Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), writes that NML and Aurelius paid “a small fraction of [the debt’s] face value. Their intention was to use their political connections to get a favorable ruling from the courts, with the hope of being able to extract something close to the face value of the defaulted bonds from Argentina’s government. This is exactly what ‘vulture funds’ do.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that the two are noteworthy in the “world of distressed-debt investing because they are willing to take countries to court that fall behind on bond payments. The fact that so few investors are willing to take those risks allows Elliott and Aurelius to buy defaulted sovereign bonds at deep discounts.”

Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious debt relief group, Jubilee USA Network, called the default outcome “unfortunate,” and said, “Because of the precedent this case sets there are a lot of losers and few winners. Legitimate investors and poor people lose the most.”

“These predatory actors are only able to operate because our financial system is too much like the wild west,” LeCompte added.

CEPR’s Baker joined over 100 economists including Nobel laureate Robert Solow in sending a letter to Congress on Thursday warning that Judge Griesa’s recent ruling forcing Argentina to pay the vulture funds, who are “seeking exorbitant profits in excess of 1,000 percent,” at the same time as its other creditors risked “unnecessary economic damage.”

“While individuals and corporations are granted the protection of bankruptcy law, no such mechanism exists for sovereign governments. As such, the court’s ruling would severely hamper the ability of creditors and debtors to conclude an orderly restructuring should a sovereign debt crisis occur. This could have a significant negative impact on the functioning of international financial markets, as the International Monetary Fund has repeatedly warned,” the letter states.

The letter urges the members of Congress to “seek legislative solutions to mitigate the harmful impact of the court’s ruling.”

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Missouri Governor Jay Nixon made his first comment on the events on Thursday morning after five days of demonstrations and police brutality. “The worsening situation in Ferguson is deeply troubling, and does not represent who we are as Missourians or as Americans,” Nixon said in a press release. “While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) also said she plans to speak with Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday. The FBI joined the investigation into Brown’s death earlier this week to determine whether there had been civil rights violations.

Brown was killed over the weekend when a police officer shot him multiple times. Brown was unarmed.

Tensions between police and residents were high throughout the weekend, particularly as officers responded to peaceful demonstrations by dressing in riot gear and holding rifles and attack dogs. But the protests reached a turning point when the department suddenly refused to release the identity of the officer who fatally shot Brown, despite police chief Tom Jackson’s promise to announce the name on Tuesday. Jackson claimed the officer’s safety was at risk.

The ACLU of Missouri sent a letter (PDF) to Jackson on Wednesday warning him that his officers violating the First Amendment by preventing media access to the city and demanding that residents “limit themselves to assembling during daylight hours and protest in a ‘respectful manner.'”

“Government agencies do not get to demand respect from protesters,” the letter read. “Respect is something that government officials earn from citizens, and citizens are entitled to express their lack of respect by protest on public streets and sidewalks.”

Residents were also angered and demoralized by the militarization of the police response, as officers crack down on demonstrations with tanks, helicopters, and rifles, setting a scene that resembles a war zone more than a town in the U.S. Lowery told NPR that many Ferguson officers “are in riot gear, SWAT gear, carrying very heavy weapons… not standard-issue stuff. This is the type of stuff that you see National Guards employ, not what you expect to see from a police officer in suburban St. Louis.”

On Twitter, Gaza residents sent messages to Ferguson protesters with instructions on how to escape and recover from tear gas.

Howard University students also shared a powerful image of their solidarity, as thousands of students gathered into a single photo with their empty arms raised in the air.

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“The EPA has failed in its mission to protect the environment, just as the biotech industry’s toxic, chemical-intensive industrial agriculture has failed to deliver on its promises of higher yields and higher profits for farmers, and fewer poisons for the environment,” Cummins continued.

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Further, conservation watchdog groups charge that the EPA is “ignoring its legal duty” to protect key animal species in their expeditious approval of “two known dangerous pesticides.”

“Once again the EPA has turned a blind eye to endangered species, clean water and human health in its apparently endless desire to placate multinational pesticide companies.”
—Brett Hartl, Center for Biological Diversity

“This was an unbelievably foolish decision — Enlist Duo will harm dozens of endangered species, and is another nail in the coffin for the monarch butterfly,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “Once again the EPA has turned a blind eye to endangered species, clean water and human health in its apparently endless desire to placate multinational pesticide companies.”

Violating the Endangered Species Act, the EPA failed to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the negative impacts to such species before issuing their approval, Hartl added. CBD estimates that the approval now puts over 20 endangered species in harm’s way.

Over half a million people submitted public comment this summer urging the EPA not to green light the pesticide mix. In the past two weeks alone an additional quarter of a million people signed a White House petition calling on President Obama to block the approval.

Condemning the federal office for “turn[ing] its back on those it purports to protect —the American people and our environment,” the Center for Food Safety is vowing to take legal action “to stop the commercialization of these dangerous crops.”

Meanwhile, Organic Consumers Association and other groups say this will only embolden their state-by-state campaigns to pass mandatory GMO-labeling laws and other agriculture policies “that promote organic, regenerative agriculture over an industrial model that is destroying our health, polluting our environment, and has been identified as one of the leading causes of global warming.”

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Brown said he would forward the petition to the trustees when they meet in two weeks and to the University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing, which was created last year. According to BU Today, the university’s news site, the board has divested due to social pressures “at least twice before: in 1979, when it pulled BU’s money from companies with ties to South Africa to protest apartheid, and in 2006, when it divested from companies directly tied to or supporting businesses in Sudan, to protest that government’s genocide in Darfur.”

BU Today reports that Brown, “who is a chemical engineer, confessed to being personally ambivalent about whether divestment was the best strategy for ‘a very complicated issue.'” He has claimed the best way to combat climate change is to reduce consumption of fossil fuels; to that end, the university has adopted a plan to cut its emissions by focusing on conservation, retrofitting older buildings, and switching from oil to natural gas for energy needs. 

The group says its action builds on the momentum of previous higher education divestment calls, most recently from last April when 93 members of Harvard University’s faculty urged the university to divest from fossil fuels.  According to the website gofossilfree.org, more than a dozen colleges and universities have already pledged to divest from fossil fuels. There are active divestment campaigns on many more campuses across the country.

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The Marine Conservation Institute joined a number of ocean conservation groups cheering the expansion.

“This unprecedented protection is an important step to rebuilding fishery abundance in the Pacific Ocean, which will in turn help to feed the world’s growing population,” stated Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for U.S. oceans at Oceana.

Emily Woglom, vice president for Conservation and Policy at Ocean Conservancy, said that “we all win by the Obama Administration creating the world’s largest marine monument, because protecting our ocean now is the investment that will pay dividends for generations to come. Science shows that protected areas in the ocean help rebuild fish populations, which is good for fishermen, and provide habitat for many unique ocean animals, including whales, sharks, tuna and corals.”

While the marine reserve is receiving accolades, the administration’s decision to allow exploration activities for oil and gas, including the use of seismic cannons, off the East Coast has been denounced as a potential “death sentence” for marine mammals.

“I just can’t understand how anybody would propose something that’s going to be just a rape of the East Coast, endangering whales and dolphins and turtles and fish,” McClatchy quotes Nags Head Mayor Bob Edwards as saying.

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“It’s unacceptable,” Scott continued. “The municipalities themselves, the communities have no power, no control, and in this case no information even over what’s being run through the rail lines.”

The crash occurred days after it was made public that two train industry groups had petitioned the U.S. government to drop the already-weak requirement to notify local emergency responders about the transport of hazardous materials through communities. The U.S. Department of Transportation, for the time being, chose to uphold their May 7 emergency order requiring such notification.

Mollie Matteson, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that this accident is but “another reminder” of the risks posed to people and wildlife by “rail shipment of flammable products, such as crude oil.”

“We know trains will continue to derail and we know we still stand unprotected from these types of dangerous accidents in the U.S.,” Matteson said. In July, the U.S. DOT proposed new rail safety regulations—which environmental groups decried for being too “weak”—calling for a two-to-five-year phase-out of older tank cars, including the widely used, puncture prone DOT-111 cars. Last week, top oil and railroad lobbyists pressed for those regulations to be even further loosened.

CBD notes that it wasn’t until the Lac-Mégantic disaster in July 2013, which killed 47 people, that any real government attention had been paid to the hazards of shipping dangerous goods by rail.  On Wednesday, the coroner reports for the 47 victims were finally released. In the reports, Quebec coroner Martin Clavet slammed the poor regulations of the rail industry, saying the deaths were “violent” and “avoidable.”

These cautions come as politicians and energy industry groups continue to hold a public and, as many say, “false debate” over the merits of pipeline versus rail transport of fossil fuels. However, environmental groups and a growing sector of society say that both pose a grave threat to our planet and ought to be discarded in favor of more renewable energy options.

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“For the Latina community, we have already unequal access to health care. More barriers create more imbalance and inequality for Latinos and African Americans in Colorado,” Corrine Rivera-Fowler of the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR) told Common Dreams. COLOR members, along with the No on 67 coalition, are canvassing, phone-banking, and conducting media interviews to mobilize against the proposed measure. “It’s a tremendous loss of resources to our community to have to again defeat something that has been defeated twice before,” said Rivera-Fowler.

Pro-choice campaigners in Tennessee also face a fight to defend abortion rights.

The state’s proposed Constitutional Amendment 1, if passed, would amend the state’s constitution to say, “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.” For more than ten years, Tennessee Republicans have sought to enact the measure, following the Tennessee Supreme Court’s ruling in the year 2000 to strike down a state anti-abortion measure. “If Amendment 1 passes, anti-abortion politicians are poised to pass the same draconian laws and regulations that have forced facilities providing abortion to close in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia,” warns Planned Parenthood.

The latest poll from Middle Tennessee State University finds that the outcome is “too close to call,” with 39 percent of voters in favor of the measure, 32 percent opposed, and a whopping 29 percent undecided. “We stand today because pending legislation has the potential to send women back to the back alleys where we died from unsafe and unsanitary abortions,” Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of SisterReach, declared at a Thursday press conference in Memphis. “We assemble today to impress upon Black women and women of color, many of whom are heads of households, to get out and vote.”

Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate for the Guttmacher Institute, told Common Dreams that, while this is not the first time similar ballot initiatives have been introduced at the state level, it is unusual to see three measures in one election. “Over the past three years, what we have seen is incredibly voluminous,” said Nash. “There were about  230 abortion restrictions enacted between 2012 and 2014. These three initiatives are continuing this trend. If there was some success, if one of these measures was approved, it could spark additional interest in other states.”

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Lizze Cook, a UNICEF campaigner, says millions of children are threatened each day by violence, disease, hunger, and the chaos of war and disaster. However, she argues, a concerted global effort could help end such suffering by making a commitment to end violence against children and ensuring every child’s right to “grow up in a world without fear.”

Though the group highlights that a majority of the overall violence experienced by children happens outside of what would be considered official war zones, the role of war and military-scale violence can have a potent impact on those populations exposed to it.

Earlier this year, Israel’s sustained attack on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip was condemned globally for the shocking number of children killed in weeks of airstrikes and bombing raids on the civilian population. According to Defense of Children International in Palestine, more than 500 children were killed and thousands more were wounded during the attack.

“Children were killed in their homes as they slept, with their parents as they fled for safety, and in UN shelters where they were told they would be safe,” declared DCIP in a recent statement. The group is now running demanding justice for those children killed, maimed, and terrified by the violence. 

As Baroness Doreen Lawrence, a long term campaigner for justice in the UK, said in her forward to the UNICEF report, “This epidemic of violence against children feeds off silence. It grows when we soundlessly accept that this is just the way things are. Every five minutes, somewhere across the globe, a family loses a son or daughter to violence. This is intolerable – it must stop.”  

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By June 2012, radiation from Fukushima had arrived 1,500 kilometers west of British Columbia, Canada, and by June 2013, had spread to the Canadian continental shelf, say the scientists. By February 2014, radiation levels had increased, and scientists expect them to peak at 3 to 5 Becquerels per cubic meter of water, before declining.

Even at peak levels, however, this radiation is nowhere near Canada’s drinking water standard for Cesium-137, which stands at 10,000 Becquerels per cubic meter.

Radiation levels near the wrecked Fukushima plant, however, reached much higher levels immediately following the incident, at 50 million Becquerels per cubic meter, a very dangerous level, according to senior scientist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Months after the crisis, radiation near Fukushima had fallen to the lower thousands, Buesseler told the Washington Post—a level still considered dangerous for food consumption.

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