortgage. … When the market went down, the house went down too and it was just worth nothing. … I just decided to let it go, give it back to the bank. It wasn’t a situation where they came and took it from me . I felt like i didn’t want to pay that much money a month for a house I’m never at. … I just didn’t feel like it was a good investment. …

NPR basically observes that he’s a celebrity strategic defaulter. Who knows how many more homeowners will be inspired by his sticking it to the bank.

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

Much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a storm is coming. Putting satellites in ‘safe mode’ and disconnecting transformers can protect these assets from damaging electrical surges. Preventative action, however, requires accurate forecasting—a job that has been assigned to NOAA.

“Space weather forecasting is still in its infancy, but we’re making rapid progress,” says Thomas Bogdan, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Bogdan sees the collaboration between NASA and NOAA as key. “NASA’s fleet of heliophysics research spacecraft provides us with up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening on the sun. They are an important complement to our own GOES and POES satellites, which focus more on the near-Earth environment.”

Among dozens of NASA spacecraft, he notes three of special significance: STEREO, SDO and ACE.

STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) is a pair of spacecraft stationed on opposite sides of the sun with a combined view of 90% of the stellar surface. In the past, active sunspots could hide out on the sun’s farside, invisible from Earth, and then suddenly emerge over the limb spitting flares and CMEs. STEREO makes such surprise attacks impossible.

SDO (the Solar Dynamics Observatory) is the newest addition to NASA’s fleet. Just launched in February, it is able to photograph solar active regions with unprecedented spectral, temporal and spatial resolution. Researchers can now study eruptions in exquisite detail, raising hopes that they will learn how flares work and how to predict them. SDO also monitors the sun’s extreme UV output, which controls the response of Earth’s atmosphere to solar variability.

Bogdan’s favorite NASA satellite, however, is an old one: the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) launched in 1997. “Where would we be without it?” he wonders. ACE is a solar wind monitor. It sits upstream between the sun and Earth, detecting solar wind gusts, billion-ton CMEs, and radiation storms as much as 30 minutes before they hit our planet.

“ACE is our best early warning system,” says Bogdan. “It allows us to notify utility and satellite operators when a storm is about to hit.”

NASA spacecraft were not originally intended for operational forecasting—”but it turns out that our data have practical economic and civil uses,” notes Fisher. “This is a good example of space science supporting modern society.”

2010 marks the 4th year in a row that policymakers, researchers, legislators and reporters have gathered in Washington DC to share ideas about space weather. This year, forum organizers plan to sharpen the focus on critical infrastructure protection. The ultimate goal is to improve the nation’s ability to prepare, mitigate, and respond to potentially devastating space weather events.

“I believe we’re on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.” Fisher concludes. “We take this very seriously indeed.”

For more information about the meeting, please visit the Space Weather Enterprise Forum home page at http://www.nswp.gov/swef/swef_2010.html.

Suspicious bags, some provoking a cautious response, were checked out in large numbers in the weeks after the failed Times Square bombing attempt.

Now as large numbers of tourists flood into New York City and the nation’s capital, the FBI is warning of a new terror tactic.

Citing an FBI informational document, ABC News reports a so called “battle of suspicious bags” is being encouraged on a jihadist website.

Bomb expert Kevin Barry with 20 years experience in the NYPD says the bags could be filled not with bombs, but with innocuous items like water bottles or socks.

The potential terrorists would be watching the response.

“How they evacuate. The standoff distances. How long it takes additional emergency services to come to the scene,” Barry said.

“After every major incident there will be a spike in calls because people become more nervous and there is more reporting of suspicious items,” Barry said.

Putting more emphasis, security experts say, on the slogan “see something, say something.”

“People are becoming more suspicious, more vigilant and that results in more calls. We understand that happens and we are prepared to respond,” police commissioner Ray Kelly said.

He slipped an empty bottle of red wine into a binliner and stretched. At his feet was a chalk-drawn pyramid showing the structure of society, the word “pueblo” at the bottom, and the tip pointing up the hill towards Bilderberg. It’s a short pyramid today, maybe half a heavily-armed mile from Rockefeller down to Ivan.

Ivan’s bed last night – is it had been the night before – was the scrub by the roadside. “It’s not so cold in my bag,” he said. “A lot of times I travel in the mountains – in the mountains, you can sleep anywhere.”

A lone Catalonian in green trousers, he clutched a leaflet and stood in the Sitges sun as, up the hill, billionaires and finance ministers ate kiwifruit patisseries.

The shame, the awful poignancy of Bilderberg, is that, for much of the time, there are more delegates up the hill than there are protesters at the foot of it.

On that point, there’s something I’d like you to do. I’d like you to extend a grateful thought, a prayer of thanks, an idle nod of acknowledgment – a something, an anything – towards Ivan and all the others who have come to Sitges to bear witness to Bilderberg 2010.

These people are on your side, they are fighting your corner. And if you don’t think it’s a corner that needs fighting, or if it’s a corner you think is being fought by the people up the hill … well, good luck to you.

I want you to know, though, that the people who are crawling around on pine needles with long lenses, trying to identify delegates (and doing pretty well, by the way), the people who are being detained, searched, questioned, then heading out again into the hills, the people who are sitting late into the night at the campsite bar, talking about distracted populations and central banks, are not lunatics.

They are your very best friends. They’re not feeble-minded or playing some kind of game. They are deadly serious, and they are worried to death.

These people look at the state of the world and they pack a rucksack and sleep at the side of a roundabout.

The head of the IMF (and Bilderberger), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, looks at the world and declares: “Crisis is an opportunity.” He sees the precarious global economy and floats the idea for “a new global currency issued by a global central bank”.

Now, if you think that’s a good idea – if you think yet more centralisation of debt (and interest payments), and more unelected financial control is a good thing – then good luck (what are you? The chairman of Barclays?)

We already have a world, says Daniel Estulin, the arch Bilderbotherer, “where unelected bodies like the IMF can tell sovereign nations like Greece what to do”.

Estulin is here in Sitges, wearing the fanciest trousers I’ve seen in a long time. He says the Bilderberg endgame is “one world company ltd”. And the board of directors is sitting half a mile away.

And they’re being watched. I can’t say from where – I don’t know where the guerilla camerafolk are out crawling today. And I can’t ring them, because they’ve turned their mobiles off and taken out the sim cards so they can’t be triangulated by the signal.

They’re out getting sunstroke on your behalf, on my behalf. I’ll publish some of their photos, and some of their spottings, tomorrow.

Later today, a bunch of Spanish activists are providing paella for everyone in a mountain restaurant. Some of us won’t make it. Some of us will be under arrest, or lying in a ditch holding our breath until the footsteps pass.

One last time: if you think what they’re doing is ridiculous, you’re wrong. It’s the fact they’re having to do it at all that’s absurd.

This morning, a policeman screeched up beside me as I went for a stroll and told me to take the recording device out of my pocket. I did. It was a bit of driftwood from the beach. Yesterday, I had my car searched (and was detained for 50 minutes while the Mossos d’Esquadra checked and rechecked my passport).

They asked me what was in the boot. I dug them out a T-shirt. The patrolman radioed the station and read out the slogan on the shirt in heavily accented English: “I went to Bilderberg 2010 and all I got was this lousy new world order.” His partner asked me why I was laughing. I couldn’t really explain.

BIlderberg is an absurdity. The secrecy is absurd. The lack of a relationship between the event and the mainstream media is absurd. Ivan standing alone by his roundabout bed is absurd. The paranoia of the participants is more than absurd – it’s pathetic.

This year, most of the delegates were whisked into the hotel through an underground entrance, dodging the lenses, like a bunch of James Bond baddies, like a dieter creeping downstairs at midnight to eat chocolate cake from the fridge.

But the good news is that not everyone has dodged the cameras (John Elkann, the heir to Fiat, was spotted by the German blog Schall und Rauch looking particularly dapper this year). And the even better news – the very best news – is that the press seems, finally, to have woken up to Bilderberg.

We have had camera crews from Spanish TV and Spanish newspapers both local and national (Javier from El Mundo is currently up a tree with a camera). French journalists, Portuguese documentary makers and al-Jazeera are picking up the story. Russia Today has sent a film crew.

We’ve had articles in the Independent and the Times, and on the Today programme on Radio 4. Daniel Estulin has been doing interview after interview. He’s getting quotes from inside the meeting. The veil of secrecy is looking decidedly tatty. It might be time to bin it.

And yet the veil of ignorance is still holding up pretty well. As Ivan says, handing me a leaflet from the Anwok collective, “it is difficult to talk about the Bilderberg agenda if people don’t even know about the group”.

I know what he means – I’ve spoken to countless news agencies and outlets in the last few weeks, and the most common response, from journalists, editors and commissioners, is: “I’m sorry, the Bilderberg what?”

But seriously, if you work on the foreign desk of a major news corporation and you’re at the “Bilderberg what?” level of political awareness, you need to think about getting a different job. Take a sabbatical. Take up carpentry, or read a book. It’s like calling yourself a porn star and not knowing the reverse cowgirl. “The reverse what…?”

Get with the programme. Shimmy up a pine tree. Take a leaflet. Resign. You’re not helping anyone.

Sittin’ on the dock of the bay…
Watchin’ the tide roll away…

~ “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” Otis Reading

We’re glad we’re not sitting on the dock of the bay in Biloxi or St. Petersburg. There’s oil coming that way…and it’s not the kind you can burn in your lamp.

The newspapers say there are huge globs of oil beneath the surface…or floating on the top. You’d think you could just pump it up. At $70 a barrel, you’d think you could make money scooping up the “sea oil” in the gulf. Probably better than shrimping.

Instead, everyone is complaining about it…and threatening to put BP executives in jail. Yesterday’s cover story in The Financial Times told us that the head man at BP has admitted error.

“BP ‘not prepared’ for spill”

We hope he had a good talk with his lawyers. “Not prepared” sounds like an admission of negligence. Maybe criminal negligence.

There are billions in lawsuits coming up…and the attorneys around the Gulf are slicker than an oil spill. The English don’t realize what they’re up against…an Alabama lawyer in a seersucker suit…talking to an Alabama jury…about how a British billion-dollar company destroyed their lives and livelihood.

They’re going to use every word Tony Hayward says against him.

Nobody is going to thank him for keeping his auto running. No one is going to think about where the oil comes from that he uses to heat his house…or how he draws electricity from an oil-fired power plant. No one in the entire state of Alabama is going to stand up for BP…certainly not an elected official.

“You have no idea how this works,” said a Washington friend. “The shyster lawyers are all in tight with the lawmakers. Many of them are shysters too. That’s why Obamacare is so tilted towards the lawyers and the pharmaceutical companies. They’re all in cahoots.

“And now this oil spill is going to set off a feeding frenzy on BP. The shyster lawyers are drawing up their class action strategies now. And you’ll see public interest groups get into the action. These guys are smart. And they’re very well funded. They’re going to short BP shares…and then announce a $20 billion lawsuit. And every pseudo environmental group…and trade organization…and labor union…and city council…and cracker-jack collection of meddlers anywhere within 100 miles of the coast…they’re all going to be looking at that pay day…when BP settles for…what?…$100 million…$1 billion…who knows. But they can invest millions in the case, because they know the payoff will be huge. They’re just fighting for position now…seeing who can put together the winning jackpot case… It’s sickening.”

Legal advice to BP: deny everything. You weren’t there. Deepwater what? Then, tell litigants that you will never settle any case, no matter how big or how rich. That will vastly increase the investment capital the shysters need to raise.

BP’s share price has plummeted. Some people think it is time to buy. Might be a little too soon. Our guess is that estimates of the damage are going to balloon even higher as more and more lawyers begin to see that thanks to BP they can win the lottery without buying a ticket.

Also, we suspect that a downturn is coming in the entire energy sector. Why? Because energy use grows with GDP growth. And we suspect we’re in Deep Doo-Doo there too.

Savings rates are rising all over the world – in developed economies and in emerging economies. That means GDP growth should turn down.

From Yahoo Finance:

Americans pulled back on their spending in May after a tepid April, underscoring how fragile the consumer spending recovery remains, new data released Thursday show.

Cool weather and a quirk in the calendar – a late Memorial Day weekend that hurt May’s business but should boost June’s figures – dampened spending on almost everything from clothing to major appliances. The figures, from MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, include spending in all forms including cash from May 2 through Saturday.

But weakness in the past six weeks is due to more than thermostat and calendar flukes, analysts said. They cited unemployment, stock market jitters and the end of government funded rebates on energy-efficient appliances.

“I don’t think you can explain away all the weakness just based on the calendar shift,” said Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

People are reluctant to spend for all the usual reasons…and some new ones. In the past, people have feared losing jobs. Never before in recent history have they feared that the government would go broke.

Just ask young people what they expect to get from Social Security or the new Medicare program. They know the score. The old folks stacked the deck against them. All the aces come up first – while the boomers are still in the game. Then, nothing but low cards.

“‘Sittin’ on the dock of the bay’ was a protest song,” a communist friend once explained. “It’s about blacks who came to look for work in San Francisco and then couldn’t find a job.”

Maybe so.

Another report tells us that the corporate bond market is practically dead. Corporations can’t raise money for expansion…and don’t seem to want to. They’re being shut out of the credit market by government – particularly the US government. Bond rates are so low buyers don’t have much to look forward to – whether they buy the corporates or the Treasuries. They figure they might as well go for Treasuries. At least they’ll be sure to get paid back.

This year, the US government is expected to borrow an additional $3 trillion. That doesn’t leave much money for the private sector. Which is why The Wall Street Journal report is surely correct; more and more people are going to be sitting on the dock of the bay…or watching TV. Unemployment is still increasing in most cities.

China Daily seemed to capture the underlying trend better than anyone. It’s headline:

“West moving towards deeper financial abyss.”

Into the Deep Doo Doo, in other words.

On May 17, David Laws, the new British government’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury, walked into his office. There on the desk was a note from the previous holder of this high office, Liam Byrne, who had departed along with Gordon Brown’s Labour Party cabinet. The note was brief.

“Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.”

Mr. Laws was a bit miffed. He informed the media that it is traditional for an outgoing senior office holder to leave some guidelines for the incoming office holder. This note, Laws said, was not helpful.

On the contrary, it may have been the most helpful note left by an outgoing politician in modern history. It told the truth.

Mr. Byrne later told the media that it was a joke. “I do hope David Laws’s sense of humour wasn’t another casualty of the coalition deal.”

Ha, ha, ha. The joke was on Mr. Laws and the incoming government. There isn’t any money left. The government is running an enormous deficit. The money required to keep the government going will have to be borrowed, either from investors or from the Bank of England.

Mr. Laws was said to be up to the task. This glowing assessment appeared on the site of the Wall Street Journal, a media outlet always ready to believe that deficits don’t really matter, that a government can always dig itself out of a fiscal crisis. All it must do is raise taxes and cut spending. Of course, no government ever does the second. But the folks at the WSJ never are fazed by this invariable law of modern politics. We read of Mr. Laws:

Now he is central to the coalition’s plans and must handle much of the most difficult work. He will have to get used to becoming very unpopular with a significant chunk of the electorate and parts of the commentariat. He will be presented as Mr. Cuts, which the Tory high command clearly thinks is good for its prospects. In theory, Laws will take all the flak for Osborne.

Ah, yes: Mr. Cuts. There will be lots of cuts. There will be a slice-and-dice cost-cutting regime, despite the fact that it is a divided British government in which the Conservative Party could not win a majority.

Laws looks like he realizes all this and is impressively unfazed. He has a job to get on with, as Gordon Brown would say. But it’s a very different task to that undertaken by the former PM. The Lib Dem Laws is on a mission to put the Gladstonian liberal approach – of sound money and low taxation when possible – back into operation.

Said his colleague and friend Malcolm Bruce to Allegra Stratton: “Laws is an unreconstructed 19th-century Liberal…. He believes in free trade and small government. Government should do the job only government can do. There’s no point in having a large public sector if the users of the public services are getting poorer. But he specifically made the point in the house [on Wednesday] that his economic liberalism is tempered by his social liberalism.”

Yes, my friends, there is a New Era coming in Great Britain – a new era of Gladstonian cuts. Yes, it is also true that the Conservatives ran Disraeli against Gladstone, because they could not tolerate his free trade, low-taxes policies. But all this has changed. It’s a New Era.

His agenda has the potential to be quite revolutionary in its effects, if he is not blown over by a hurricane of protest or events unforeseen. But it also might catch on, and make Laws very popular indeed. He has barely been in office for two weeks but the words “potential future prime minister” don’t sound entirely silly.

That was published on the morning of May 28. By the afternoon, Laws had resigned. A hurricane had hit. It seems that he has been a closet homosexual. That was acceptable to the media, but the closet had been in the form of a $1,200/month apartment rented – at government expense – from his partner of nine years. After 2006, this was illegal by government law. Mr. Laws promised to repay $60,000 in subsidies, but it was too late. The 2009 scandal of Members of Parliament who had taken government money to pay for their non-government-related expenses is too fresh in the minds of politicians and voters. Laws resigned.

His immediate replacement was exposed two days later as having avoided paying capital gains taxes on a similarly subsidized residence. It was legal, because of an anomaly in the tax code, but it was one more reminder to the voting public that the politicians have effectively gamed the system to avoid the burdens that the system has imposed on voters. This has been true of political life for several millennia, but the public never seems to catch on.

We see Punch and Judy battling it out again for the right to swindle the public one more time.

BUT WHERE WILL THEY GET THE MONEY?

Maybe you have seen the videos by Clarke and Dawe, the Australian comedians. If not, you really should. They are funnier than much Liam Byrne.

Mr. Byrne warned Mr. Laws that the country was out of money. Mr. Laws had insufficient time to solve this problem. His replacement now inherits the problem. It is the problem facing all of Europe.

It is also facing U.S. banks, mainly the largest ones. They have purchased an estimated trillion dollars in bonds issued by European nations. A series of defaults would call these assets into question. This is why the Northern European politicians are frantically borrowing money from investors to cover the losses that Southern European nations have produced.

There is no possible way that Southern European nations will ever pay off these debts. Modern finance theory assumes that debts of sovereign nations will never be paid off, for these debts have in part been monetized. If they are all paid off, this will force central banks to monetize other assets. Otherwise, the central banks would have to shrink their monetary bases back to whatever gold they still have, assuming they have any, since most of their gold holdings have been leased to bullion banks, which then sold the gold to buy government bonds.

Follow the money, advised Deep Throat in the screenplay of All The President’s Men. No one can actually follow the money. The debts and cross-debts are too large and too complex. Add to this at least $600 trillion worth of derivatives, which are mostly based on the interest and market value of bonds, and the central bankers have a very big problem facing them.

So, the squandering governments in Northern Europe have pledged about a trillion dollars’ worth of bailout money for the even more wasteful governments of Southern Europe. Everyone knows there will be some sort of default, but they do not expect this in the near term. It will be later. How much later? No one knows and no one cares. Until then, investors lend money to governments that will surely default. This is the foundation of international finance. It is also the basis of Social Security, Medicare, Federal pensions, and the municipal bond markets.

Most voters don’t know and don’t care. Politicians do know but don’t care. There are no negative sanctions for continuing to pooh-pooh the inescapable reality of the unfunded liabilities of all Western governments. There are instant negative sanctions for any politician who admits the truth and publicly calls for the immediate reform and partial default of these programs. No one in the electorate wants to face the truth: either granny will get stiffed near-term or the working-age voters will get stiffed long-term. Voters want to delay the cuts now, on the assumption that the can will be kicked down the road indefinitely. They discount the inevitable future for the sake of present bailouts.

This mentality subsidizes the expansion of private lending to governments. This is why the United States government can borrow for ten years at a rate below 4%. This is why capital is pulled out of the private sector in order to fund the delay of the inevitable bankruptcy of Western governments.

ASSETS WITHOUT LIABILITIES

The voters believe that there is no connection to the liability side of citizenship. They believe fervently in the asset side of citizenship. They do not believe that the bills will ever come due for them. They believe fervently that they are entitled to every dime already promised, plus whatever more they can get Congress to enact.

They vote for their beliefs. They vote only for politicians who insist that the liability side of citizenship can be deferred or transferred to others. They vote only for politicians who promise that the asset side of citizenship will increase. Every politician knows this.

Liabilities and assets must match on every balance sheet. The government’s balance sheet is the reverse of the citizenry’s. Every asset possessed by a citizen is a liability to the government. Every liability must be matched by an asset. What is this asset? Future government income. Where will this come from? From taxes, from borrowing, and from borrowing from the central bank (inflation).

Citizens believe only in the asset side of their balance sheets. The assets – promised future income – must not be offset by liabilities: future taxes, including the inflation tax. The politicians encourage this belief. They vote ever-increasing assets based on future government income, but they refuse to tell voters about the size of these liabilities. They pretend that an off-budget liability is not really a liability. After all, this is what the government’s own ledgers show.

The liabilities of the voters – the trust funds full of IOU’s from the government on behalf of the citizenry – are counted as assets of the Social Security and Medicare systems. When anyone raises a question regarding the future source of the future funding of these assets – the general fund – he is dismissed as a crackpot, a Tea Party voter.

For voters, the trust funds’ IOU’s are all assets, not liabilities. For politicians, the same is true. The trust funds’ IOUs from the government are assets politically, because the vast majority of voters believe that the trust funds’ assets are not legal claims on their future income. The assets are future claims on someone else’s future income, not theirs. “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax the guy behind the tree.”

The accounting charade is promoted by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO lies in the early part of this paragraph, but tells the truth in the sentence beginning with “If intragovernmental transfers. . . .”

According to CBO’s current baseline projection, trust funds as a group are expected to run a surplus of $119 billion in 2010 and $1.6 trillion from 2011 through 2020 (see Table D-1).That surplus is bolstered by interest and other sums transferred from elsewhere in the budget. Such intragovernmental transfers, which are projected to total $590 billion in 2010, reallocate costs from one category of the budget to another but do not directly change the total deficit or the government’s borrowing needs.

If intragovernmental transfers are excluded and only income from sources outside the government is counted, the trust funds as a whole are projected to run annual deficits that will increase from $471 billion in 2010 to $907 billion in 2020.

It plays the same game of deception in the next paragraph, which deals specifically with Social Security. The truth is revealed in the sentence beginning with “Excluding interest. . . .”

Total trust fund surpluses are dominated by those for the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance portion of the Social Security program. Including interest and other intragovernmental payments, CBO estimates a surplus of $110 billion for that fund this year and a cumulative surplus of nearly $1.5 trillion from 2011 through 2020.

The DI program is projected to run annual deficits through the entire projection period. For Social Security as a whole, the estimated surpluses peak at $139 billion in 2015 and decline to $107 billion in 2020. Excluding interest (which accounts for the bulk of the intragovernmental transfer), surpluses for Social Security become deficits of $28 billion in 2010 and $202 billion over the period from 2011 to 2020 (see Figure D-1).

The politicians know that most voters will never see this report. So, they emphasize the early portion of each paragraph. They quote other official documents that reinforce this systematic deception.

The voters refuse to hear any other version. They plug their ears to anyone who comes with the message of the second part of these paragraphs.

The politicians tell voters that the government has assets without liabilities. The voters believe that they also possess assets without liabilities. Yet every government promise that voters regard as an asset is in fact a liability. It is deliberately concealed by the government. The voters like it this way. They will vote out of office any politician who dares challenge this deception as an outright fraud. The voters delight in the fraud. Why? Because it shields them from this question:

“BUT WHERE WILL I GET THE MONEY?”

As surely as departing Chief Secretary to the Treasury warned “There is no money,” so are the trust funds of the United States government. Social Security will run a deficit this year. Medicare has been running one for at least two years.

The dreams of millions of voters will be shattered by this reality: “There is no money.” These dreams will be shattered in one of two ways: open default or mass inflation followed by hyperinflation. In the second case, “There is no money” will not literally be true. What will be true is this: “There is no money with 2010′s purchasing power.”

The voters will be at an age where they cannot easily rebound. But they will be able to vote. This is why, at some point, the electorate will have to decide: outright default to the coming generation of oldsters – an ever-increasing age to receive benefits – or else an outright default to richer oldsters: a means test for receiving payments. Richer people will not be paid. I think the second option is likely before the implementation of the first.

There will be increasing price inflation before the day of reckoning hits, for the Federal Reserve will buy the government’s debt. But, at some point, the default must be open if the dollar is to be saved. Otherwise, hyperinflation at rates above 40% per annum will destroy the capital markets.

CONCLUSION

You must decide. Which default is most likely? When is it likely? When will I be affected? Then you must take expensive steps to prepare for the scenario you select as most likely. If you continue to act as if there will be no day of reckoning, you will find yourself unprepared for that day.

If you sit there and do nothing, you will at some point face this reality: “There is no money.”

The total number of recalled glasses is somewhere in the 12 million range. Long term exposure to Cadmium has been linked to cancer. Consumers should stop using these products immediately.

The recall was put into effect when regulators learned that the designs on the glasses contained the toxic metal, cadmium.

The glasses were sold at McDonald’s restaurants nationwide from May 2010 to June 2010.

Visit here for Cadmium Material Fact Sheet

Like many of you, I’ve been (privately) making fun of the strain of thought that Barack Obama is a Bad President because he isn’t Doing Something!!!! About the BP Oil Spill!

I’ve been laughing even harder at those who acknowledge that he maybe can’t personally pilot a top secret experimental navy sub down to the well and close it himself (a la Bill Pullman in Independence Day), but castigate him anyway for not showing us that he “gets it”–it being the scope of the disaster, the deep moral seriousness of the crisis. Presumably, this would all be much easier to take if the president were openly panicking. Or something. The Care Bear Stare Model of American Politics once again rears its ugly head.

However, a friend writes that there might be something the President could and should do:

My father, who has worked in the petrochemical industry for decades, tells me that there is a well-established method for dealing with a problem like this: blowing up the well. It’s been done before, successfully. So why isn’t this option being actively considered, despite the failure of every method tried so far? Because when a well is blown up, it can’t ever be used again. As a result, BP stands to lose a lot from doing so. And they probably won’t have to pay for all the harm done by the oil spill. (Did you know the Exxon Valdez legal case just ended recently, after Exxon fought to keep every penny it could for years on end?)

So in a case like this, it seems like there’s a good argument for the president stepping in. BP has a poor incentive to do the right thing here. Now, it might be true — as Obama has said — that the government lacks the expertise and equipment to cap a well. But (a) capping a well and blowing it up aren’t the same thing, and (b) if blowing it up requires expertise the government lacks, they could just hire the experts from (say) other oil companies.

As for whether the government has the authority to step in, I think the answer is yes. There is an *ongoing* threat to property throughout the Gulf region, and the protection of property is well within what I consider proper government
action. Also, the seabed is not owned by BP — it’s property of the government, leased out to BP (or so I understand).

As I told my father, I don’t know enough about the risks of exploding a well to know for sure that it’s the best decision. For all I know, there’s a chance it would make the problem even worse. But it doesn’t seem like BP’s incentives are properly aligned for them to give it the proper consideration.

Unlike many in the blogosphere, I did not have enough boxtops to get my Petrochemical Marine Engineer Secret Decoder Ring, so I cannot weigh in on whether or not this is a good idea.

But if it is an idea that should be on the table, then I quite agree that the President–or rather, experts in his administration–should step in and make that decision. I’m pretty fond of America’s modern, fossil-fuel based economy, but I’m pretty sure it can survive the loss of one well. BP is undoubtedly willing to cost the rest of the country a near infinite sum to preserve its future profits. But in a case like this, with an enormous and crystal-clear negative externality being imposed on the rest of the country (and a large swathe of marine life), they shouldn’t have the power to make that decision.

From TheAtlantic – shaping the national debate on the most critical issues of our times, from politics, business, and the economy, to technology, arts, and culture.

Something is killing crops, trees, even weeds and nobody can explain why.

Farmers are scratching their heads and some are worried their crops may be lost to the mysterious plague.

It’s happening along a large swath of land near the Shelby and Tipton county border along Herring Hill Road and elsewhere near the Mississippi River bottoms.

Tiny dots appear to have burned onto leaves of all types of plants, and they appear different depending on the plant.

On corn stalks, the dots seem to turn white in the center.

On other plants, a white dust speckles the leaves and then destroys the green life underneath.

“We found it all in the herbs, in the flowers, in the plum tree, in the weeds,” said organic farmer Toni Holt. “It’s apparently in everything.”

Holt grows organic produce that she sells at area farmers’ markets.

As she and other farmers inspect the new growth covered in the perplexing plague, they fear their entire crop may be lost.

Less than ten miles from Holt’s crops, the damage could possibly hit hundreds of acres of corn at Wilder Farms.

It appears to have hit everything in its path.

There does not seem to be anything in common with the affected plants.

The Holts raise organic crops, so they don’t spray pesticides on any of their fruits and vegetables.

The first thought among some was a new parasite or insect caused the damage, but Wilder farms sprays pesticides and the damage there is exactly the same.

Farmers first noticed the damaging dots over the weekend.

Then Holt came home to find baby birds dead in their nests.

“There are two dead birds hanging out of two different bird houses, so we’re concerned about that. We don’t know if it’s related, but it’s alarming,” said Holt. “We’ve got horses, we’re concerned about the horses on the grass. We’ve got chickens. We sell our eggs at the market.”

Farmers we spoke with are convinced something in the air caused this damage.

They’re asking the USDA and other experts to look into the problem, and so are we.

FAST FACTS:

* Small dots appear to “burn” through leaves
* Area affected is along Tipton and Shelby County line
* Farmers afraid they may lose their entire crop