An Ohio policeman shot to death a litter of kittens on Wednesday, telling a group of screaming children that the animals would be going to “kitty heaven”. But instead of firing the officer, the local police department cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Humane Officer Barry Accorti was responding to a report of a litter of feral cats that were located in the woodpile of a home in North Ridgeville on June 10. The resident who made the call said the cats were bringing fleas to the home and leaving dead wildlife in her backyard. Twenty minutes after the call was made, the officer arrived at the scene. After spotting the five kittens, he told the resident’s distressed children that the cats would be going to heaven. Shortly thereafter, he took a gun from his vehicle and shot the animals to death.

“He informed [the resident] that shelters were full and that these cats would be going to kitty heaven,” Ohio SPCA Director Teresa Landon told the Cleveland Sun News. “She assumed he would be trapping them or something and taking them to a shelter and they would be humanely euthanized if they were not adopted.”

Initially, the woman who made the call assumed that the gun was a tranquilizer. But to her surprise, the 8-to-10 week-old kittens were shot dead, just 15 feet from the back door to her house.

“She was very distraught when this happened,” Landon said. “He started shooting them right in front of her. Her children were upstairs in view of the windows. They started screaming and crying because they heard the gunshots. They started screaming, ‘Mommy, he’s killing the kittens.’”

http://rt.com/usa/cop-accorti-kittens-shooting-669/

It warns that the speed at which global oceans are warming is threatening the industry’s ability to sell affordable policies around the world, with parts of the United Kingdom (UK) and the U.S. state of Florida already facing “a risk environment that is uninsurable.”

And these areas are unlikely to be the last that will experience such problems.
But in the UK, hundreds of thousands of homeowners in areas at high risk of flooding will still be able to insure their properties, after the government struck a deal with the industry.

The deal—introduced as part of the government’s new water bill—comes just weeks before the current agreement is set to expire and follows lengthy negotiations with the Association of British Insurers.
The agreement will cap flood insurance premiums, linking them to council tax bands so that people in high risk areas will know the maximum they will have to pay, while a levy on all UK household insurers will be used to create a fund to cover claims for people in high-risk homes.

The new bill also includes plans to increase competition in the water market and improve drought resilience. Meanwhile the government announced an extra £370 million of flood protection funding for 2015-2016 and committed to increase funding each year to 2020—adding to the £2.3 billion they say is currently earmarked for flood defenses.
There has been rising friction in recent years between the insurance industry and governments around the world who are struggling to shore up flood protection.

The Geneva Association—which is overseen by executives from some of the world’s largest insurance firms—warns that governments will have to step up their action to protect their towns from the effects of climate change.



http://ecowatch.com/2013/insurance-firms-warn-uninsurable-future-climate-change/

Lack of knowledge on the actual policies. Very few people actually understand the original executive orders, subsequent judicial decisions and legislation beyond sound bites via “news" that is insistent upon painting this as “taking stuff" from Whites for Black people (as if it is “just" about Black people). Honesty, how many White people have reviewed the actual history of why this is needed? It’s almost as rare to find as anyone who calls themselves “patriotic" who has actually read the Constitution or a Christian who has read the Bible. Media soundbites shaped by bigotry (in a White supremacist capitalist patriarchal society) absorbed by many Whites whose life ideologies have been shaped by bigotry is not going to produce the nuance and thought necessary to understand affirmative action. (Even so, these two simple, non in-depth cartoons explain this almost as well as the complex legalese: 1 and 2.)

Anti-intellectualism. Piggybacking on the first point, the current culture of anti-intellectualism doesn’t encourage most White people (and Americans at large) to actually investigate things they are “for" or “against." It’s much simpler to decide to be “for" anything shaped by a legacy of White supremacy and White privilege and against anything that appears to be contrary to the former. Whites are used to being a “baseline," the “norm," or not considered a group at all, but those whom other groups are compared to. Sociopolitically, many Whites are having a “day of reckoning" moment by even being classified as a “group," or a “race" as Tom Scocca pointed out so well in a recent article about Romney’s overwhelming support from Whites. These factors contribute to the resistance to affirmative action.

Ahistorical views on race. If a White person takes the "why isn’t there a White history month" and "why isn’t there a White Entertainment Television station" stances on Whites and the media, it can be safely assumed that they are either uneducated or being willfully ignorant about the role of race in America and why certain spaces exist for Black people amidst the media, public discourse and culture itself. By pretending that the tide of history has no racial element, they can then infer that if everyone “is equal" (as if being equal means being treated equally) Black people are “unfairly" getting “goodies" through affirmative action. This also ignores the fact that even with said theoretical "goodies," unemployment, health care, finances, real estate, and more is markedly worse for Black people (and other people of colour) versus White. The latter is written off as Black “character failures" in the ever so common victim blaming ideologies such as American “exceptionalism" and even “patriotism" at times. This is where LIES about "poverty culture" come about as a way to praise greed, wealth and Whiteness and demonize suffering, poverty and Blackness.

the rest: http://www.gradientlair.com/post/36223829489/why-whites-hate-affirmative-action