A natural gas line explosion early Tuesday morning in Louisiana evacuated about 55 people from their homes and closed off roads leading to the area near Enon, outside New Orleans.

WWL TV reports:

The amount of scorched earth near the explosion made it appear as if a bomb was detonated, Seal said.

An approximate 80-foot segment of the pipeline was blown away, causing a nearly 300-foot heavily-wooded radius to be completely leveled, according to Louisiana State Police Trooper Nick Manale.

Florida Gas, who owns the line, shut down the gas line around 6:45 a.m.
Seal said the company released more gas in an attempt to get the remaining "residual gas out of the pipeline. So you may be hearing a few more explosions, but nothing serious is going to happen."

"Crews have isolated and contained the west end of that pipeline, basically the ignition source is now gone from that pipeline, and all of the residual natural gas has been drained," Manale said.

He said there is still a small amount of ignition aflame on the east side coming from the Bogalusa area. Crews are working to drain the pressure and residual gas out of the segment.

The report from the Louisiana State Police and Department of Environmental Quality Hazmat indicated the suspected cause of the explosion was a rupture of a 30-inch natural gas line, according to the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. The cause of the explosion remained under investigation.

Amazingly, there were no injuries and no fatalities as a result of the explosion. Approximately 10,000 area residents lost power.

Continue reading »

In this 40-minute web exclusive interview, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks discusses his more than 300 days in the Ecuadorean embassy, the U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists, the future of WikiLeaks and Visa’s financial blockade on WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange:

"Well, we are literally winning in the courts in Iceland. Of course, Iceland is an independent—is one of the most independent countries in Europe, that has been behind a lot of our values in the past. The European Parliament passed a resolution against the activities of the credit card companies in relation to us. In Australia, we have had three opinion polls. They show that I have between 26 and 28 percent of the voting intention, Australia-wide. We have 40 percent of the voting intention of people under the age of 30, 36 percent of the voting intention in the most popular state of New South Wales, where Sydney is located. The Kissinger Files, 1.7 million documents that we have just published.

And I detect a certain fear in the United States administration and a certain fear in the Pentagon in relation to making statements about us. The bad old neo-McCarthyist fervor that once existed in 2011 about this organization, where politicians felt that they could propose bills to Congress, where Lieberman and Peter T. King felt they could propose bills to Congress to declare my staff enemy combatants of the United States, who could be kidnapped or killed at will, those days are well and truly gone, where politicians like Biden thought that he could come out and declare that I was a high-tech terrorist, where other politicians and high-profile journalists thought they could come out and directly call for my assassination, as Bill O’Reilly did and other people in Fox and The Washington Times. They came out and nakedly called for my assassination, including an adviser even in Canada to Stephen Harper. Those days are gone. Now, this organization is furious, and we are after redress. And we are getting redress."

A full transcript of the interview is available here.

You can also watch Democracy Now!'s recent interview with Assange about the guilty plea of hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, the upcoming "show trial" for accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, and his little-known meeting with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

By Rob Garver and Charles Seife, Special to ProPublica

On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.

Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from the FDA, had visited the Houston lab many times over the previous decade for routine inspections. This time was different. His team was there to investigate a former employee's allegation that the company had tampered with records and manipulated test data.

When Stone explained the gravity of the inquiry to Chinna Pamidi, the testing facility's president, the Cetero executive made a brief phone call. Moments later, employees rolled in eight flatbed carts, each double-stacked with file boxes. The documents represented five years of data from some 1,400 drug trials.

Pamidi bluntly acknowledged that much of the lab's work was fraudulent, Stone said. "You got us," Stone recalled him saying.

Based partly on records in the file boxes, the FDA eventually concluded that the lab's violations were so "egregious" and pervasive that studies conducted there between April 2005 and August 2009 might be worthless.

The health threat was potentially serious: About 100 drugs, including sophisticated chemotherapy compounds and addictive prescription painkillers, had been approved for sale in the United States at least in part on the strength of Cetero Houston's tainted tests. The vast majority, 81, were generic versions of brand-name drugs on which Cetero scientists had often run critical tests to determine whether the copies did, in fact, act the same in the body as the originals. For example, one of these generic drugs was ibuprofen, sold as gelatin capsules by one of the nation's largest grocery-store chains for months before the FDA received assurance they were safe.

The rest were new medications that required so much research to win approval that the FDA says Cetero's tests were rarely crucial.

Stone said he expected the FDA to move swiftly to compel new testing and to publicly warn patients and doctors.

Continue reading »

Via Lee Camp: Aerial footage of Arkansas Tar Sands Oil spill.
There are more photos from National Geographic here.

Seems Exxon has some job openings for more people to toss paper towels into the tar sands. From Craigslist:

Oil Spill Cleanup (Mayflower)
Need 40 HR Hazmat trained laborers. Emergency cleanup of oil.

Location: Mayflower
Compensation: Contract / OT.
This is a contract job.
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

What, no experience necessary? Temporary work. Pathetic that Exxon doesn't have experienced specialists in their employ. There certainly isn't a shortage of work cleaning up after this industry. This doesn't inspire much confidence for me as far as what to expect from the quality of the clean up efforts by Exxon...not that I had high expectations to begin with.

Oil-covered wildlife (Not all survived) from the Mayflower area is keeping the volunteers with the Helping Arkansas Wild Kritters (HAWK) Center busy:

"That is oil," Slater said, holding her hand out covered in dark liquid. "That's all oil he [the duck] just pooped. It's going through is GI tract. That's what we have to be on the look out for right now."

It's been an exhausting three days as the first of the animals began to be delivered to the rehabilitation center, but Slater said it's well worth it, especially considering the alternative.

"It feels good to be able to give back to these animals that would have no chance at all ," she said.

The job of washing and treating these animals isn't easy or inexpensive.

"It certainly does cost a great deal more than just some dish soap," she said. "The cost of each bird can go up in the thousands, when you think about food, electricity, and medical treatment."

There's also video with the Hawk Center article that gives a good look at the work involved with treating these birds and other wildlife.

Wildlife paying the price for Exxon tar sands pipeline rupture in Arkansas. Image via the HAWK Center.

Continue reading »

A suicide bombing tore through a mosque in the Syrian capital Thursday, killing a top Sunni Muslim preacher and longtime supporter of President Bashar Assad along with at least 41 other people.

Syrian extremists have killed the wrong Sunni cleric. Sheikh Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Buti, a top Sunni preacher and supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, was one of 42 people killed in a suicide bombing at a mosque in Damascus on Friday. In response, Assad has stated that his forces will “wipe out” and “clean our country” of the Muslim extremists he believes are responsible for the attack, the first to target a mosque since the country’s civil war began two years ago. Meanwhile, the United Nations plans to investigate whether either the Syrian government or its rebel opposition has used chemical weapons against one another, as they both have claimed.

Via:

It was one of the most stunning assassinations of the two-year civil war and marked a new low in the conflict: while suicide bombings blamed on Islamic extremists fighting with the rebels have become common, the latest attack was the first time a suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a mosque. The grandson of the 84-year-old al-Buti was among those killed in the attack.

In the statement carried by Syria's state SUNA news agency, Assad said al-Buti represented true Islam in facing "the forces of darkness and extremist" ideology.

"Your blood and your grandson's, as well as that of all the nation's martyrs will not go in vain because we will continue to follow your thinking to wipe out their darkness and clear our country of them," said Assad.

Syria's crisis started in March 2011 as peaceful protests against Assad's authoritarian rule. The revolt turned into a civil war as some opposition supporters took up arms the fight a harsh government crackdown on dissent. The U.N. says more than 70,000 people have been killed since.

It is not yet clear when al-Buti's funeral would take place, although the Syrian government declared Saturday as a day of mourning.

New phone-hacking allegations at Rupert Murdoch's now closed newspaper News of the World have been made.

Sources told The Guardian on Friday that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has been hit with 600 new hacking claims, some new victims, and some people who had earlier decided not to sue. Scotland Yard’s new information reportedly comes from a former suspect turned informant for the police. The news comes just days before Britain’s high court will hear arguments from more than a dozen people—including Cherie Blair and David Beckham’s father—who settled last fall with News International, News Corp.’s British wing. With the new claims, the investigation into hacking at News Corp. could last well into 2015:

Further details are expected to emerge on Monday morning at the high court during a hearing relating to the existing litigation by hacking victims against Murdoch's News International (NI) – hours before MPs are due to vote on joint Labour and Liberal Democrat amendments that would introduce a backstop law to stiffen regulation of the press.

Sources say Scotland Yard detectives believe they can identify as many as 600 new incidents after obtaining the phone records of an insider who is now being lined up as a crown witness. As a result of the new information, the force's Operation Weeting is revisitng the timetable for concluding its investigation, which had been due to be completed with the conclusion of trials this year. Police now expect their work to continue into 2015.

The 600 new potential litigants fall into three groups: new victims; others who sued over hacking but signed agreements with NI allowing them to sue the company again; and a third group who signed agreements potentially barring them from suing again. The indications are that there may be "some hundreds of new legal actions" from the first two groups.

On Monday the high court will hear formally of at least a dozen settlements out of the 167 civil claims filed last autumn from individuals including Cherie Blair and David Beckham's father, Ted. Blair was one of 170 victims who chose to sue in the high court instead of going through the NI private scheme, which has so far accepted 254 compensation claims.

And here I thought there wasn't a phone left that Murdock's goons hadn't hacked yet...

It’s almost unspeakable. Three young sisters aged 5, 9, and 11 were walking home from school on Valentine's Day when they disappeared. Now, it’s being reported that the girls were found raped and murdered two days later, and the police never launched a proper investigation. After discovering the sisters’ bodies in an old well, police recorded their deaths as “accidental.” It was only after the people from the girls' remote village staged a protest that blocked a national highway Wednesday did officials look into the matter, leading to a medical investigation that revealed the rape and murder. The girls’ mother was offered one million rupees in compensation, but she says, “No amount of money is going to bring my girls back.”

The Guardian reports:

The young mother's tragedy in a remote village once again demonstrated how the police in India often fail to adequately respond to major crimes, especially when it involves women and children.

When a young physiotherapist was brutally gang-raped in a moving Delhi bus in December, the extraordinary public outrage across the country forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government to promise better policing and faster legal action to protect Indian women at home and outside.

But even as lawmakers prepared to discuss a new law against sexual offences on Friday, news of the latest atrocity, involving three young girls in a village more than a thousand kilometres from the Indian capital, was kept under a veil of silence until villagers rioted and blocked the national highway demanding a proper investigation.

"There was no nationwide outrage in response to the latest heinous incident of rape," said a CNN-IBN news anchor. "Why is the nation silent? Or have we become numb?"

A recent study released by Human Rights Watch that said one in three reported rape victims in India were children.

Yet another tragic fire at a factory in Bangladesh's garment district on Saturday has claimed the lives of seven women there, one of whom wasreportedly just 16-years old:

"When I tried to escape through the emergency exit I found the gate locked," Raushan Ara, a worker at the factory, was quoted as saying by Dhaka's Prothom Alo newspaper.

The newspaper said at least 50 people were injured in a stampede triggered by the fire. Six were hospitalized, while others received first aid treatment on their own.

Some of the injured jumped out of the windows of the two-story factory, survivors said.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Monzurul Kabir said the bodies of 7 women were recovered from the top floor of the factoryt. He said the factory was making pants and shirts, but could not provide further details.

Fire official Abdul Halim said it took firefighters about two hours to bring the blaze under control.

Volunteers joined firefighters in battling the fire as a large crowd gathered outside the factory awaiting word on the fate of relatives. Family members were seen crying near the body of a female worker named Josna, who was 16.

About 250 workers were working at the time of the fire, newspapers said.

The owner of the factory, Smart Export Garment Ltd., was not yet not available for comment, so it is not yet known if they produced their garments for any international companies.

Since 2005, over 600 garment factory workers have perished in workplace fires.

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

In "The Untouchables," Frontline investigates why Wall Street's leaders have escaped prosecution for any fraud related to the sale of bad mortgages. Are Wall Street's big bankers untouchable?

Producer Martin Smith joined HuffPo Live on Tuesday to discuss his investigation into the lack of prosecution of Wall Street executives for any fraud related to the sale of bad mortgages:

Commenting on clips from the episode showing former home loan underwriters explaining how they would laugh as they pushed through mortgages that were too expensive for the borrowers, Smith said this type of behavior was "very frequent and common."

"There are lawsuits that name 35 -- easily 36, 37 -- of these kind of testimonies," Smith told HuffPost Live host Jacob Soboroff. "And these guys are joking about it at this point, but of course it's not really funny in the end because it all resulted in the collapse of 2008, a million people losing their houses, many people out of work and businesses seeing demand sink."

"It was like a party," one former loan underwriter tells Frontline's" Martin Smith. "We were getting through these loans as quick as we can. They were not being looked at like they should've been looked at."

A full transcript of the report is available here.

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

A Senate committee is close to putting the final stamp on a massive report on the CIA's detention, interrogation and rendition of terror suspects. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, called the roughly 6,000-page report "the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted."

But it's unclear how much, if any, of the review you might get to read.

The committee first needs to vote to endorse the report. There will be a vote next week.

Republicans, who are a minority on the committee, have been boycotting the investigation since the summer of 2009. They pulled back their cooperation after the Justice Department began a separate investigation into the CIA interrogations. Republicans have criticized that inquiry, arguing that the interrogations had been authorized by President George W. Bush's Justice Department.  (In August, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the investigation was being closed without bringing any criminal charges.)

Even if the report is approved next week, it won't be made public then, if at all. Decisions on declassification will come at "a later time," Feinstein said.

According to Reuters, the Senate report focuses on whether so-called "enhanced interrogation" tactics – including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other techniques – actually led to critical intelligence breakthroughs. Reuters reported earlier this year that the investigation "was expected to find little evidence" that the torture was in fact crucial.

Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and others have repeatedly said that such tactics produced important information. They've also said waterboarding was used on only a handful of high-level detainees, a claim which recently came into question. Feinstein has previously disputed claims that such interrogations led to Osama Bin Laden. (It is also still unclearwhat key members of Congress knew about the program, and when they knew it.)

Much about the CIA's program to detain and interrogate terror suspects has remained officially secret, despite widespread reporting and acknowledgement by Bush.  Obama banned torture upon taking office and released documents related to program, including a critical report from the CIA's Inspector General.

But the Obama administration has argued in courts that details about the CIA program are still classified. (As we have reported, this has led the administration to claim in some cases that Guantanamo detainees' own accounts of their imprisonment are classified.)