Francois Hollande is not a popular president. No matter how hard the ‘socialist’ leader tries to impress, there never seems to be a no solid constituency that backs him. He attempted to mask his initial lack of experience in foreign affairs with a war in Mali, after his country enthusiastically took on Libya. While he succeeded at launching wars, he failed at managing their consequences as the latest attacks in Paris have demonstrated.

Following the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, he is now attempting to ride a wave of popularity among his countrymen. On January 11, an estimated 3.5 million people took to the streets of France in support of free speech – as if that were truly the crux of the problem. Nearly forty world leaders and top officials, many of whom are themselves unrelenting violators of human rights and free speech, walked arm in arm throughout the streets of Paris. It was a photo-op to show that the world was ‘united against terrorism.’

Thirteen Class II injection wells in Central Ohio sit in the headwaters of the Olentangy River and threaten to contaminate Ohio’s drinking water, warned Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice, hydrogeologist and soil scientist. The key 2004 and 2010 laws that have allowed deregulated fracking injection wells in Ohio came from the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bankrolled by the controversial Koch brothers.

The Koch brothers, cited as the third and fourth wealthiest individuals in the United States, have made Ohio the worst state in the northeast for protecting the environment against the oil and gas industry.

“We’re the worst by far in our area of the country,” said Weatherington-Rice. “We’ve become the dumping ground, more than 60% of the fracking waste in Ohio is coming in from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Ohio is doing virtually nothing” in regards to regulating fracking.

“If you’ve got an old oil or gas well you can easily turn it into an injection well to take fracking waste,” she explained.

If there is a group of Americans to whom Iraqis struggling with the health effects of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and all the various poisons of war can relate, it might be the mostly black and largely poor residents of Gibsland, in northern Louisiana.

Here's how an op-ed in the New York Times from one resident describes their situation:

"For years, one of the largest employers in that area was the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, about four miles from Minden. The Environmental Protection Agency eventually listed the plant as a Superfund site because for more than 40 years 'untreated explosives-laden wastewater from industrial operations was collected in concrete sumps at each of the various load line areas,' and emptied into '16 one-acre pink water lagoons.'"

And now (from Truthout.org):

A scholarly study has found that the U.S. public believes that whenever the U.S. government proposes a war, it has already exhausted all other possibilities. When a sample group was asked if they supported a particular war, and a second group was asked if they supported that particular war after being told that all alternatives were no good, and a third group was asked if they supported that war even though there were good alternatives, the first two groups registered the same level of support, while support for war dropped off significantly in the third group. This led the researchers to the conclusion that if alternatives are not mentioned, people don’t assume they exist — rather, people assume they’ve already been tried.