The Speaker News Journal

Blitzortung! Team Develops World-Wide Maps of Lightning Strikes, Real-Time and Free for Everyone

December 22, 2015July 4, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

It is now possible to watch world-wide lighting strikes play live on your computer screen in real-time, and for free. Blitzortung is a free, live, lighting strike map developed by Heinrich-Heine-University of Dusseldorf professor Egon Wanke and LUCOM lead developer Tobias Volgnandt, who created the service “just to provide free and live lightning maps” for the world. Lighting strikes on the realtime maps are marked by a white expanding circle and a click-sound.

Blitzortung is, however, a community, according to developer Tobias Volgnandt. “Our great community behind the project should be in the foreground, not just we,” Volgnandt told The Speaker.

Around the world, there are currently over 800 participants. Each of these participants has set up a lightning sensor (which are available from Blitzortung for less than 200 Euro–$270) and connected to the network of volunteers.

Currently, the network is composed of sensors mainly in Europe, North America and Australia, but the network is growing fast, and there have been requests from every continent (even Antarctica), Volgnandt told us.

Although the developers at Blitzortung make no money from the project, and created it just because they wanted to see it exist, they cannot currently handle the amount of requests they receive. The volunteers want to cover their own regions and ask for the hardware, Volgnandt told us. He stressed the community nature of Blitzortung. “We do not find volunteers, they find us. They do not do this for us, but for themselves and for our community.”

“They contact us, because they want to help. They are weather enthusiasts, amateur radio operators or have a general interest in electronics.”

Volgnandt spoke to the origins and early days of the project, as well as recent developments.

“We are just enthusiasts and doing this as a hobby. We weren’t satisfied with the performance of existing lightning location hardware which private users can buy. Either it was not accurate enough or it was much too expensive. Egon Wanke created his own much cheaper hardware and locating method around 2008 which already produced very good results. This former community was much much smaller than today, but they made all this possible.

“Last year we (Egon Wanke, Tobias Volgnandt and Richo Anderson) released a new hardware generation, which is even better. We don’t have specific goals. We want to have some fun and gather experience all fields belonging to lightning locating (physics, mathematics, informatics, weather) community.”

How does the network work?

Lightning sensors located in over 800 locations around the world collect information from nearby electromagnetic storms. This information is sent via internet to the central processing servers–which receive millions of signals per hour at peak times–and the exact positions of the discharges are calculated. The data is published to the website and, within 3-6 seconds the strikes appear on users’ screens.

The question of how many sensors will be needed to cover the globe depends on many factors, according to Volgnandt, such as the constellation of the stations or their reception quality.

“At least four stations on different places are needed. They could already provide some very basic coverage in an area with 1000 x 1000 km when all parameters are good enough. The same could be true for an area of 100 x 100 km, depending on the station constellation.”

To use Blitzortung, or for information on participating and necessary equipment, please visit their site and click on the “What’s New?” page.

By Day Blakely Donaldson

CSIS Report to US Government: How the US Military Can Scale Down Across-the-Board to Create an “Affordable Military” in 7 Years, Overturning Past 10 Years Defense Strategy, Focus on Today’s Two Main Threat Nations

October 17, 2014July 3, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

The US military will be scaled down in the next seven years, according to the plans of the US government, which is aiming to create an “affordable military” by 2021. A report published Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), focused on coping with an across-the-board drawdown while still maintaining US security, has provided recommendations that would overturn the last 10 years of US defense policy–which has focused on unconventional warfare against terrorist insurgents and a shift to the Far East–to focus instead on today’s most pressing threats to the US.

“The post-9-11 US defense drawdown will be significantly deeper than is generally recognized,” stated the authors of the report. The cause of the reduction in funding is the “double whammy” of decreased purchasing power of US dollars and topline drawdown. The amounts that the Department of Defense (DoD) will be able to afford in 2021 will be smaller across the board–many areas will see reduced capacity.

“To cope with a drawdown of this magnitude, DoD needs to adopt a dramatically different approach to force planning–one that is grounded in the acceptance of budgetary caps established by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA),” stated the report. The teams responsible for the report focused on how the DoD could “minimize the impact of a deep budgetary reduction and provide the military capabilities needed for the strategic realities of 2021 and beyond.”

US Military — History of US military spending

The report, “Building the 2021 Affordable Military,” was authored by Clark A. Murdock, Ryan Crotty and Angela Weaver for the CSIS Affordable Military Working Group and the earlier CSIS Defense Drawdown Working Group, and represents two years of work by the teams. It was published on CSIS’s website at the beginning of June. The team also relied on the work of other leading think tanks for their conclusions.

The research team proposed a number of options for reducing spending, but advised a focus on containing and deterring Russia and China, given the aggressive policies of the two nations as demonstrated by China’s assertion of ownership of 90 percent of the South China Sea and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The team also preparing for a conventional war with another great power, reducing troop numbers and investing in weapons, equipment, science and technology. In particular, long-range bombers, attack subs, nuclear modernization, aerial and space surveillance, national missile defense and “tripwire” deployment brigades seemed important to the research team, who stated, “This aggressive investment in modernization is aimed at sustaining the US high-tech edge versus Russia and China.”

CSIS is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, which has worked for the US military, developing solutions to policy changes for over 50 years since its founding during the Cold War. CSIS has 220 full-time staff and a large network of affiliates.

US defense spending peaked in 2010–when deployments in Afghanistan were at their highest–at $730 billion dollars (in 2013 dollars). The budget proposed for 2021, by which time the defense dollar is expected to have lost 15 percent of its purchasing power because of the aggregate impact of internal cost growth–increased personnel and other costs.

By James Haleavy

CSIS

Ocean Garbage Mystery: Instead of Expected Millions of Tons, Researchers Find Only 7,000 – 35,000 Tons

October 17, 2014July 1, 2014 by Sid Douglas

Researchers testing the amount of plastic garbage polluting the earth’s oceans have discovered a mystery. Instead of finding evidence of the millions of tons of durable plastic garbage expected to litter the ocean surface, they found only tens of thousands.

In the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 45,000 tons of plastic garbage reached the world’s oceans every year. Today the world produces five times as much plastic as it produced in the 70s, so researches expected to find evidence of millions of tons of plastic garbage in the oceans. They were surprised that after looking at over 3,000 samples, they found only 7,000 – 35,000 tons of plastic garbage.

The research was conducted by ecologists at the University of Cadiz in Spain. The report, “Plastic debris in the open ocean,” was completed by Andrés Cózara, Fidel Echevarríaa, Ignacio González-Gordilloa, Xabier Irigoienb, Bárbara Úbedaa, Santiago Hernández-Leónd, Álvaro T. Palmae, Sandra Navarrof, Juan García-de-Lomasa, Andrea Ruizg, María L. Fernández-de-Puellesh, and Carlos M. Duartei, and was published by the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers do not know where the missing garbage has gone. The researchers did find clues, however. A primary piece of evidence was that far fewer plastic fragments under 5 millimeters were found than larger fragments.

The researchers guessed that somehow the smallest pieces of plastic were finding their way to deeper waters.

Another guess was that mesopelagic fish, which inhabit the oceans at 660-3,300 feet below the surface, were feeding on the plastic fragments when they came to the surface at night. The researchers pointed out that the normal food of these fish is roughly the same size–zooplankton. When the fish excrete the debris, it may sink deeper, or the debris may be carried deeper when the fish die.

Another finding was that bacteria was growing on the plastic fragments. The bacteria’s weight may be pushing the fragments down, the researchers suggested.

These guesses were phrased by the researcher this way: “Our observations of the size distribution of floating plastic debris point at important size-selective sinks removing millimeter-sized fragments of floating plastic on a large scale. This sink may involve a combination of fast nano-fragmentation of the microplastic into particles of microns or smaller, their transference to the ocean interior by food webs and ballasting processes, and processes yet to be discovered.”

The surprising finding led the researchers to conclude a further question was pending. “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean,” the researchers stated.

By Sid Douglas

PNAS

Global Ocean Commission

UN to Legislate Against Transnational Corporations Which Violate Human Rights – US and EU Oppose Resolution

October 17, 2014July 1, 2014 by Cheryl Bretton

The UN will move toward a legal treaty that penalizes transnational corporations which violate human rights, after a vote at the 26th UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session last week.

Key language included in the resolution includes a decision to “establish an open-ended intergovernmental working group on a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights, the mandate of which shall be to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.”

The vote was split. Twenty states voted in favor, including Ecuador and South Africa, who proposed the resolution. Additionally, more than 80 nations and 600 organizations supported the resolution.

Fourteen states voted against, including the US, who said that “this legally binding instrument will not be binding for those who vote against it,” and EU states. Some nations who voted against did so expressly because of political pressure. “We vote with the EU. If we do not, it can become very unpleasant for us”, one representative was quoted as saying to Friends of the Earth International.

The opposing states also lobbied other countries to side with them, threatening the loss of developmental aid and foreign investment.

Thirteen nations abstained.

There is already a voluntary framework in place at the UNHRC to support human rights. The resolution to move from the voluntary framework to a more strict one was led by Ecuador in 2013, and was supported from the outset by 80 nations.

Cheryl Bretton

Research Looks at Two Northern Oceans Fish Species, One of Which Has Thrived and One Diminished, to Explain the Future of Biological Species in Global Warming

October 17, 2014July 1, 2014 by Sid Douglas

42 Percent of Muslims Polled by Pew Research Think Suicide Bombing and Other Violence Against Civilians Are at Least Occasionally Justified

September 1, 2015July 1, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

A Pew Research study has found that 42 percent of Muslims in 15 locations think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets is at least occasionally justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. The study was concluded in Spring 2014 and the results were published Tuesday by Pew Research as part of its Global Attitudes Project. In a few of the nations polled, a large majority of Muslims were against suicide bombing.

Pakistan and Tunisia were found to be overwhelmingly against suicide bombing. Indonesia was also found to be significantly against suicide bombing.

On the other hand,a significant percentage of Muslim populations polled supported suicide bombings in some circumstances.

Out of 15 polled locations (counting Gaza and West Bank separately), in eight the majority of respondents said suicide bombings were never justified, while in four the majority believed they were at least occasionally justified. Overall, 42 percent of Muslims polled thought suicide bombing was at least occasionally justified.

However, in all or most of the nations polled, there was at least a significant minority that thought suicide bombings were at least occasionally justified. Only in Tunisia and Pakistan was the minority under 10 percent. Depending upon interpretation, 7 and 8 percent of populations of 180 million and 11 million may be considered significant.

42 Pecrent of Muslims Polled by Pew Research Think Suicide Bombing and Other Violence Against Civilians Are at Least Occasionally Justified (4) — Click to expand

Although Pew tallied their net results to include only “Often” and “Sometimes,” a large percentage of Muslims polled felt that suicide bombings were at least “Rarely” justified. For example, in Israel only 16 percent of Muslims thought that suicide bombings were “Often” or “Sometimes” justified, but an additional 30 percent felt they were justified on some occasions. In Jordan, only 15 percent felt suicide bombings were justified often or sometimes, but an additional 29 percent thought they were occasionally justified. In Egypt, 24 percent said “Often” or “Sometimes;” 35 percent said “Rarely.”

In a few locations, an uncertain response accounted for a significant percentage of responses. To compare the two regions polled within the Palestinian territory, although in Gaza 75 percent of Muslims thought suicide bombing was “Often” or “Sometimes” justified, and on the West Bank only 49 percent did, on the West Bank there was also a significant percentage of respondents who said they “didn’t know”–13 percent–while only 4 percent of Muslims in Gaza “didn’t know.”
Similarly, in Turkey, where the the minority (29 percent) of Muslims felt suicide bombings were never justified, 13 percent responded that they did not know. A similar percentage of uncertainty existed in three other majority-opposed nations: Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal.

42 Pecrent of Muslims Polled by Pew Research Think Suicide Bombing and Other Violence Against Civilians Are at Least Occasionally Justified (3) — Click to expand

Pew Research also reported that support for suicide bombing has fallen since the September 2001 World Trade Center attack. Pew has recorded a steady decline in support for suicide bombings “against civilian targets in order to defend Islam from its enemies.” In all nations presented by Pew–with the exception of Tanzania–levels of support have declined or remained steady. However, it should be noted that although Pew formulated the results by asking “Do you feel this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?” they tabulate their percentages of support based on “often/sometimes” only, and do not show the percentage of Muslims who do support suicide attacks, but only “rarely.”

By Day Blakely Donaldson

Pew Research

Ten-Year-Old CG Girl “Sweetie” Used to Collect Identities of 1,000 Online Sex Predators From Chatrooms

June 10, 2015June 30, 2014 by Heidi Woolf

Amsterdam-based advertising agency Lemz created a CG 10-year old to enter chatrooms and collect 1,000 identities of participants in a form of child sex tourism called webcam child sex tourism. The advertising team spent 10 weeks of 10-hour days hunting for predators. This week, the children’s charity Terre des Hommes, which was partly responsible for the Sweetie campaign, won the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity for the project.

Sweetie is a computer model who looks and moves like a real girl, according to Lemz. Sweetie is animated by capturing the movements of a real person with a camera and motion sensors and applying them to the model. Every movement the real person makes–down to blinking–is replicated in Sweetie. “Men think she’s sitting in front of a webcam in the Philippines, but she’s actually operated by Terre des Hommes from a warehouse in the capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam. While Sweetie is chatting we track down the men.”

“As a marketer, the model I used to understand this problem was one of supply and demand,” said Lemz’s Mark Woerde. “It was clear to me that the demand-side needed to be stopped in order to stop growth of the ‘supply’ of child victims.”

Lemz began researching online predators before they conceived of Sweetie. The team went online after reading an article about webcam child sex tourism. The team entered a random chatroom and claimed to be an adult male from Holland.

An 8-year-old Filipino boy contacted them and “almost immediately offered to take off his clothes if [Woerde] sent him some money.” Woerde immediately closed his laptop and cried, he later said.

After days thinking about the Filipino boy she had encountered, Woerde decided to imitate that child to catch predators in the act and convince them to identify themselves. “We would turn the vulnerability of these children into a weapon against their abusers,” stated Woerde.

Lemz’s art directors worked with artists and animators at Motek Entertainment and Brekel 3D to create Sweetie. Four Lemz staff members then spent 10 weeks of 10-hour days in chatrooms as Sweetie, collecting names, locations and webcam footage until 1,000 such predators were netted.

The predators netted by Sweetie resided in 71 countries and all but 1 were male.

Lemz then delivered their research to Interpol as evidence. Lemz also began a global PR campaign.

Woerde said that she hoped the “campaign has also shown people in all creative industries, including advertising, that the world needs their skills and gifts to solve real global problems.”

“If catching them is so easy webcam child sex tourism can be stopped,” claimed Lemz in their promotional video. “What we need now is pro-active policing… If we can trace 1,000 men in two months, police forces can trace more than 100,000 in a year.”

Stop webcam child sex tourism! Lemz PR Campaign to Catch Online Webcam Child Sex Predators

By Heidi Woolf

South Sudan Crisis Could Not Have Been Predicted, Says UN Envoy, Preparing Step Down From Leadership in South Sudan

October 17, 2014June 30, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

The speed, the scale and the scope of what has unfolded in South Sudan during the last six months could not have been predicted, said Hilde Johnson, the UN head in the world’s youngest nation, who spoke at a press conference in New York Monday about her upcoming withdrawal from the leadership of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).

At the press conference, Johnson referred to the situation in South Sudan as “bleak” and stressed the need to put the welfare of South Sudanese above all other concerns, as well as to bring to justice those responsible for crimes committed during the conflict.

“Although I knew it would be rocky and difficult and challenging and we would be under significant pressure,” said Johnson, “I did not expect what happened in the last six months – the speed, the scale and the scope of what has unfolded before our eyes.

“Yet, the events took a life of their own, and the took an ethnic turn, and I think that is one of the reasons why we saw [what] we saw,” said Johnson, referring to the ethnic Nuer-Dinka killings that have been reported to characterize a large part of the fighting.

Hilde Johnson — HIlde Johnson at the New York press conference

Johnson led an UNMISS that was focussed on building the nation. Since the fighting broke out last December, the UN mission has changed. It is now focussed more on peacekeeping and protecting South Sudanese lives. Johnson said this was “a very different from the mandate I took office on.”

The change was “not something we chose to do,” said Johnson. The UN was obliged to do so in order to save lives, which, Johnson said, had been saved.

The 12,000 UN peacekeepers and other workers who would compose the UN force decided on by UNMISS in January has not yet been realized, but Johnson made another statement that the force would now be possible after the May 27 Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) meeting.

The country of South Sudan came into being in 2011 by seceeding from Sudan through a near-unanimous UN-backed referendum.

The conflict that has now lasted six months in South Sudan and caused thousands of deaths and over one million displaced began as a political scuffle between the supporters of South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir and supporters of former Vice President Riek Machar, who was removed by Kiir last summer as part of what Kiir has said was a paring down of government.

Currently, humanitarian action in South Sudan is focussed on assisting people through the rainy season, in which the country’s scant roads are often impassable and human resources are scarce.

Humanitarian agencies face the task of assisting 3.8 million South Sudanese–and another 3 million are at risk–according to UNOCHA estimates.

Johnson served as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of UNMISS since 2011, when UNMISS was first established. Johnson announced that she was stepping down earlier this year.

By Day Blakely Donaldson

Duke University Scientists Create Method to Measure the Effects of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on the Brain, Offering Hope of Improvements in TMS Therapy

October 17, 2014June 30, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

Neuroscientists and engineers at North Carolina’s Duke University have pioneered a method with which the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the brain can be measured. The Duke team has made it possible to measure the response of a single neuron to an electromagnetic charge–something that has not before been possible. The work offers the potential to improve and initiate novel TMS therapy approaches.

“This report focused on the innovative methodology that allowed us to record from single neurons,” Duke professor of biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and neurobiology and lead researcher on the team, Warren Grill, told The Speaker. The team was able to record an increase in a neuron’s firing rate in the wake of the short, rapidly varying magnetic field created by TMS. The increase in firing lasted approximately 100 ms after the TMS pulse, according to Grill.

The report, “Simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation and single-neuron recording in alert non-human primates,” was authored by Jerel K Mueller, Erinn M Grigsby, Vincent Prevosto, Frank W Petraglia III, Hrishikesh Rao, Zhi-De Deng, Angel V Peterchev, Marc A Sommer, Tobias Egner, Michael L Platt, in addition to Grill, was published in Nature and was supported by a Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Research Incubator Award and by a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a widely-used procedure wherein electromagnetic coils are held up to the skull and short electromagnetic pulses are run through the coil. It has long been understood that neurons react to TMS, and the procedure has been used to treat psychiatric disorders, substance abuse and other health conditions. Although preferable to other treatment methods because TMS is noninvasive, its mechanisms have always been poorly understood, making improvements difficult.

In part, the barrier to understanding the mechanisms of TMS is due to the difficulty of measuring neural responses during the procedure. The neural response is electric,and the current charging the TMS bears an overwhelmingly stronger electric charge.

Grill said of the difficulty in understanding TMS without measuring its effects, “Nobody really knows what TMS is doing inside the brain, and given that lack of information, it has been very hard to interpret the outcomes of studies or to make therapies more effective. We set out to try to understand what’s happening inside that black box by recording activity from single neurons during the delivery of TMS in a non-human primate. Conceptually, it was a very simple goal. But technically, it turned out to be very challenging.”

Although thousands of times smaller than the charge of the TMS, the neural response can be measured by the research team’s hardware. The team also overcame the obstruction posed by the recording device, which also emitted an electric current.

“Studies with TMS have all been empirical,” said Grill. “You could look at the effects and change the coil, frequency, duration or many other variables. Now we can begin to understand the physiological effects of TMS and carefully craft protocols rather than relying on trial and error. I think that is where the real power of this research is going to come from.”

The Duke team’s research is open to anyone with a lab, according to the researchers. “[A]ny modern lab working with non-human primates and electrophysiology can use this same approach in their studies,” said Grill. The team said they hope others would pursue this line of research, and contribute to improvements in TMS therapy.

“This research will allow us first to quantify and understand the effects of TMS on neurons, and subsequently to design novel approaches, including stimulation waveforms and stimulation coil design to amplify or modify those effects,” Grill told us.

By Day Blakely Donaldson

Nature

Fracking Can Be Banned by Local Communities, Says New York’s Highest Court

October 17, 2014June 30, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

$fracking$

Local communities have the power to use local zoning laws to ban heavy industry, such as oil and gas production and fracking, according to New York’s Court of Appeals Monday. The state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 decision that the towns of Dryden and Middlefield could ban such industry within municipal borders.

“Today the Court stood with the people of Dryden and the people of New York to protect their right to self determination,” said Dryden Deputy Supervisor Jason Leifer. “It is clear that people, not corporations, have the right to decide how their community develops.”

The ruling effects more than just Dryden and Middlefield. More than 170 New York municipalities and many communities in Colorado, Ohio, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and California have passed or are attempting to pass measures against fracking, and the ruling is considered to significantly empower those citizens to establish bans or moratoriums on unwanted industry.

“Heavy industry has never been allowed in our small farming town and three years ago, we decided that fracking was no exception,” said Dryden Town Supervisor Mary Ann Sumner. “The oil and gas industry tried to bully us into backing down, but we took our fight all the way to New York’s highest court. And today we won.”

Communities have faced daunting odds in their attempts to assert self determination when industry interests are at stake.

“This decision by the Court of Appeals has settled the matter once and for all across New York State and has sent a firm message to the oil and gas industry,” said Deborah Goldberg, managing attorney at Earthjustice, who worked on the case. “For too long the oil and gas industry has intimidated and abused people, expecting to get away with it. That behavior is finally coming back to haunt them, as communities across the country stand up and say ‘no more.’ Earthjustice is proud to have stood with, and fought on behalf of, one such community.”

“Town by town, New Yorkers have taken a stand against fracking. Today’s victory confirms that each of these towns is on firm legal ground,” said Helen Slottje, an Ithaca-based attorney whose legal research inspired New York’s fracking ban. “The oil and gas industry tried to take away a fundamental right that pre-dates even the Declaration of Independence: the right of municipalities to regulate local land use. But they failed. The anti-fracking measures passed by Dryden, Middlefield and dozens of other New York municipalities are fully enforceable.”

Dryden began its organized opposition to oil and gas projects in 2009 when it began to learn about the technique the companies planned to use to extract oil and gas–fracking. Dryen residents organized under the Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC) and convinved the town board to prohibit oil and gas development activities, including fracking.

An interested oil and gas company sued the town weeks later. Dryden argued that they had the right to make local land use decisions under the provisions of the New York State Constitution, including where oil and gas interests were involved. In 2012, a trial court agreed, and a mid-level appeals court also found for the residents in 2013.

“Today’s ruling shows all of America that a committed group of citizens and public officials can stand together against fearful odds and successfully defend their homes, their way of life and the environment against those who would harm them all in the name of profit,” said Leifer.

Dryden – The Small Town that Changed the Fracking Game

By James Haleavy

Albania Granted EU Candidate Status

October 17, 2014June 25, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

The EU General Affairs Council granted the Balkan nation of Albania EU candidate status June 24.

The Council granted Albania candidate status “in light of its… continued progress… subject to endorsement by the European Council,” although the Council also urged Albania to increase its efforts to combat corruption and organized crime, reform its public administration and judiciary, and protect human rights, including with anti-discrimination policies for minorities and property rights. The council also requested the Western Balkan nation do more to relieve pressure on the EU related to immigration.

“The Council… expects Albania to intensify its support for the timely reduction of migratory pressures on the EU including by pursuing its efforts to ensure the fulfilment of all conditions of the visa roadmap and by taking further steps to address the issue of unfounded asylum applications lodged by Albanian nationals,” the EU stated in a press report.

“The Council welcomes Albania’s continued constructive engagement in regional cooperation and good neighbourly relations as well as its alignment with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.”

The decision is now subject to approval by the European Council.

By James Haleavy

Three Corporations Manage All of US’s Illegal Alien Prisoners in 13 Prisons, Net $4bn and Pay Executives Over $19 Million

July 30, 2016June 25, 2014 by The Speaker Editors

Between 1998 and 2012, immigration prisoners incarcerated in federal prisons increased 145 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Thirteen US Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons managed by three private prison corporations house all of America’s 25,000 prisoners convicted of living in the US without proper documentation.

The three corporations, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group, and Management and Training Corporation (MTC), are contracted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), formed in 2003, has over 45,000 agents and receives more money than all other federal agencies combined. The CBP is a department of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and is the largest law enforecment agency in the US. The primary task of the CBP is preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the US. The Customs and Border Patrol feeds the CARs.

In 2012, the three corporations took in a total of $4 billion in revenue. GEO and CCA executives made around $19 million that year.

Illegal immigrants are pursued by the DHS. Since 2009, illegal immigrants have been placed in US prisons in numbers greater than convicts for “violent, weapons and property offenses combined,” according to an ACLU report.

The ACLU has blamed a DHS-Department of Justice (DOJ) program, Operation Streamline, for much of what it deems human rights abuse of illegal migrants. Begun in 2005, Operation Streamline mandated that in addition to deporting illegal migrants, the US government would prosecute them.

According to a CCA executive who was quoted by the ACLU, “Let me just make a brief comment on Operation Streamline…. Before this initiative was put in place, only a small percentage of [il]legal persons crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were prosecuted….We are now experiencing significant numbers to further be in place in custody as a result of Operation Streamline…We believe that the Federal Bureau of Prisons…will continue to provide a meaningful opportunity for the industry for the foreseeable future.”

By Day Blakely Donaldson

National Immigration Forum

The Atlantic

Business Managed Democracy