The Tennessean |By Bobby Allyn | 11:40 AM, Aug 23, 2012


[font color=gray]Aerial photo taken Tuesday, December 30, 2008 of the area where a dike
broke at a forty-acre settling pond near Tennessee Vally Authority's Kingston
Plant. [/font]Sanford Myers/The Tennessean

The Tennessee Valley Authority was responsible for a coal ash spill outside of Knoxville in 2008 that federal officials called one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind, according to an order issued today by a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Tennessee.

Had TVA acted appropriately, the underlying failure of the North Dike "would have been investigated, addressed, and potentially remedied before the catastrophic failure,” said Judge Thomas Varlan of the Eastern District. The authority repeatedly sought to have the case dismissed. A five-week trial was held last September on whether the nation’s largest public utility should be responsible for the spill. The authority maintained its innocence.

Today’s decision affirms that TVA was, in fact, blameworthy. The spill's cleanup is on-going and has been estimated at $1 billion. It is expected to be completed by 2015. In a statement released after the ruling, TVA said it "remains committed to the full restoration of the community directly impacted by the spill, while being mindful of our responsibility to manage ratepayer dollars."

Already, the TVA has purchased some 180 properties around the spill, in addition to settling more than 200 other claims. The authority paid $43 million to the Roane County Economic Development Foundation for restoration efforts. The TVA has spent $11 million on legal fees stemming from the spill.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120823/BUSINESS/308230081/TVA-held-responsible-coal-ash-spill

edge on the Net
by Jason St. Amand
Web Producer / Staff Writer
Thursday Aug 23, 2012

Business owners in Roanoke, Va., have come together to lend a helping hand to a gay bullied college student, Virginia’s WDBJ7 reported.

Jordan Addison’s car had been vandalized four times between March and May. The vandals spray-painted anti-gay slurs on Addison’s car because he is gay and someone even keyed the word "dyke" into the side of the Radford University student’s car.

Despite Addison’s best efforts, he could not remove the homophobic epithets from his vehicle and the lowest estimate he received to clean the car was $2,500 -- a price he could not afford.

When Richard Henegar, the manager of Quality Auto Paint and Body, heard what happened to the young man he insisted that he help out. "Once I saw the vandalism that was done to it, I said ’that’s uncalled for. We’re gonna fix your car.’ That’s the least we can do," he said.

MORE: http://www.edgeonthenet.com/news/national//136332/roanoke,_va,_businesses_offer_bullied_gay_student_free_car_repairs

August 22, 2012



[font size=4]Cognitive Dissonance[/font]
election:

The theme for the Republican National Convention is “We Built This!” which aims to underline the GOP’s counterpoint to an Obama vagary of pronoun usage last month, where he said the following:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Ironically, this year’s “We Built This!” RNC is being held in The Tampa Bay Times Forum arena, which was built in 1996 with 62% government funds.

- Jason

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WPSD - Local 6
Reporter - Robert Bradfield
Photojournalist - Jason Thomason
Story Updated: Mon Aug 13, 2012 5:01 PM

MAYFIELD, Ky. - At Mayfield's United Livestock Commodities, owner Joseph Watson is tweaking the recipe for success. "Just to be able to survive, we have to look at other sources for nutrition," he said.

His 1,400 cattle are no longer feeding off corn. The prices, Watson said, are too high to keep in stock. So earlier this year, he began to buy second hand candy. "It actually has a higher ratio of fat then (sic) actually feeding them straight corn," Watson said.

Which is important, because all of the cattle will be brought to slaughter. Watson wants them to gain weight and by feeding them chocolate, it gets the job done. "It's hard to believe it will work but we've already seen the results of it now, so we're pretty happy with it," he said with a smile.

Watson believes it is healthy. He monitors the cattle's daily intake and said there haven't been any health problems and the proof is in their weight.

MORE-VIDEO

Published on Aug 15, 2012 by RTAmerica

Credit card companies are turning to court to collect their debts, but
there is a problem - their lawsuits depend on documents that are
incomplete or inaccurate among other problems. RT's Capital Account
show host Lauren Lyster explains.

Like us and/or follow us:
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[font size=3]Problems Riddle Moves to Collect Credit Card Debt[/font]

NYT - Dealbook | By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG | August 12, 2012

The same problems that plagued the foreclosure process — and prompted a multibillion-dollar settlement with big banks — are now emerging in the debt collection practices of credit card companies.

As they work through a glut of bad loans, companies like American Express, Citigroup and Discover Financial are going to court to recoup their money. But many of the lawsuits rely on erroneous documents, incomplete records and generic testimony from witnesses, according to judges who oversee the cases.

Lenders, the judges said, are churning out lawsuits without regard for accuracy, and improperly collecting debts from consumers. The concerns echo a recent abuse in the foreclosure system, a practice known as robo-signing in which banks produced similar documents for different homeowners and did not review them.

“I would say that roughly 90 percent of the credit card lawsuits are flawed and can’t prove the person owes the debt,” said Noach Dear, a civil court judge in Brooklyn, who said he presided over as many as 100 such cases a day.

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Published on Aug 8, 2012 by RussiaToday

A controversial police tactic has minorities in London feeling like second-class citizens. Officers say their 'stop and search' policy is necessary to fight gang crime, yet the city's black community fears it's nothing more than racial profiling.

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By Eduardo Garcia and Maria Golovnina
QUITO/LONDON | Wed Aug 15, 2012 7:27pm EDT

(Reuters) - Britain on Wednesday warned Ecuador that it could raid its London embassy if Quito does not hand over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been taking refuge at the mission since mid-June.

In Quito, the Ecuadorean government said that any such action would be considered a violation of its sovereignty a "hostile and intolerable act."

"Under British law we can give them a weeks' notice before entering the premises and the embassy will no longer have diplomatic protection," a Foreign Office spokesman said. "But that decision has not yet been taken. We are not going to do this overnight. We want to stress that we want a diplomatically agreeable solution."

In Quito, the government bristled at the threat and said it would announce its decision on Assange's asylum request on Thursday at 7 a.m. (1200 GMT). "We want to be very clear, we're not a British colony. The colonial times are over," Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said in an angry statement after a meeting with President Rafael Correa.

- So if you're scoring at home, the little shit what lives at Number 10 (at the moment), is prepared to ignore international law and to blatantly break the hell out of a number of other domestic rules, customs and laws (especially the CIVILIZED ones), in order to enforce a law he prefers to enforce -- which everyone knows is a farce designed to segue-way into the US getting their slimy clutches on Julian for having the temerity to embarrass their stupid asses in front of the world -- instead of the laws he doesn't want to enforce. Got that?

The News Tribune (AP)
Updated: Aug. 13, 2012 at 7:11 a.m. PDT


[font color=gray]A kangaroo is on the lam in Germany after breaking out
of a wildlife park, with a fox and a wild boar his suspected
accomplices.[/font]

BERLIN — A kangaroo is on the lam in Germany after breaking out of a wildlife park, with a fox and a wild boar his suspected accomplices.

Michael Hoffmann, assistant head of the Hochwildschutzpark Hunsrueck west of Frankfurt, said Monday the male kangaroo was one of three that escaped overnight Saturday with the inadvertent help of the menagerie that lives in the area woods.

Hoffmann says the kangaroos got out of their enclosure after a young fox snuck into the park and dug a hole next to the cage's fencing. Two of the three were then able to get out of the park entirely through another hole dug by a wild boar under the exterior fence.

Hoffmann says "we've got two of them back; now we're just looking for the third."


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