AL GORE COMMENT ON EVIL AUSTRALIAN CARBON TAX

Start of a new era - GetUp! ” This is a historic moment. Australia's Parliament has put the nation's first carbon price into law. With this vote, the world has turned a pivotal corner in the collective effort to solve the climate crisis. This success is the result of the tireless work of an unprecedented coalition that came together to support the legislation, the leadership of Prime Minister Gillard, and the courage of legislators to take a vote that helps to safeguard the future of all Australians. I have spent enough time in Australia to know that their spirit of independence as a people cannot be underestimated. As the world’s leading coal exporter, there’s no doubt that opposition to this legislation was fierce. But through determination and commitment, the voice of the people of Australia has rung out loud and clear. Today, we celebrate. Tomorrow, we do everything we can to ensure that this legislation is successful." - Al Gore, November 2011

PSYCHOLOGISTS HELP 9/11 TRUTH DENIERS

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF OAKLAND FROM THE OAKLAND POLICE OFFICERS’ ASSOCIATION

1 November 2011 – Oakland, Ca.

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.

As your police officers, we are confused.

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

Meanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday. This is also being paid for by Oakland taxpayers. Last week’s events alone cost Oakland taxpayers over $1 million.

The Mayor and her Administration are beefing up police presence for Wednesday’s work strike they are encouraging and even “staffing,” spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for additional police presence – at a time when the Mayor is also asking Oakland residents to vote on an $80 parcel tax to bail out the City’s failing finances.

All of these mixed messages are confusing.

We love Oakland and just want to do our jobs to protect Oakland residents. We respectfully ask the citizens of Oakland to join us in demanding that our City officials, including Mayor Quan, make sound decisions and take responsibility for these decisions. Oakland is struggling – we need real leaders NOW who will step up and lead – not send mixed messages. Thank you for listening.

http://www.opoa.org/uncategorized/an-open-letter-to-the-citizens-of-oakland-from-the-oakland-police-officers’-association/

REALITY CHECK: THE #OCCUPY PROTESTORS ... KIND OF HAVE A POINT

October 20, 2011

SOCIAL ISSUES

Everybody's talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the many related demonstrations around the world. According to Journalism.org, the movement "occupied" 10% of news coverage in the U.S. last week, with commenters' opinions ranging from fervent support to outright disgust. The Wall Street Journal has compiled a few of the most interesting reactions here.

One thing that can't be denied: the protesters are making a lot of noise. Andnew research from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2011 might just raise the volume. There are some pretty sobering facts in the report, including the statistic that 0.5% of the world's population own 38.5% of the wealth, while the bottom two-thirds account for just 3.3% of wealth.

Those are pretty crazy numbers. Here are some more: another new studyanalyzing the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has found that only 147 are "superconnected". What does that mean? Basically that a lot of money and power is concentrated in very few hands - and a lot of the 147 companies are banks. Here's an image the researchers released. The yellow dots are 1318 "very connected" companies, and the red are the 147 "superconnected" companies:

The study was conducted by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and is the first of its kind. It's already met with some criticism - Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute, for instance, points out that the study assumes ownership equates to control, which isn't necessarily true - but its findings are still fascinating.

There are some interesting similarities in the numbers. Credit Suisse found that 0.5% of the world's population control 38.5% of the wealth. The Zurich study found that about 40% of the corporate network is controlled by about 1% of companies. So all signs seem to be pointing to the fact that wealth is distributed very unevenly on the world stage.

Speaking of signs, here's one from the protests:

http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/social-issues/reality-check-the-occupy-protestors-kind-of-have-a-point.html

A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF BEING ARRESTED FOR PROTESTING

by nicocoinicon on October 24, 2011

I was one of the people arrested on Friday for protesting against forcibly shutting down Occupy Melbourne. I have never been arrested before, and had never even considered it a possibility. I realise that I am a white middle class male, and that there are others in our society who are confronted by these realities on a regular basis. Despite this, I feel that my experience is worth sharing as it has had a huge impact on me.

Many police seemed to enjoy the opportunity to cause some violence. At one stage a girl I was next to was choked as a policeman pushed her against the people behind with his arm across her throat. As her face went bright red I grabbed his arm and said “let her go” at which point he pushed my head back instead, to which my sore neck is a testament. Afterwards, she asked him, in tears, “why did you choke me?” and he smiled. On the other hand, I did not see a single protester act violently, an aspect of the day which even Robert Doyle doesn’t seem to deny, only confuse.

I can be seen with my face to the camera and my hands in the air earlier in the day. From the Herald Sun online.

When the protesters in City Square had been arrested and the horses were brought up to Collins Street a man came up to me and started yelling in my face “those horses are going to crush your skull” and “when I see you in the back of the van I’m going to fuck you up”. My first response was to ask him why he was saying this, but then as I looked him up and down I realised he was a cop in plain clothes (the black and yellow police boots were the giveaway). I took out my phone to take a photo of him, but he quickly turned away and ran across the intersection and across the police line. It was the first, but certainly not the last time that I had failed to realise what was happening. Before Friday I considered myself to be quite cynical, but I was never ready to believe that the police would act like this.

After the horses pushed the main group of people out of the Swanston and Collins intersection (trampling a few people along the way) there was a lot of discussion among the protesters. It was clear that if we stayed put the police were going to push us again soon, so after a show of hands it was agreed that everyone would march up Swanston Street towards Burke. So at around 3pm, everyone turned to face North, with our backs to the police, and began to move forward. At this point, once the protesters were moving away from them, and perhaps because the cameras now faced away from them, the police began to push forward.

They shouted “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE” and pushed those of us at the back against the people in front of us. Ahead, protesters were blocked by the traffic stuck in the Bourke Street intersection, so the crowd had slowed to a crawl. I remember yelling “I’m moving as fast as I can”. When someone grabbed the backpack of the person to my right, I reached out towards him. Instantly, another officer grabbed my arm, twisting it behind my back. Another protester shouted “let him go you’ll break his arm” and a voice behind me shouted “I fucking hope so”.

Within half a minute, the guy on the right with the backpack, the guy to my left and a few others nearby had all been pulled behind the police line. I couldn’t see what was happening to them because I was facing the opposite direction and being constantly shoved forwards. Someone then grabbed me, lifted me up in the air and threw me on the ground behind the line. As I scrambled to get back up I was shoved back down to my hands and knees again.There were at least a dozen other people around me having the exact same thing done to them. It sounds daft now but I remember saying out loud “I haven’t done anything wrong” still completely shocked. I felt like I was ready to cry. I put my hands in the air to show that I wasn’t going to struggle, and a policewoman pulled them down behind my back. They then pushed me forwards, one on either side, to the back of a truck where they grabbed my phone from my pocket and started reaching around my clothes. I asked what I had done wrong but was met with no reply. The woman who took my phone asked “do you have any ID” and perhaps naively I told them which pocket had my wallet. She then searched all my other pockets and took my keys, some coins, a handkerchief and a mandarin peel and my shoes for good measure. I’m not sure if me raising my arms  and telling them what I had on me amounted to consenting to a search, but at the time I was scared and just wanted it to be over. I asked “where will you take me” and she told me the Custody Center, which later turned out to be false. Because I was getting answers now I again asked I had done and this time the reply was “you failed to comply with a police order” a cause which on it’s own is ludicrous. As someone has put it to me since; the police could order me to shoot my own mother.

The truck was entirely metallic with no windows. One guy sitting across from me was asking “can I please go to the toilet, you can bring me right back” every time they brought another person in. Eventually there were eleven of us in our section, one was a kid of seventeen who had come to the protests from school. The majority of the time spent in the back was spent with the engine off, occasionally we would move for few minutes at a time before stopping again. We tried to guess what was happening, the two main theories being that they were either driving around and letting people out one and a time (starting with the other section) or that they weren’t sure which station to take us to. At one point we realised we were all sitting on an angle and the van must be parked on a slope. After what seemed like an eternity we drove for a bit longer, the sounds letting us know we were on a freeway and then entering a car park with roller doors, signalling that we had indeed been taken to a police station.

After another stretch of time someone opened the door and said “first one”. We chose the guy who had been denied a chance to use a bathroom by the cops in the city. Around ten minutes later police took another person (again we let a guy who needed to piss go first), and then finally told us all to get out. As we were escorted through the underground car park the police pointed out our torn and filthy clothes, ripped by their colleagues and dirtied by the horseshit covered streets we had been thrown down and laughed. We were taken to a small bathroom, and I stood out the front of the door because I didn’t need to go. It was only after a double take that I realised this was the holding cell. The room was disgusting, it stank like shit and one of the metal benches was covered in blood. Every five minutes or so they would come in and take another one of us. When it was my turn I was taken down a corridor to a desk where a policeman asked for my name, date of birth and address. Lining the corridor was a row of shoes. I peered over the desk, I could see a bank of TVs, most showed empty rooms, but one showed some of the people I was with and some others who I hadn’t seen before who must have been from the other section. I could also see our property bags behind the counter and recognised mine. This was the first time I had seen a clock since they took my phone and it was 5:30, which meant I had been in the truck for over two hours. After checking that I didn’t have a belt (I guess they thought I might hang myself). I was brought into a room with FCELL painted on the walls, which one of the others had overheard being called the “female cell”. The “male cell” was already full.

In the cell they used temperature to tire us out and break us. First they heated the cell until we were all lying on the floor in silence, exhausted. They then swapped and cooled us right down, and we suddenly all got up, pacing around the room to keep warm. Just as suddenly, they would then make it unbearably hot again, leaving us even more weaker than before. I’m sure this procedure must be common knowledge for many, but for me this was completely shocking. It left me with an unbearable mixture of fear, lethargy and boredom. At one point I tried to balance a coin on its side to keep myself from thinking about what was happening and realised that my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

After a few more hours they opened the door and asked for me specifically. I went back to the desk, where they told me I was banned from City Square and environs until Sunday evening, an area which ranged from Queen Street to Spring, from Flinders to Latrobe. At first I thought I was being told to sign an agreement, so I asked what would happen if I didn’t agree. They told me that I would have to see what the Governor said, which meant waiting in the cell until Monday. It took me a little while to realise that I was just being formally told this information, and didn’t have to agree with anything. So I took the ban notice, signed for the return of my belongings and was released without charge. I later found out they asked for me first because I had someone waiting outside. It was 8pm, five hours after I had been grabbed out of a group of peaceful protesters.

There is clearly more I could say about my own beliefs in regards to the Occupy movement, but my intention in writing this is to document what happened to me, not to further a particular agenda. However I don’t want my story dismissed through the type of stereotyping that has seen people labeled professional protesters, a term which I don’t even begin to understand. I would like to stress that I did not attend the protest in order to be arrested, and I spent most of the day refilling plastic bottles of water and passing them throughout the crowd. So briefly, for those of you who don’t know me, no I am not unemployed, drawing government benefits, a member of a union, political party or activist group – not that I think that should matter in the slightest. I was there because I believe the right to protest is one of the most important rights we have, it plays a crucial role in any democracy. A few flimsy excuses about hanging heavy items and having some tents shouldn’t be enough to clear a protest entirely with two hours notice. Most importantly, to first threaten a group with violence and to then blame them for the violence after they don’t give in to your threats is an incredibly dangerous brand of flawed logic.

https://nicocoinicon.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/a-firsthand-account-of-being-arrested-for-protesting/

AUSTRALIAN MURDOCH TABLOID TO CHARGE FOR INTERNET CONTENT.

By Michael, Member of the House of Byers.
Melbourne corporate newspaper, The Age, has reported that Murdoch tabloid, The Australian, is set to announce a charging schedule.
The $2.95 fee shall apply to website, tablet & mobile phone access, and applications, but, is a sliding fee that increases depending on what you are purchasing.
There is no word as to whether the scheme will be rolled out to other News Ltd tabloids such as the Herald-Sun & the Courier Mail, although it is claimed that the news ltd website will not be charging for access to its website.
Other newspaper around the world that charge for content such as The Financial Review, The Times of England, and The New York Times, do not appear to be faring well.
At any rate, it is a much better idea to consume and support independent news agencies such as The Mikiverse.

MEET THE GUY WHO SNITCHED ON OCCUPY WALL ST TO THE FBI AND NYPD

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 BY ADRIAN CHEN OCT 15, 2011The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.ADRIAN CHEN

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

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As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team.

On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.

Another organizer named Conor responds: "+1,000,000 to Jackie's proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis's execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?"

Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd's FBI email address. "Thanks!" Loyd responded. He cc'd his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply.

On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.

The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana.

"Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant "SHAME" for the NYPD's recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?" asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD.

Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.

"I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert.

But Ryan didn't just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows likeToday and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal.

Ryan wrote:

Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them.
There is a huge protest in New York call "Occupy Wall Street". Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show.

We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.

"Thanks Tom," Farrell responded. "I'll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU."

Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. "I do not work with the FBI," he said.

Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because "everyone's curious" about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. "Jordan never asked me for anything."

Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn't remember how many he'd passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above.

But even if he'd been sending them on regularly, they were probably of limited use to the authorities. Most of the real organizing at Occupy Wall Street happens face-to-face, according to David Graeber, who was one of the earliest organizers. "We did some practical work on [the email list] at first—I think that's where I first proposed the "we are the 99%" motto—but mainly it's just an expressive forum," he wrote in an email. "No one would seriously discuss a plan to do something covert or dangerous on such a list."

But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI's cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street.

At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a "newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems." (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been "monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security,"according to a New York Institute of Technology press release.

We contacted Loyd to ask about his relationship with Ryan and if any of the information Ryan passed along was of any use to the agency. He declined to answer questions and referred us to the FBI's press office. We'll post an update if we hear back from them.

We asked Ryan again this morning about how closely he was working with the authorities. Again, he claimed it was only these two emails, which is unlikely given he forwarded them to the FBI and NYPD without providing any context or explaining where he'd gotten them.

And he detailed his rationale for assisting the NYPD:

My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11.

Don't you find it Ironic that out of all the NYPD involved with the protest, [protesters] have only targeted the ones with Black Ribbons, given to them for their bravery during 9/11?

I am sorry if we see things differently, I try to look at everything as a whole and in patterns. Everything we do in life and happens in life, there is a pattern behind it.

[Photo, top, via dcannflan/Flickr. Photos of Zuccotti Square and arrests of protesters via AP]

http://gawker.com/5850054/meet-the-guy-who-snitched-on-occupy-wall-street-to-the-fbi-and-nypd

OUTCRY IN AMERICA AS PREGNANT WOMEN WHO LOSE BABIES FACE MURDER CHARGES

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 June 2011


Across the US, more and more prosecutions are being brought against women who lose their babies. Photograph: Alamy

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state's "chemical endangerment" law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.

Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way. During her pregnancy her foetus was diagnosed with possible Down's syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination, which Kimbrough declined as she is not in favour of abortion.

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.

Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."

She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars. "I'm just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids," she said. "They say I'm a criminal, how do I answer that? I'm a good mother."

Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalisation of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion, in which conservative prosecutors are chipping away at hard-won freedoms by stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception. In Gibbs' case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi's highest court that her prosecution makes no sense. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.

"If it's not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is," Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.

McDuff told the Guardian that he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example. "I hope it's not a trend that's going to catch on. To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme."

He pointed out that anti-abortion groups were trying to amend the Mississippi constitution by setting up a state referendum, or ballot initiative, that would widen the definition of a person under the state's bill of rights to include a foetus from the day of conception.

Some 70 organisations across America have come together to file testimonies, known as amicus briefs, in support of Gibbs that protest against her treatment on several levels. One says that to treat "as a murderer a girl who has experienced a stillbirth serves only to increase her suffering".

Another, from a group of psychologists, laments the misunderstanding of addiction that lies behind the indictment. Gibbs did not take cocaine because she had a "depraved heart" or to "harm the foetus but to satisfy an acute psychological and physical need for that particular substance", says the brief.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument put forward in the amicus briefs is that if such prosecutions were designed to protect the unborn child, then they would be utterly counter-productive: "Prosecuting women and girls for continuing [a pregnancy] to term despite a drug addiction encourages them to terminate wanted pregnancies to avoid criminal penalties. The state could not have intended this result when it adopted the homicide statute."

Paltrow sees what is happening to Gibbs as a small taste of what would be unleashed were the constitutional right to an abortion ever overturned. "In Mississippi the use of the murder statute is creating a whole new legal standard that makes women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies and threatens them with life imprisonment for murder."

Miscarriage of justice

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.

South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

In other states laws designed to protect children against the damaging effects of drugs have similarly been twisted to punish childbearers.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

A SLOP BUCKET IN EVERY HOME: ANOTHER U-TURN AS COALITION SAYS ALL FAMILIES WILL RECYCLE FOOD SCRAPS

By Steve Doughty

Last updated at 11:44 PM on 14th June 2011

Compulsory: Every home in the UK will be forced to use a slop bucket to recycle food scraps under a radical government proposal

Every home in the country will be ordered to use a slopbucket under Coalition plans set out yesterday.

The compulsory recycling of food scraps is the most radical in a series of ‘green’ schemes promoted by Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

It marks yet another U-turn for the Coalition. Almost exactly a year ago, Mrs Spelman said categorically: ‘The Government has no plans to force households to put food into slopbuckets.’

The fresh climbdown was revealed as the minister confirmed a retreat on the oft-repeated Tory promise to restore weekly bin collections, revealed by the Daily Mail on Saturday.

Mrs Spelman’s call for all food waste to be recycled raises the prospect of families having to save all of what she referred to as ‘smelly waste’ for separate collection, while the rest of their rubbish is picked up once a fortnight.

It came in her long-awaited Waste Review, which committed the Coalition to ‘a zero-waste economy’ and aims to make it the ‘greenest ever’ Government.

Labour ministers backed away from the slopbucket idea before last year’s general election after a cool public reaction when the first councils tried the scheme.

One such authority, Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, insists its residents use no fewer than nine separate bins, bags and buckets to satisfy its recycling requirements.

Mrs Spelman’s plans include persuading manufacturers and producers to use less packaging, asking families to throw away less uneaten food, and encouraging the spread of litter bins adapted for recycling.

But they have revealed a deep split in the Cabinet, with Communities Secretary Eric Pickles openly furious at the way the Environment Secretary has ditched the promise to bring back weekly bin collections.

Mrs Spelman explained the retreat on weekly collections was a matter of money. She said: ‘In Opposition you don’t have a chance to see the Government’s books. You don’t see how much the Government is overspent. When we came in we found the situation was worse than we thought. I think people will understand that.’

Ministers have said that bringing back weekly collections would cost £132.5million a year.

Deep split: The slop bucket proposal was introduced by Caroline Spelman in the Waste Review, who has already left Eric Pickles furious with measures such as not re-introducing weekly bin collections

However, Mrs Spelman’s plans involve supervision of rubbish policy by two quangos, the Waste and Resources Action Programme and Keep Britain Tidy. Abolishing those two bodies would alone save taxpayers around £50million a year.

The Environment Secretary also blamed the EU for directives which will mean big fines for councils that do not meet recycling and landfill targets in 2013.

Instead of bringing back weekly collections of all waste, Mrs Spelman wants ‘smelly waste’ to be collected separately and then used in a recycling process called ‘anaerobic digestion’.

The process has been known about for more than 150 years, but has never been used on a large scale.

It produces a ‘digestate’ material which, under current technology, is too polluted to be used on a large scale for its main potential purpose, as fertiliser for farmers.

The review acknowledged that kitchen slopbuckets were unpopular but said: ‘There are a number of ways in which households themselves may be able to treat some of their food waste, including composting, food waste digesters, or at-sink disposal units.’

It also proposed reducing the powers of council inspectors to enter homes and ending the £1,000 fines for those who break bin rules.

But local authority ‘bin police’ will still be able to levy on-the-spot fines, currently from £75 to £110, on those who breach recycling regulations.

Alongside the calls for more intensive compulsory recycling, the review did contain a pledge to ‘work with councils to meet households’ reasonable expectations for weekly collections, particularly of smelly waste’.

But last night Mr Pickles’s supporters claimed the wording had appeared in the waste review only as a result of pressure from the Communities Secretary.

And in the Commons, Labour’s environment spokesman Jamie Reed described the Environment Secretary’s ministry as ‘the political equivalent of the mad woman in the attic’.

Town hall chiefs have claimed they were forced to introduce fortnightly collections and ever more recycling bins to avoid paying a Landfill Tax.

Under the measure, introduced by John Major’s Government in 1996, councils are penalised for every ton of rubbish they bury.

It went up dramatically under Labour and now stands at £56 a ton. The Coalition has pledged to increase the tax, designed to help Britain meet the EU Landfill Directive, by £8 a year.

Town where families put out NINE bins

Residents in Newcastle-under-Lyme are already being forced to follow the strict new recycling regime – with households juggling nine separate bins.

The containers include a silver slopbucket for food waste, which is then tipped into a green outdoor bin for kerb-side collections, a pink bag for plastic bottles, a green bag for cardboard, and a white bag for clothing and textiles.

Strict regime: Residents in Newcastle-under-Lyme are being forced to put out nine separate bins for collection

Retired teacher Sylvia Butler said residents like herself, who live in a terraced house with no garden, were struggling to accommodate the bins.

The 59-year-old said: ‘I have had to take my brown bin down to my allotment – there simply isn’t room in my back yard to house it.’

Since the scheme was introduced, only food waste is collected each week. All other rubbish has to be stored for a fortnight.

Pictured above, the bins are, from left, food (grey bin kept in kitchen), food (green outdoor bin), tin cans, cardboard, plastics, clothing, paper, general waste and garden waste.