Opposition Grows to Obama's Refusal to Reveal Secret Patriot Powers

 By Noel Brinkerhoff

 

United States - Congressional Democrats, the media and civil libertarians are continuing their fight with President Barack Obama over his administration’s secret interpretations of the Patriot Act.

 

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, who sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder last week claiming a classified intelligence operation based on the Patriot Act interpretation is not as critical to national security as the administration says.

 

Wyden and Udall also wrote that Americans would be “stunned” if they knew what the government was really doing based on the legal theory being employed through the Patriot Act. In October, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) said that the government’s use of “Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy. Some day that cloak will be lifted, and future generations will ask whether our actions today meet the test of a democratic society: transparency, accountability, and fidelity to the rule of law and our Constitution.”

 

The Department of Justice has insisted that revealing anything about the secret spy program could “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

 

Federal lawyers are trying to dismiss two lawsuits, one by The New York Times and the other by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that seek to force the administration into disclosing how the Patriot Act has been interpreted.

Odd Stories: Hillrose Man Suffocates in Pile of Beans Near Brush

Brush, Colorado - A Hillrose area man died late Thursday morning after apparently suffocating in a large pile of beans in a warehouse outside of Brush.
 
Numerous agencies responded to the 11:20 a.m. report of a man buried under a pile of beans at Kelley Beans in the 28000 block of County Road S, Morgan County Sheriff Jim Crone said.
 
Raymond Segura Jr., 56, was dug out from near the bottom of what had been a pile of pinto beans 15-20 feet high one hour after the initial call. Morgan County paramedics and a Medevac Air Life crew pronounced Segura dead shortly thereafter.
 
When the enormity of the pile of beans was realized, numerous agencies and businesses responded to a call for manpower, with at least 55 people being on the scene. CHS Inc. from Brush brought a skid loader to help move beans away from the pile, and Ackley Building Supply immediately supplied shovels and masks for the rescuers.
 
Firefighters from Brush, Fort Morgan, Hillrose and Wiggins responded, along with several workers from the Brush Street Department, Morgan County Road and Bridge crews and four inmate workers from the county jail. Digger's Diner offered hamburgers to all those who responded.
 
The exact cause of how Segura ended up being trapped is still under investigation continues by the coroner and sheriff's office, OSHA investigators, and Kelley's safety team.
 
"The sheriff's office wishes to express it appreciation to all of those who responded and we applaud their efforts and hard work in difficult conditions in attempting to rescue Mr. Segura," Crone said. It was "a tremendous community response."

Odd Stories: Lafayette Police: Cat Refuses to Jog Around Lake; Owner Ticketed for Leaving It Behind

By Heath Urie

Lafayette, Colorado - Police in Lafayette ticketed a 19-year-old man Wednesday on suspicion of tethering his cat to a rock after the pet refused to go jogging with him.

Lafayette police Sgt. Fred Palmer said the man, Seth Franco, of Lafayette, brought his cat on a leash to the path around Waneka Lake Park near Baseline Road and U.S. 287.

"Apparently, the individual was trying to jog with the animal on a leash and the animal was either unwilling or unable to keep up," Palmer said.

According to Palmer, Franco secured the cat's leash to a rock while he finished his run. A passerby saw the cat and called police. According to police radio traffic, the cat was being attacked by a flock of birds while it was tied to the rock.

Lafayette animal control officers responded and found Franco retrieving his cat. Franco was ticketed on suspicion of "domestic animal cruel treatment," a municipal offense.

"Our ordinance prohibits that kind of tethering," Palmer said.

The cat was not injured, so it was released to its owner, Palmer said.

A phone listing for Franco could not be located Wednesday.

Messages sent to a Facebook account for a Seth Franco in the Boulder area were not returned. The social media site contains numerous images of a rescued cat, Stella, including some with the cat on a leash outside.

Texas Rice Farmers Won't Get Water for Irrigation

Houston - Thousands of Texas rice farmers won't get water for irrigation this year because lakes and rivers remain low after more than a year of drought.

The Lower Colorado River Authority said Friday it won't release water from two Austin-area lakes into the rivers and canals the farmers use for irrigation. The announcement was expected, but notable as the first time in the authority's history that it won't provide the water.

Texas is one of the six largest rice producers in the country, and the farmers in the Colorado River basin make up almost three-quarters of the state's total rice acreage. But without irrigation, many farmers will be able to plant only a fraction of the rice they usually grow, and some won't plant any.

"Farmers were prepared for the almost inevitability of this ... but things came so close at the end, there were some who thought we might get it," said Ronald Gertson, who grows rice in Lissie, about 60 miles southwest of Houston.

Conditions have eased in recent weeks with some significant rains, but two-fifths of the state remains in a severe drought. As of Friday morning, lakes Travis and Buchanan were about 3,200 acre-feet, or more than 1 billion gallons, short of the level they'd need to reach for the farmers to receive water.

A small percentage of farmers, those with senior water rights along the river, will get about 20,000 acre-feet of water. The rest will not get any.

LCRA spokeswoman Clara Tuma had said Thursday that the authority did not expect to reach the 850,000 acre-feet needed to provide water to all farmers.

But even if the lake levels had hit that mark, farmers would have received only 25 percent of the water they needed for their crops for this season, Gertson said. They would have had to break up big fields into smaller ones and do a lot of other improvising to make that work, he said.

"It would not have been the most efficient use of resources," said Gertson, whose family has grown rice in the area for five generations. "So while I'm not happy not to get water, I wouldn't have been jumping for joy to get only 25 percent."

He has estimated he can grow about a third of his rice with groundwater. If he pushes it, he might get about 45 percent of the acres he normally plants. Like many farmers, he had already been looking at what he could do to cut costs and make it through what's clearly going to be a hard year.

The three counties that won't get irrigation water — Wharton, Colorado and Matagorda — are some of the poorest in the state, with poverty levels above the national average. Many farmers in the region alternate between growing rice and ranching, but those with cattle sold off much of their livestock last year as the drought parched rangeland and pushed up hay prices.

Odd Stories: Wrong-number Call Helps Ohio Woman Having Stroke

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio/Denver — A woman who called the wrong number when she suffered a stroke still found help a couple of time zones away.

Loretta Smith, of Cuyahoga Falls, felt her right side go numb and fell to the floor at her home last weekend.

The 70-year-old Smith said she was able to grab the phone with her left hand and thought she was calling her son. Instead, she was one digit off and reached a man in the Denver area who was originally from northeast Ohio and had kept the same number after he moved.

"It was a woman, and she said 'I may be having a stroke,'" said Kenny Crater, 28, a sculpture major at Metropolitan State University in Denver.

Crater asked for her name and address and offered to get help. His 911 call was answered by Broomfield, Colo., police, who transferred his call to Cuyahoga Falls.

Smith was taken to Summa Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, where it was determined that she had suffered a mini-stroke, said Dr. Joseph Nienaltowski.

Smith said Crater saved her life. "I want this kid to be praised to high heaven," she said.

Crater said Smith had done her part, too. "I do not feel like I have done anything special," he said.

"I didn't save her," Crater said. "She found me."

Odd Stories: Big Tigers Cut Loose, Re-penned, in Colorado

Calhan, Colorado - It seems there is no such thing as a perfect security system, even if they involved tigers, one Colorado man found out.

Nick Sculac, the owner of Serenity Springs Wildlife Center, said three of the more than 120 big cats he has were set free. The first of the so-far two break-ins happened near the end of January. In that event the ones responsible climbed a ten-foot high fence lined with barbed wire and cut a hole in three cages big enough to set the tigers free.

“Luckily they were the three tigers we raised and they were nice. We have some other cats that, if they had broken open those cages, that person would have been torn to shreds. He would have been eaten in a heartbeat.”
 

A few days later a man and woman were found sticking their hands into a cougar cage in an attempt to pet the cat. After a short argument with the workers who spotted them, they ran jumped over the fence and escaped in a car.

He said about getting a security system “I never bought one before because I didn’t think I needed it. I didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to try to come in here.”

Drones Slowly Becoming a Fact of Life

Grand Junction, Colorado - Denver's ABC-7 seems to be in preemptive spin mode with the idea of having drones keeping an eye on the residents of Mesa county.  It reports:

The Mesa County Sheriff's Department has purchased a small drone aircraft for $14,000 to use in investigations and in search and rescue operations...The sheriff's department is test-flying the aircraft and expects it will be ready for use within the next couple of months. Officials said the department has FAA permission to fly the drone anywhere in Mesa County in daylight hours.

Now I don't doubt what else is present in the article, that it will help find lost hikers and bikers, but just like what happened in Montana and other western states it will more than likely be used on civilians too.  The station then went on to praise the drone's looks and abilities, never stopping to question the real possibility it may be used on citizens.

Sheriff's officers demonstrated the 4-foot-long, 9-pound vehicle Friday. The plane can stay airborne for an hour, fly at an altitude of 400 feet and send video and infrared images to ground controllers...Officials said the plane could also be useful for observation during wildfires. The plane has manual pilot capabilities but is most useful and efficient on autopilot, allowing its operators to type into a computer where they want the plane to fly. "You tell it where to go, and it will continuously fly over those parameters you set for it," [sherriff's spokeswoman Heather] Benjamin said.

It will only be a matter of time before seeing drones in the skies for no reason will become commonplace.  Right now we are just being normalized to it.

Climate Change Strikes Hard in Thailand

Denver – The Listera virus is continuing its outbreak and claims a 29^th life. The victim is the eighth death in Colorado. According to the Centers for Disease Control 139 people either died or were sickened in 28 states.

The reason why new listeria outbreaks are occurring weeks after they were pulled from the shelves is its symptoms may not show up for three months.

Some of the other deaths happened in Indiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming, Reuter adds.