The State Department on Thursday ordered the nonprofit Defense Distributed to remove blueprints for the world’s first 3D-printed gun from its website. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it…
The real reason not to intervene in Syria
Demands by politicians and pundits for intervention in Syria have now become so strong that they now seem to be influencing U.S. policy. But are they right? The most emotionally powerful arguments came from the State Department former policy planning head, Anne-Marie Slaughter. The Obama administration is in danger of letting genocide akin to the one in Rwanda in the 1990s occur, she wrote, in the Washington Post. The case of Rwanda haunts Democrats. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright called not saving Rwandans her “greatest regret” from her time in office, “something that sits very heavy on all our souls.” UN ambassador Susan Rice has similarly expressed agony over US failure to intervene in Rwanda.Continue Reading… … Read More
John Kerry blasts politicized Benghazi misinformation
Secretary of State John Kerry Tuesday denounced an “enormous amount of misinformation” about a deadly attack on a US mission in Libya amid a report four US officials are set to leak secrets. Questions about the September 11 assault on the US mission in Benghazi in which four Americans…
Canadian Minister promoting the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline: ‘Our objective is to have zero serious spills’
Though the State Department officially closed the final comment period for the final stretch of the Keystone XL pipeline earlier this week, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Olivier continued to make the rounds to press for approval and public acceptance of the controversial project…
State’s Keystone report authors also okayed explosive Caspian pipeline
As Salon noted earlier this month, following the release of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement, which greenlighted the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, it emerged that the report’s authors were outside contractors with oil industry ties. The contractor that produced the bulk of the report was Environmental Resources Management (ERM), DeSmog Blog reported, had ties to tar sands extraction companies. On Tuesday, DeSmog Blog’s Steve Horn added yet another layer of discreditation to the Environmental Impact Statement — namely that ERM have a terrible track record when it comes to greenlighting pipeline projects.ERM also authored a report, which argued that that the 2002 BP Caspian pipeline was environmentally and economically sound – as the firm has also determined with the Keystone XL project. Horn notes that the predictions about the Caspian pipeline were dramatically wrong — the project failed to deliver on jobs and the pipeline has been the site of explosions and oil spills. Via DeSmog Blog:Continue Reading… … Read More
Is the Keystone XL pipeline a jobs creator?
If you’ve been following the controversy over the Keystone XL oil pipeline, recent events will either encourage you, disappoint you, or both. For a market that’s yet to be determined, this much ballyhooed project would transport hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil daily from Canadian tar sands compounds to the U.S. Gulf Coast for refining. What we do know is that the pipeline would dramatically increase the volume of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, erasing what little progress North America has made in reducing its carbon footprint.The State Department — which has final say in whether Keystone XL gets built — recently admitted as much in a highly publicized (and heavily criticized) preliminary draft of its environmental impact study. State acknowledged the climate-change risks but then argued that rejecting the project wouldn’t reduce the amount of emissions flowing into our atmosphere because Canada would still burn the tar sands and pipeline the oil elsewhere.Continue Reading… … Read More
With Hillary gone, will State Department still prioritize women?
It’s no secret that when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously declared in 1995 that “women’s rights are human rights,” she cemented her status as a champion for women and girls around the world. And as secretary of state, Clinton made gender equality and women’s empowerment a pillar of American diplomacy. The question now is whether the departure of the leading advocate for women will signal the end of the State Department’s focus on these key issues.Among her achievements in this area, Clinton launched the Equal Futures Partnership to increase women’s leadership in politics, and made the case that rights for women and girls are key ingredients for democracy, peace and economic growth in every country. Critically, she led the United States National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security as well as the United States Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, an initiative of USAID and the State Department. If that wasn’t enough, she also shaped the Secretarial Policy Directive on Gender, which has been instrumental in working to end child marriage.Continue Reading… … Read More
