Villeneuve reported from Washington and Williams from Los Angeles.Edward Snowden won't face death penalty in U.S., Holder says
Holder also disputed Snowden's claim that he is unable to travel out of Russia. U.S. authorities revoked his passport on June 22, but Snowden is eligible to get a "limited validity passport" that would allow him to return to the United States, the attorney general said.
Holder's letter didn't expressly request that Snowden be extradited, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that Russia would not be sending Snowden to the United States, the Interfax news agency reported.
If he were to return of his own volition, Snowden would be tried before a civilian, not a military, court and would be accorded the protections of U.S. law, Holder said. Those include the right of legal representation and trial by jury.
"Any questioning of Mr. Snowden could be conducted only with his consent; his participation would be entirely voluntary and his legal counsel would be present should he wish it," he wrote.
Snowden has been on the run since leaking top-secret details of government surveillance programs to the press in early June.
He first took refuge in Hong Kong, where he disclosed in interviews with Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald the existence of the wide-scale surveillance programs. He left for Moscow the day after his passport was revoked and has been stuck at Sheremetyevo-2 airport since his arrival, unable to proceed through passport control without valid documents and also unable to buy air tickets for travel elsewhere.
Snowden faces three felony counts of espionage and theft. Russian officials have previously said they won't extradite him because of his claimed fears of mistreatment. But neither have Kremlin officials warmly welcomed him to their fold. President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that Snowden was welcome to stay in Russia, but only if he ceased making disclosures that were detrimental to "our American partners."
Villeneuve reported from Washington and Williams from Los Angeles.Edward Snowden won't face death penalty in U.S., Holder says
Holder also disputed Snowden's Womens Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys claim that he is unable to travel out of Russia. U.S. authorities revoked his passport on June 22, but Snowden is eligible to get a "limited validity passport" that would allow him to return to the United States, the attorney general said.
Holder's letter didn't expressly request that Snowden be extradited, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that Russia would not be sending Snowden to the United States, the Interfax news agency reported.
If he were to return of his own volition, Snowden would be tried before a civilian, not a military, court and would be accorded the protections of U.S. law, Holder said. Those include the right of legal representation and trial by jury.
"Any questioning of Mr. Snowden could be conducted only with his consent; his participation would be entirely voluntary and his legal counsel would be present should he wish it," he wrote.
Snowden has been on the run since leaking top-secret details of government surveillance programs to the press in early June.
He first took refuge in Hong Kong, where he disclosed in interviews with Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald the existence of the wide-scale surveillance programs. He left for Moscow the day after his passport was revoked and has been stuck at Sheremetyevo-2 airport since his arrival, unable to proceed through passport control without valid documents and also unable to buy air tickets for travel elsewhere.
Snowden faces three felony counts of espionage and theft. Russian officials have previously said they won't extradite him because of his claimed fears of mistreatment. But neither have Kremlin officials warmly welcomed him to their fold. President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that Snowden was welcome to stay in Russia, but only if he ceased making disclosures that were detrimental to "our American partners."

Nice work. Keep it up.

This is the best part man,

Holder also disputed Snowden's Womens Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys claim that he is unable to travel out

LJ;1484434 wrote:This is the best part man,

That's an odd claim on Snowdens part.

[h=2]Farmer, Rebecca Hosking, takes a trip to a biodynamic farm in Cornwall to find out how they use Joel Salatin's method of composting with pigs, rather than diesel, to turn their cow manure into fertiliser. These are pioneering farming techniques in the UK[/h]





I'm sure many are familiar with this scenario: you're driving along in the countryside and you're suddenly hit with the overwhelming stench of manure from a farm. A dilemma ensues do you A) wind up your window to stop any more of the smell entering the car thus trapping the low level smell that's already made it in; or do you B) keep the window down, taking on the full brunt in the hope the smell will quickly pass and fresh air will blow the rest of it away.
Can you smell it from here?When this happens to us (we're windows open people) we usually comment – 'That farm is wasting money'.
What we're all actually smelling is a combination of Ammonia (NH3), Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) Nitric oxide (NO) and numerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Mixed in with those pungent gases are their odorless greenhouse bedfellows, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).
Whether the smell from the farm is emanating from a yard dung heap, a slurry pit, a shed full of manure from over-wintered cattle or the muck spreader spattering its way across the field... it is the aroma of valuable nutrients fizzing off into the atmosphere where they do considerably more damage than good. Nearly all of these smells are the result of anaerobic decomposition – or as it's known to the gardener, poor composting.
Now not all farmers are die hard environmentalists and some may even doubt the science behind global warming. All of them, however, are concerned with making ends meet and, as such, the escape of these gasses (particularly the nitrogenous ones) from the farm, where they will fertilize nothing but the nostrils of passers-by, must be a concern. If half the nitrogen in your farmyard manure wafts off over the M5 corridor and beyond then you have to pay good money to replace it to keep the farm productive. And with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer currently trading around £350/tonne, the cost soon adds up.

Gardeners have long known the best way to lock down nitrogen in manure is to compost it; and the best way to do that is to physically turn the material to aerate it. Many studies have trialed alternative methods but as yet nothing beats brute intervention. In all fairness, on a garden scale even we've found this is relatively easy to achieve, all you need is a sturdy fork, a bit of elbow grease, cups of tea and biccies.
However if I walk into one of our cattle sheds where the stock has been wintered for three months, the volume of dung to turn and aerate becomes an overwhelming challenge. Could it be possible with human labour? Well, nobody in their right mind would willingly volunteer for this job, no farmer could afford to pay for the necessary workforce and we abolished slavery in England back in 1772 (thankfully), ...so no, it's not an option.
12 cows for 3 months = massive pile
Instead immediate thoughts turn to diesel powered machinery, much work with a front-end loader and investing in a trailer-operated compost turner. This is farmer speak for a lot of money, time, effort and fuel; making it an expensive exercise to even contemplate.
But what if there is another way, which is fraction of the price, requires no manual labor, no fossil fuel and no new farm machinery?
[h=3]Enter Pigs; Stage Right[/h]I first became aware about using pigs for this job back in 2007 while reading about holistic farmer – and a bit of a visionary – Joel Salatin. I'm sure many of you will already be aware of his work.
Joel and his family run Polyface Farm in West Virginia. He openly admits they stumbled backwards into pig rearing. Initially they purchased just a few pigs to use as a cost saving device to aerate the farm's cattle dung into compost. Polyface's 'pigaerator pork' as the Salatins named it is now one of their most popular products.
Since then I've heard a lot about the theory of pigaeration and we've longed to trial it here, but the older generation on this farm, namely my father and uncle, don't like change – I think I may have mentioned this before in previous posts! Anyway, in addition they have an irrational dislike of pigs so it's not going to happen here anytime soon. However, luckily this year our friends decided to test it out on their farm so finally I got to witness it in action.
Jim and Laura with their sheepdog GlenLaura and Jim Wallwork manage Tregillis, an organic, biodynamic farm at South Petherwin in Cornwall. As I've often joked with Laura, I'm happy keeping an open mind but still struggle with cow horns acting as cosmic antennae but, when it come to soil health, we could all learn an awful lot from the biodynamicists. At Tregillis, soil health and condition is a priority, hence their interest in composting dung on a large scale. Last week I popped down to see them and their pigs at work and Laura kindly walked me through what had been happening.
Laura has used Salatin's approach as a template but has adapted the materials and ingredients to suit the particulars of her own farm. For the composting to be successful and the pigs to be agreeable, the preparation began right back at the beginning of December as the cattle first entered the shed.
Each day while bedding up the stock with fresh oat straw, Laura liberally sprinkled their own grown polycrop of peas, triticale and oats in amongst the bedding.
This differs slightly from Salatin's original ingredients of woodchip as bedding and corn (maize) as feed. However, whether you use peas or maize, the results are the same. The dry food gets stomped into the bedding by the cattle, where it ferments in the compacted anaerobic dung and urine. The result at the end of winter is thousands of little, sweet, mildly alcoholic piggy treats tantalizingly hidden in a barn full of manure.