Kevin Bollaert, who was charged after allegedly posting pornographic photos of women and girls submitted by ex-boyfriends as revenge, then asking complaining women and girls for money in order to remove the photos, will go to trial on 31 felony counts.

After Bollaert’s five-day preliminary hearing, the judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with the trial. Bollaert is reported to have posted over 10,000 revenge porn images on his websites, including YouGotPosted.com.

Bollaert also created a second site called changemyreputation.com for revenge-porn victims.

Bollaert is charged with conspiracy, identity theft and extortion. There had also been allegations of child pornography, since at least two victims had said that they were underage.

Bollaert denies the charges. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 22 year in prison.

Bollaert was also charged in three other states in the past, but he did not respond to the lawsuits, and the judge entered default judgements.

There exists in California a law the criminalizes revenge porn. Only a few states have such laws, but there is increasing activism to create them.

Read more: Revenge-Porn New Laws for 2014

If Bollaert is found guilty in the case, it may be the first major revenge-porn prosecution. There are significant obstacles to prosecution, however.

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Fatherlessness in families has been on the rise since 1960, and now is the situation in one-third of homes–meaning that 24 million American children do without their fathers.

Among the stock-and-trade activities documented to be missing from the lives of fatherless children are talking about the child’s day, sharing meals, helping with homework and going to and coming from activities.

Statistics show marked disadvantages caused by fatherlessness. Fatherless children account for more youth suicides, runaways and dropouts, and are two to three times as likely to have behavior disorders, experience poverty, chemical abuse, institutionalization and imprisonment, child abuse and child neglect. Criminal behavior such as anger-related rape is higher for those who were fatherless.

However, the greatest losers when fathers are not present are daughters. The prospects for family of fatherless daughters are very different from those of daughters with families. Fatherless daughters are 711 percent more likely to have kids as teenagers, 164 more likely to have a pre-marital birth, and 92 percent more likely to get divorced.

Why fatherlessness has increased from around 8 percent in 1960 to around one third in the 2010s is not completely understood, but fathers have cited two main reasons. The most commonly cited is “non-marital relationships and divorce.” The second is incarceration, which accounts for 7.3 of the 24 million fatherless American children.

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One little US town is showing the world how a small community can take on big oil and gas. Lafayette, Colo. (pop. 25,733) was unhappily facing fracking within their town area. The citizens banded together with environmental groups and amended their Community Bill of Rights to secure their right to clean air, pure water, and the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.

Besides Lafayette’s stand, moratoriums and bans have been enacted in six small cities and towns with a combined total of more than 400,000 citizens.

The Community Bill of Rights was amended on November 6, Election Day. The margin for the vote was nearly 60 percent, and in nearby Oberlin, OH. (pop. 8,286) the vote was over 70 percent in favor.

The vote was held after an employee of Halliburton, the world’s second largest oil field services company, filed a complaint with the elections board that the amendment being proposed by the community would have to include a summary of the measure according to state law.

The petitioners included the entirety of the amendment language, and the city clerk, Susan Koster, threw out the petition challenge, stating, “As a home rule city, Lafayette operates under a citizen adopted charter. In the case of this protest, the petition submitted to amend the City’s Charter complied with the Colorado Home Rule Act.”

Among the other challenges anti-fracking citizens faced were the Colorado Oil and Gas Association’s (COGA) $66,974 investment in local media and claims that the “Bowling Green” charter amendment would kill jobs and raise energy costs buy over 80 percent.

The city itself enacted an ordinance that banned fracking. This was a way of dissuading voters from voting for the charter amendment, according to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF),which helped craft the Community Bill of Rights, because the ordinance was subject to being rescinded by the Council after the election was over. Similar actions had recently succeeded in nearby Broadview Heights and Mansfield, OH, according to CELDF.

However, Lafayette voted to adopt the charter amendment, banning fracking.

One month later, COGA filed suit against the city in attempt to overturn the fracking ban.

Then, energy industry representatives began private meetings with Gov. John Hickenlooper. Eleven environmental groups formally requested to be present at any such meetings.

“Apparently, it is now simply business as usual to shut out the voice of the people when making decisions that effect us all,” said the president of Protect our Loveland, Sharon J. Carlisle. “We demand our rightful place in your smoke-filled, oil- and gas-filled rooms of secret wheelings and dealings.”

Gov. John Hickenlooper

Hickenlooper approved a Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s lawsuit with Longmont City in an attempt to overturn that city’s fracking ban last summer, but weeks later admitted fracking was something “no one wants in their backyard.”

Reacting to the COGA suit, Lafayete residents filed a class-action lawsuit against COGA, the state of Colorado and Hickenlooper. The lawsuit is the first of its kind. Although the particular focus of the suit is fracking, it insists on the right of local self governance for citizens, protected through a community bill of rights. The residents’ suit alleges that their right to self governance is guaranteed by the US Constitution, the COGA Act infringes that right, and Colorado officials are guilty of not enforcing the ban on fracking. The residents allege that the ban passed in November was not being enforced.

CELDF executive director, Thomas Linzey, Esq., said of the suit, “This class action lawsuit is merely the first of many by people

Thomas Linzey, Esq

across the United States whose constitutional rights to govern their own communities are routinely violated by state governments working in concert with the corporations that they ostensibly regulate.

“The people of Lafayette will not stand idly by as their rights are negotiated away by oil and gas corporations, their state government, and their own municipal government.”

Halliburton Dubai Headquarters

Halliburton Co. is incorporated in the US, where its headquarters is in Houston, TX., but its chairman and CEO, David Lesar, works and lives in Dubai, where Halliburton’s other headquarters is located.

The company took in $5 billion of profits for the past three fiscal years, and billions in the years before.

Halliburton has recently been the source of several controversies. In 2013, the company pled guilty on charges of destroying evidence relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, incurring a $200,000 statutory fine. In addition, Halliburton has been implicated in the creation of a toxic cloud that forced evacuations in Farmington, New Mexico in 2006, and it may also be implicated in spill in a 2009 Timor Sea off Australia and a 2010 improper cementing in the Gulf of Mexico.

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In one US state alone–Pennsylvania–the effects of abandoned oil wells has been examined by a Princeton University student, PhD student and civil engineer Mary Kang, and the findings are that four to seven percent of estimated man-made methane emissions in Pennsylvania are caused by the abandoned wells. The source of the four to seven percent had previously been unaccounted for, according to the study published.

The study, “CO2, Methane, and Brine Leakage Through Subsurface Pathways: Exploring Modeling, Measurement, and Policy Options,” was published by Kang with the Civil and Engineering Department of Princeton.

Pennsylvania is the oldest oil and gas producer in the US. There are between 200,000 and just under one million abandoned wells in the state.

Robert Howarth, ecologist and methane expert at Cornell University, commented on the Princeton study, saying it was important because it shows how government and industry estimates of oil and gas emissions are actually lower than actual amounts. Howarth added that this study was not illustrative of just Pennsylvania. “I would expect this to be a problem affecting most if not all gas and oil fields,” Howarth said.

Other of Kang’s findings included that properly sealed wells polluted just as bad as unplugged wells. Also, sandstone formations were the most leaky of well locations. Cement seals in both active and abandoned wells crack over time, allowing methane leaks. The gas leaks can travel up to 14 kilometers and show up in rivers and homes.

Methane, radon, brine and other hydrocarbons can migrate into shallow groundwater aquifers, the air, and people homes through abandoned wells. Methane’s global warming potential is 86 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

Princeton

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The DC Appeals Court sided with Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg Friday in a case over several pages on Facebook, such as “Third Palestinian Intifada,” which called for Muslims to rise up and kill Jews. The ruling was based on the protections given to all Americans using the internet under a section of a 1996 law.

Three years ago, Klayman saw the Facebook page “Third Palestinian Intifada,” of which there were 360,000 members, as well as three similar, smaller pages, and complained to Facebook because the pages called for Muslims to rise up and kill Jews. After receiving a letter from Israel’s Minister for Public Diplomacy as well as from Klayman, Facebook removed the pages, but not fast enough, according to Klayman, who filed suit against Facebook and Zuckerberg. Klayman alleged that the delay of “many days” constituted intentional assulat and negligence.

Mark Zuckerberg

The district court which heard the suit found for Facebook and Zuckerberg on the basis of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) (1996), Section 230. Klayman appealed the decision, and Friday the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld the decision of the district court.

“In enacting the Communications Decency Act,” wrote the court in its decision, “Congress found that the Internet and related computer services ‘represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources,’ and ‘offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for

intellectual activity.”

The court concluded that Facebook and Zuckerberg–internet providers under Section 230–could not be held responsible for any content on their site(s), no matter how egregious it may seem to another user. “Facebook is not responsible for the actions, content, information, or data of third parties,” the court found.

“Congress accordingly made it the ‘policy of the United States’ to ‘promote the continued development of the Internet,’” the court continued, “and ‘to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation[.]‘”

The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed in 1996. It was in part an effort by the US Congress to regulate internet pornography, but in 1997 the US Supreme Court unanimously struck the “community standards” provision of the CDA in Reno v. ACLU because the provisions violated the First Amendment guarantee to freedom of speech.

Another part of the CDA, however, has been strengthened by court decisions over the years. Section 230 protects operators of internet services–such as Facebook–from being construed as publishers. Section 230 protects social media sites, ISPs and users by making them not liable for words posted on their sites by other people (except  regarding federal criminal liability and intellectual property). The section reads, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Providers are even protected if they fail to take action after receiving notifications that harmful or offensive content exists on their sites.

Section 230 is considered a main protection of free speech online. Last year, after 47 state attorneys general signed a letter to Congress requesting the civil immunity in Section 230 be removed, the ACLU wrote, “Section 230 is directly responsible for the free, messy, uncensored, and often brilliant culture of online speech. By prohibiting most state civil or criminal liability for something somebody else writes or posts, it created the single most important legal protection that exists for websites, bloggers, and other internet users… If Section 230 is stripped of its protections, it wouldn’t take long for the vibrant culture of free speech to disappear from the web.”

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The number of children living without their fathers continues to rise in America, In 1960, only 90 percent of children age 18 or under lived with their fathers. By 2010, 27 percent did not. Since 2012, one third of children lived without–that is, 24

million American children are living without their biological father.

The number is further broken down into fathers who live apart from some of their children and fathers who live apart from all of their children. More fathers live apart from all of their children.

Every US state has seen a decline in homes with fathers, but there is a pronounced concentration of such homes in the Southeast and East. Inner cities locations also have shown to be spots where there are high percentages of single-parent families. The highest concentration of sustained fatherlessness is in the largely black poor across Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana along the Mississippi River.

Financial comfort is an observable factor in fatherlessness. Children from families below the poverty line are twice as likely to not have fathers present. For blacks the distinction is most extreme. Below the poverty line, only 12 percent of black children have fathers present; above the poverty line, 47 percent have fathers present.

For Whites, the figures are 32 and 78 percent, and for latinos, the figures are 41 and 68 percent.

Single mothers have an average income of $24,000–about half are below the poverty line. Married couples have an average of $80,000.

Race as a factor in fatherhood is an argued point of validity. “Education and income seem to trump them,” is the belief of the vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative,Vincent DiCaro.

In 2010, when 27 percent of children lived without fathers, it was found that 40 percent of fathers who did not complete high school lived apart from their children, while only 7 percent of college graduates lived apart from their children.

The percentage of children living away from their mothers is also on the rise, although the numbers are smaller. In 1960, four 
percent of children lived with their father, and in 2010, 8 percent did.

The trend of fatherless children is at odds with cultural values. 70 percent of Americans say a father in the home is essential to a child’s happiness–a percentage just lower than that for having a mother in the home. Not only that, overall, 87 percent of males age 15-44 who do not have children say they want to be fathers, and, although most did not feel a man needs children to be happy, 90 percent of fathers said that being a father was the most fulfilling role a man can have.

What is missed when a child lacks a father has been documented. Children without fathers, even though they sometimes
communicate by phone or email, lack shared experiences such as talking about the child’s day, having meals together, help with homework, and being taken to and from activities.

Other issues related to fatherlessness: 63 percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes, according to 2010 statistics; 90 percent of runaways (32 times the average); 85 percent of children who show behavior disorders; 80 percent of rapists with anger problems; 71 percent of high school dropouts; 75 percent of adolescents in chemical abuse centers; 70 percent of youths in state-operated institutions; 85 percent of youths in prison. Children from single-parent homes are twice as likely to experience child abuse and neglect. In fact, fifty percent of child abuse cases are from single-mother homes.

Daughters from fatherless homes are 711 percent more likely to have children as teenagers and 164 percent more likely to have a pre-marital birth, as well as being 92 percent more likely to get divorced.

So why are fathers not in the home? The number one reason cited is “non-marital relationships and divorce,” followed by incarceration (accounting for 7.3 million fatherless children).

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The US Consul General in St Petersberg, Bruce Turner, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who served in Russia and Afghanistan as Director of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement affairs, has published a collection of poems in anticipation of the end of his work in Russia.

Turner regretfully admitted that it was hard to leave Russia.

The collection of 65 poems, “In Petersburg in Black and White,” is inspired by life in the northern capital during the three years of Turner’s residence. “The Consul General often accompanied blog entries with his own poems, and they entered into the collection,” said representatives of the embassy.

In addition to writing of his experience of Petersberg, the poems also describe Kaliningrad, Sestrorezk, Ladoga lake, and Karelia. There is a poem called “Gagarin” and one called “Aurora.”

On Kaliningrad, in a poem titled “The Croquet Pitch,” Turner writes, “Whether the city of Kaliningrad or what once was Koenigsberg should truly be part of Russia/ or returned to Prussia involves so much more than the addition of a letter for European history…”

The collection begins with “Just Arrived” and ends with “Farewell.”

The arrival is described,

“in a city once renowned for spying,

during the weekend we spent hours
wandering the st. petersburg streets
and ventured deep into the beating

heart of russia’s former imperial
lairs seeking to uncover some of
its secrets in the late october air-

and wherever we walked we were
pleased that no one stopped to turn
or stare or appeared at all to care

in what direction our footsteps were
dropping or what with our gesture
we might be intending, with no one

contending there was anything at all
odd or postured, and we for our parts
never pretending that we were seeing

any places on a dare or were vying

to tease the fabled paranoid bear.”

And at the close, Turner writes, “In leaving this land behind … we will remain most wistful about the Russian language and those whose chatter without any risk mingles in it easily, along with gracious hosts who lingered with us a moment or two and always ensured we felt welcomed, deceived us at times into believing we might one day even become one of them but in any event bequeathing to us memories that have bonded within us to be retained with fondness until all longing is gone, beyond us.”

The collection was posted as a pdf. on the domain of the US State Department. Turner has no plans to publish the collection as a book at current time.

In addition to Russian, Turner is fluent in German and Grench, and he holds an MA and PHD in German literature.

Turner served in St Petersberg–the site of the original U.S. Mission to Russia, established in 1780–since 2011. Before that, he was stationed in Afghanistan as the head of international drug trafficing, and previously, Turner served as Director of the European and Eurasian Bureau’s Office of Security and Political Affairs in the State Department, where he was responsible for NATO, the OSCE, NATO-Russia relations, and conventional arms control. He also had served in Paris, Moscow, Vienna at the U.S. Mission to the OSCE, Brussels at the U.S. Mission to NATO, and Ankara, Turkey. Turner also has worked in Washington, where he was involved in North Korean, German and Turkish affairs.

US Consulate General in St Petersberg

“In Petersburg in Black and White”

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Stay-at-home dads have increased so sharply in recent years that the number of fathers who do not work outside the home has doubled since 1989, according to a Pew Research findings based on US Census Bureau data.

Although high unemployment during the 2007-2009 Great Recession also contributed to the trend, Pew found that fathers were choosing to care for family at home in 21 percent of the 2 million cases of fathers who did not work in 2012. In 1989, the number was 5 percent.

Dads also accounted for 16 percent of all stay-at-home parents in 2012, up six percent since 1989. Of these stay-at-home dads, 23 reported that they could not find a job. For mothers, 73 percent reported that they were home in order to care for their family.

The trend is at odds with cultural values. Pew found that only 8 percent of survey respondents thought that children were better off if their father did not work, but 51 percent said children are better off if their mother did not work.

Pew’s research included analysis of US census data from a nationally representative sample from 1989 through to 2012. It included all stay-at-home dads with kids ages 17 and younger. Stay-at-home dads were defined as men who did not have jobs during the prior year.

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