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Let the Sparks Fly, 3-8-12

Illusion of permanency: our denial as a nation, 3-8-12

Officers were let into an apartment building by tenants and the manager, and they did a dog sniff outside defendant’s apartment door. That was support for a search warrant. [This issue is pending in SCOTUS in Florida v. Jardines, 11-564 granted Jan. 6 (ScotusBlog), not yet calendared for argument, so not this Term.] United States v. Sample, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29278 (E.D. Mich. March 6, 2012).

Co-occupant of hotel room who occupied it, had clothes there, and told police he had counterfeiting tools there had standing, and therefore could consent, despite the fact he didn’t sleep there the night before. United States v. Yates, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29028 (D. R.I. March 6, 2012).

2255 ground that defense counsel didn’t file a motion to suppress was wrong; one was filed and heard. Schmitz v. United States, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29274 (N.D. Ala. January 19, 2012).*

2255 is not a method to relitigate the search and seizure already denied on direct appeal. Kapordelis v. United States, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153854 (N.D. Ga. December 12, 2011).*

A San Francisco apartment building was rendered uninhabitable from a fire, and occupants were locked out while clean up was going on. Defendant approached a construction worker and asked him to retrieve a gun from the motor compartment of a refrigerator, and that was reported to the police. The fire rendered the building de facto and de jure abandoned by operation of law, and the landlord could consent to the police entry. At the time, all personal belongings appeared to have been moved out of the apartment except for large pieces of furniture. United States v. Allen, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 28790 (N.D. Cal. March 5, 2012):

The first is that under California law, either party to a lease may terminate the lease if the premises are destroyed. Cal. Civ. Code § 1932(2) ("The hirer of a thing may terminate the hiring before the end of the term agreed upon: ... (2) When the greater part of the thing hired, or that part which was and which the letter had at the time of the hiring reason to believe was the material inducement to the hirer to enter into the contract, perishes from any other cause than the want of ordinary care of the hirer."); Cal. Civ. Code § 1933(4) ("The hiring of a thing terminates: ... (4) By the destruction of the thing hired."). Based on this principle of California landlord-tenant law, coupled with the representations the property manager made to the SFPD dispatcher about the apartment being vacant, see Scafani Decl. ¶ 3, it was objectively reasonable for Officer Scafani to believe that Ms. Wilson's lease had been terminated as a result of the fire and, thus, that the property manager had the authority to consent to a search of Ms. Wilson's apartment. This belief was an objectively reasonable mistake of fact, not law, and if the mistaken fact were true, it would have conferred authority to consent on the property manager.

The second reason it was objectively reasonable for Officer Scafani to believe the property manager had authority to consent to a search is the condition of Ms. Wilson's apartment and the building as a whole at the time of the search. There is no definitive list of facts that may lead to a reasonable belief of abandonment, but in Sledge the Ninth Circuit found apparent authority where the tenants had given their landlord thirty days notice of their intent to vacate, had removed all personal belongings from the apartment, and the apartment was "empty of furnishings not belonging to the landlord" at the time that the landlord consented to the police search. 650 F.2d at 1076, 1082. Similarly, in determining whether eviction had actually taken place, the Ninth Circuit in Young considered whether the defendant's personal belongings had been removed from his hotel room and placed into storage and whether his room key worked. 573 F.3d at 717.

Here, as in Sledge, it was objectively reasonable to believe that the apartment had been vacated. Most of the personal belongings inside had been removed from the apartment and placed into storage. ...

The Senate narrowly rejected a GOP-sponsored measure Thursday that would have bypassed the Obama administration's current objections to the Keystone XL pipeline and allowed construction on the project to move forward immediately.

Gen. Wesley Clark says the calls for military intervention in Syria are understandable but there are a host of questions to answer first.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama speak at the International Women of Courage Awards

The Republican presidential candidates turned their focus to the heart of Dixie Thursday, scheduling a series of events in the strongly conservative states of Mississippi and Alabama.

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

by Greg Palast
for FreePress.org

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn't have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

***

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Get it now!

Download Chapter 1 of the book:

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GregPalast.com

********

5 years ago, we published out first report on the Vultures with BBC TV and Democracy Now! - in the UK it set London MP's to action - the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called them "morally outrageous” and pledged to make them illegal in that country.

In the US it was two Congressman, Donald Payne and John Conyers that stormed the White House with our report and told the President that he must act.

Congressmen Donald Payne, tirelessly fought against Vulture Funds in this country, calling hearings, pushing the Washington beltway to take notice of this practice. He died this week, he will be missed. State Senator Richard Codey said it best "He was bigger than life but never conducted himself that way, If you were violating somebody’s rights, you better get out of the way.”

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