Oil Spill Killed Hundreds Of Sea Turtles, Say Researchers

Robert Hune-Kalter - Talk Radio News Service

According to experts, the massive oil spill off the Gulf Coast has killed hundreds of sea turtles. 

“We have about 560 stranded turtles documented. Most of those stranded turtles are dead, that’s the normal course for stranded turtles,” Barbara Schroeder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries National Sea Turtle Coordinator, said during a conference call with other researchers.  “About 60 were found alive and about 45 remain in rehabilitation.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Sea Turtle Coordinator Sandy MacPherson explained efforts to relocate sea turtle nests to the Atlantic Coast.

“The unified command approved plan is currently being implemented and it involves excavating sea turtle nests along Alabama and Florida panhandle beaches and carefully placing them in specially prepared boxes using sand from their own nests,” explained MacPherson. “They are then carefully tended by innovative health applications biologists in a climate controlled facility at the Kennedy Space Center.”

MacPherson said that researchers do not know if the turtles will find their way back to old nesting grounds after being released on east central Florida beaches.

“This nest translocation effort is primarily a rescue effort to prevent hatchlings from encountering oil, or oil product,” MacPherson said.

USDA Annouces $1.2 Billion Plan To Bring Broadband To Rural Areas

By Rob Sanna-Talk Radio News Service

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced 126 new Recovery Act projects aimed at providing broadband internet and media jobs in rural areas across the United States. The USDA plans to spend $1.2 billion of stimulus funds and they anticipate the projects to spur private investments of over $117 million in these rural areas.

“This investment in broadband is already putting Americans back to work,” Vilsack said in a phone conference with reporters, “We anticipate the investments we’ve announced to date will create somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 immediate and direct jobs.”

Added Vilsack, “The jobs that are being created today involve broadband service providers hiring works to lay down fiber, before and during construction works will be needed for engineering and design, and during construction and after completion there will be workers managing these installations repair lines and interacting with customers.”

In addition to bringing jobs to rural areas, the USDA also predicts the investments will boost small business’ ability to compete in the global market and expand education opportunities for children and college students.

Rolling Stone Reporter Blocked From Embedding With Troops

Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter behind the profile that ultimately cost General Stanley McChrystal his job, has been barred from embedding with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“There is no right to embed,” Pentagon spokesperson Col. David Lapan told reporters Tuesday. Instead, Lapan explained, it is a decision left to the individual command, with trust between the officers and the reporter playing a key role.

Hastings, a freelance writer, accompanied McChrystal and his staff in Paris this April. Disparaging comments directed at members of the administration made by both staffers and the then-Afghan commander made it into a June issue of Rolling Stone magainze.

START Vote Postponed

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has postponed its vote on the new START treaty and will instead take up the arms reduction agreement following the August recess.

“I chose to reschedule the vote to be responsive to the concerns of our members so that we can build bipartisan consensus around a treaty that our military leaders all agree will make America safer,” Sen. John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations Chair, said in a statement Tuesday.

While the treaty, which aims to reduce the amount of nuclear warheads held by both Russia and the U.S. to 1,500 each, has found support from the committee’s Ranking Member Sen. Richard Lugar (D-Ind.), no other Republican on Foreign Relations have joined him. 

The committee vote will now likely take place in September. Once it reaches the Senate floor, it will need 67 votes to be ratified.

Expert Blasts GOP's Economic Freedom Act

By Rob Sanna - Talk Radio News

Economic expert at Citizens for Tax Justice Steven Wamoff said Tuesday that the Republicans’ Economic Freedom Act, informally know as their jobs plan, would be extraordinarily expensive and only provide temprary relief to middle-class Americans. 

The plan permanently eliminates income taxes on capital gains, which provides a huge windfall to wealthy people who rely on return on their investment for income. It also erases the federal tax on property transferred after a person dies via a will.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Wamoff said the plan is “regressive” and that it cuts payroll taxes in half for one year, the only portion of the bill which would benefit the middle class and it is a short-lived provision.

Wamoff offered harsh criticism of the right-leaning legislation and said America would be “spinning its wheels if a bill like this were passed.”

He argued that the plan cuts 75% of corporate income taxes by allowing businesses to immediately write off purchases and reduces the regular corporate tax rate from 35% to 12.5%.

All of these changes in the tax code would cost about $7 trillion over 10 years, and Wamoff said if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, the total cost would be closer to $10 trillion.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) described the plan as “more of the Bush policies warmed over.”

“Americans don’t want to go back [and] they don’t want to return to the failed policies of the Bush administration,” Hoyer said. “They want to go forward, and very frankly we think the progess we have been making, and which we need to build on, are what the American public are going to vote on in November.”