E.ON’s generation, upstream and global commodities units, the last of which includes trading, accounted for about 35% of its €9.32bn (£7.4bn) in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in 2013. Renewables and regulated businesses alone accounted for 54%.

E.ON will hold a news conference on Monday about its plans, which will include investing more in wind and solar power.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/01/eon-splits-energy-renewables

Many of the current stories are accompanied by stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans. The recent story of spitting in Asheville, for example, was traced to a local businessman who says he is a veteran who was also spat upon and called a "baby killer" when he returned from Vietnam. An Associated Press story of April 9 reported stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans surfacing in several cities including Spicer, Minnesota whose mayor said he was spat upon in the San Francisco airport while coming home from Vietnam in 1971.

Similar stories became quite popular during the Gulf War of 1991 which raised my curiosity about where they came from and why they were believed. There is nothing in the historical record — news or police reports, for example — suggesting they really happened. In fact, the Veterans Administration commissioned a Harris Poll in 1971 that found 94% of Vietnam veterans reporting friendly homecomings from their age-group peers who had not served in the military. Moreover, the historical record is rich with the details of solidarity and mutuality between the anti-war movement and Vietnam veterans. The real truth, in other words, is that anti-war activists reached out to Vietnam veterans and veterans joined the movement in large numbers.

Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus. Born out of accusations made by the Nixon administration, they were enlivened in popular culture (recall Rambo saying he was spat on by those maggots at the airport) and enhanced in the imaginations of Vietnam-generation men — some veterans, some not. The stories besmirch the reputation of the anti-war movement and help construct an alibi for why we lost the war: had it not been for the betrayal by liberals in Washington and radicals in the street, we could have defeated the Vietnamese. The stories also erase from public memory the image, discomforting to some Americans, of Vietnam veterans who helped end the carnage they had been part of.

The facsimiles of spat-upon veteran stories that are surfacing now confuse the public dialogue surrounding the war. Debate about the war itself and the politics that got us into it is being displaced by the phony issue of who supports the troops. Everyone supports the troops and wishes them a safe and speedy homecoming. It's the mission they have been sent on that is dividing the nation and it is the mission that we have a right and obligation to question.

The "support the troops" symbolism also comes with a hidden agenda, a subtext that is about the anti-war movement. Understandably, the war brings a lot of emotion to the surface and some of that feeling stems from frustration with the economy, a sense of helplessness in the face of large-scale social and technological change, and fear that cherished American values are being lost. For some people, the real war is the war at home and the enemy coalition comes bundled for them in the anti-war movement. The redirection of their legitimate anger about the deteriorating quality of life in America onto peace activists is shortsighted scapegoating that won't solve problems.

The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans and nobody is spitting on the soldiers today. Attempts to silence opponents of the war with those figments of hostility are dishonest and should, themselves, be banished from our discourse.

http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=350

MADRID, November 27. /TASS/. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his book planned to be out on December 1 reveals that Goggle in fact works for the US State Department, as reported by the Spanish Publico.es web edition.

According to the edition, Assange arrived at the conclusion that Google works for the US government after meeting Google president Eric Schmidt and board member Jared Cohen in 2011. The meeting was also attended by Lisa Shields and Scott Malcomson who turned out to be Washington's diplomatic envoys.

WikiLeaks founder in his book says he was visited by a group of people 3/4 of whom were representatives of the US State Department and the rest being fromGoogle.

According to the edition, the company provides FBI and CIA with unfettered access to users' correspondence. Such access can be obtained without the prosecutor's approval or a court ruling, the edition quotes Assange.

http://en.itar-tass.com/world/763927

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/11/26/today-vancouver-becomes-the-first-north-american-city-to-prescribe-heroin-to-addicts-since-the-drug-war-began

The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that 95.2 percent of the research participants receiving heroin stuck with the program while only 54.1 of those taking methadone did.

Dr. Scott MacDonald, who was involved in the trial, has told reporters that bringing stability to the participants' lives gives them the opportunity to reconnect with their families and perhaps even begin building towards further educational or job opportunities.

"I think all the clinicians at the clinic have seen the great beneficial effect that this treatment can have on people — hard-to-reach populations that may have been using on the streets for 15, 20, 25, even 30 years," he told the CBC. "It is very dangerous and life-destroying to have to ingest in an alley, to use illicit heroin three, four times a day. That destroys lives. This is an alternative."

Vancouver has long been an epicenter of progressive thinking about drug policy and drug addiction. Dr. Martin Schechter, president of the School of Public Health at the University of British Columbia, has argued for years that the most destructive harms of heroin use don't come from the drug itself—they come from the fact that the drug is illegal.

It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation and the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas......


...estimates have suggested a 10% increase in health care costs in countries where coal makes up a significant fraction of the energy mix, like the U.S. and Europe (NAS 2010; Cohen et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2002). These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S. given that health care costs top $2.6 trillion, and electricity costs only exceed about $400 billion. Another way to describe this human health energy fee is that it costs about 2,000 lives per year to keep the lights on in Beijing but only about 200 lives to keep them on in New York.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

A police riot is a riot carried out by the police; a riot that the police are responsible for instigating, escalating or sustaining as a violent confrontation; an event characterised by widespread police brutality; a mass police action that is violently undertaken against members of the public for the purpose of political repression. The term "police riot" was popularized after its use in the Walker Report, which investigated the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to describe the "unrestrained and indiscriminate" violence that the police "inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat."[1] In this sense a police riot refers to rioting carried out by the police (or those acting in a police capacity) rather than a riot carried out by people who may be motivated to a greater or lesser degree by grievances with the police (see the 1981 Toxteth riots or the 1992 Los Angeles Riots for examples of riots over policing rather than police riots).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot

Last week Amen, a helpline a support service for male victims of domestic abuse, released its 2013 report, which detailed that 7,758 incidents of domestic abuse had been reported by 2,263 men last year. Since 2011 face- to-face meetings with men who reported abuse rose 64 per cent.

........

How can we expect more men to come forward as victims of violence in the home when exposing any kind of vulnerability is usurping this “norm”? And how can we expect men to report crimes perpetrated against them when we make fun of men as victims?

In Love/Hate a horrifying scene in the final episode in which one of the characters, Fran, was raped in prison with a broken snooker cue, was met with “jokes” on Twitter. If the victim had been a woman such attempts at jokes would have caused uproar. But for many commenting online it was clear men being raped was something to be laughed about, so uncomfortable and derogatory are we about men as victims.

Patriarchy doesn’t just punish women. It also places an unsustainable pressure on men to uphold a system that is rigid and stifling.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/men-still-hidden-as-victims-of-violence-in-the-home-1.2012221

A student sit-in protesting tuition hikes at the University of California continued at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall for the third day Saturday, while others planned to make a peaceful presence felt at the football game between Cal and Stanford.

Students planned to wear green ribbons at the annual Big Game at California Memorial Stadium, a symbol of the financial burden of the fee hikes. On Thursday, UC regents voted 14-7 to permit fees hikes of as much as 28% over the next five years, depending on state funding; Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), both regents, voted against the measure.

“The aim is not to disrupt the game or the proceedings around it, but to spread awareness of the regents’ vote and its effect on students,” the group occupying Wheeler Hall, known as the Open UC,” said on its blog. Students have been posting updates on Twitter using hashtags #OccupyWheeler and #fightthehike.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-protesting-tuition-hikes-cal-students-to-wear-green-ribbons-at-big-game-20141122-story.html