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This evening's music features Texas piano player, singer and whistler Whistlin' Alex Moore. Enjoy!

"The junta broke the fingers on Victor Jara’s hands
They said to the gentle poet “play your guitar now if you can”
Victor started singing but they brought his body down
You can kill that man but not his song"

-- Holly Near

News and Opinion

Florida Jury Finds Former Chilean Officer Liable in ’73 Killing

Four decades after the bullet-riddled body of the Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara was discovered in the mayhem of the [US backed - js] military coup that upended his country, Mr. Jara’s family found some measure of justice on Monday in a Florida courtroom.

A federal jury in Orlando concluded that a former Chilean Army officer who had emigrated to the United States and worked as a short-order cook was liable for the torture and extrajudicial killing of Mr. Jara at the Chilean sports stadium where he was held after the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power.

The court awarded Mr. Jara’s family $28 million in damages.

The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 67, a naturalized American citizen and resident of Deltona, Fla., near Daytona Beach, was a defendant in a civil suit brought under an American law aimed at helping victims of human rights violations committed overseas.

Mr. Barrientos, who was described in court as having bragged about shooting Mr. Jara, is also a defendant in a criminal prosecution in Chile. It is unclear whether the outcome of the Florida case will affect efforts to extradite him.

Mr. Jara, then 40, was an accomplished songwriter and theater director and a member of the Communist Party that supported the deposed government of Salvador Allende. His songs of poverty and injustice, rooted in his own humble origins in the Chilean countryside, are still popular today. He is often described as the “Bob Dylan of South America.”

The Age of Disintegration

We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: in southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.

All of these have a number of things in common: they are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals -- well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years. ...

In the process and under the pressure of outside military intervention, a vast region of the planet seems to be cracking open. Yet there is very little understanding of these processes in Washington. This was recently well illustrated by the protest of 51 State Department diplomats against President Obama’s Syrian policy and their suggestion that air strikes be launched targeting Syrian regime forces in the belief that President Bashar al-Assad would then abide by a ceasefire. The diplomats’ approach remains typically simpleminded in this most complex of conflicts, assuming as it does that the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of civilians and other grim acts are the “root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”

It is as if the minds of these diplomats were still in the Cold War era, as if they were still fighting the Soviet Union and its allies. Against all the evidence of the last five years, there is an assumption that a barely extant moderate Syrian opposition would benefit from the fall of Assad, and a lack of understanding that the armed opposition in Syria is entirely dominated by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda clones. ...

Neoliberalism was once believed to be the path to secular democracy and free-market economies. In practice, it has been anything but. Instead, in conjunction with the resource curse, as well as repeated military interventions by Washington and its allies, free-market economics has profoundly destabilized the Greater Middle East. Encouraged by Washington and Brussels, twenty-first-century neoliberalism has made unequal societies ever more unequal and helped transform already corrupt regimes into looting machines. This is also, of course, a formula for the success of the Islamic State or any other radical alternative to the status quo. Such movements are bound to find support in impoverished or neglected regions like eastern Syria or eastern Libya. ...

The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was. It, too, is feeling the strains of this global moment, in which it and its local allies are powerful enough to imagine they can get rid of regimes they do not like, but either they do not quite succeed, as in Syria, or succeed but cannot replace what they have destroyed, as in Libya. An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

US Has Trained Less Than 100 Syrians to Fight ISIS

In comments that began with the dramatic understatement that the US is “not necessarily training large units” in their latest attempt to create Syrian rebel factions for the battle against ISIS, officials are conceding that they have trained less than 100 Syrians since the program was restarted back in March.

The program, which is operating out of Turkey, Jordan, and “other locations,” was scrapped last fall after the first batch of rebels got killed and the second batch immediately defected to al-Qaeda. Officials aren’t even presenting the new trainees as “fighters,” but rather as “leaders,” leaving open the question of what they’re supposed to lead.

Iraqi Shi’ite Militias Reported Fighting Inside Fallujah

Amid interminable scandals surrounding abuse of Sunni civilians, officials assured that Iraq’s Shi’ite militias could not be involved in the fighting inside Fallujah. Despite that assurance, officials now insist the militias are in the city after all.

During the siege on Fallujah, Shi’ite militias spent most of their time rounding up fleeing civilians, taking them to a section of the Mazraa Army Base run exclusively by militia forces, and torturing them by the hundreds, trying to get them to confess to being ISIS.

Turkey will not compensate Russia over shooting down of jet

Turkey will not pay compensation to Russia over the downing of a fighter jet last year and has only expressed regret over the incident, prime minister Binali Yildirim has said, after president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered a conciliatory hand to Moscow over the incident that shattered ties between the two countries.

Yildirim’s statement on Tuesday appeared to contradict a statement he made to public TV network TRT on Monday evening, in which he said Turkey would pay compensation “if necessary”.

Yildirim also indicated that Erdoğan would speak with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, this week over how to rebuild ties between the two countries, which back opposite sides in the Syrian war.

Yildirim also said legal proceedings were under way against an individual allegedly responsible for the killing of the Russian pilot.

Norwegian court rejects Edward Snowden lawsuit on free passage

Former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden has failed in a legal bid to win guarantees from Norway that it would not extradite him to the United States if he went there to receive a free speech award, a Norwegian court said on Monday.

Snowden's law firm said in April he would take the state to court to secure free passage to the Nordic country. The United States has filed espionage charges against him for leaking details of extensive U.S. surveillance programs.

"Oslo District Court has decided that the lawsuit from Edward Snowden against the State regarding extradition, should be dismissed," the court said in a statement.

Obama's State Department is still doing Hillary's dirty work. It looks like Hillary has a lot to hide.

State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election

Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times' open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Private Prison CEO Unconcerned About Hillary Clinton’s Pledge to End His Industry

The Chief Executive of the largest private prison company in America reassured investors earlier this month that with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the White House, his firm will be “just fine.” Damon Hininger, the chief executive of Corrections Corporation of America, was speaking at the REITWeek investor forum.

Private prisons have received a great deal of criticism this election cycle, first with Bernie Sanders campaigning to end for-profit incarceration, followed by Clinton taking up a similar pledge.

After The Intercept revealed that the Clinton campaign had received campaign donations from private prison lobbyists, a number of activist groups confronted Clinton, leading her to announce that she would no longer accept the money and later declaring that “we should end private prisons and private detention centers.” ...

Corrections Corporation is receiving renewed attention this week as Mother Jones publishes a 35,000-word investigation of a CCA-operated prison in Louisiana. Reporter Shane Bauer spent four months working as a prison guard at the facility, documenting systematic neglect of medical care and rampant violence. Robert Scott, an inmate in the prison, lost fingers and limbs to gangrene after the prison largely ignored his requests for serious treatment. Bauer, who worked at $9 an hour with little formal training, found that the company failed to report multiple stabbings to the state government, despite laws that require documentation of such incidents.

Burning Issues: Lori Wallach on the Revolt Against The TPP

7 Out of 10 Americans Agree That Economy is Rigged Against Them

A new Marketplace-Edison Research poll published Tuesday found that a full 71 percent of respondents agree that the economy is rigged, affirming the popular rhetoric of the current presidential campaign season.

The majority opinion held firm across ethnicity, class, age, and gender differences. A whopping 83 percent of African Americans polled agreed that the economy is rigged, and 80 percent of people ages 18-24 also held that opinion.

The poll, which has been tracking rising economic anxiety, discovered that most Americans agree that the economy was better for their parents' generation, and believe that the economy will be worse for the next generation.

Perhaps the perception of a rigged economy is because people are working harder for increasingly less financial security.

The truth is, we have a rigged economy. It is unsustainable. It is not moral. And it's not the economy we need to be a great nation.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 25, 2016

The Marketplace-Edison Research poll found a plurality of the respondents are also "not satisfied at all" with the two top presidential contenders.

Brexit aftermath: "Jeremy Corbyn is not resigning"

Corbyn ally says attempt by Labour MPs to oust leader does not comply with party rules or democratic structures

A key ally of Jeremy Corbyn has insisted that the future of his leadership should be decided by a ballot of ordinary members instead of a vote of no confidence by MPs.

Diane Abbott, the new shadow health secretary, said the way in which Labour rebels were attempting to oust Labour’s leader of nine months was not part of the rules and was seeking to avoid the party’s democratic structures.

A majority of MPs – sources say it could be as many as seven in every 10 MPs – are expected to vote in favour of a no-confidence motion that will be conducted through a secret ballot on Tuesday. ...

Abbott said the vote had no status under the party rule book. “It has no meaning,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “MPs don’t choose the leader of the Labour party, the party does.

“I think it is really sad that colleagues have chosen to stage this three-ring circus because they don’t want to have a leadership election because they are not certain of winning a leadership election. The way to resolve this is to have a leadership election.” ...

Corbyn was voted in as opposition leader last September on a landslide after the rules were changed to allow members to join for £3 each. His allies believe he can win a second leadership election following the influx of new, leftwing members.

One campaign organisation, Momentum, has claimed it can mobilise 100,000 Corbyn supporters and can install several telephone phone banks for a leadership campaign.

Americans Confused By System Of Government In Which Leader Would Resign After Making Terrible Decision

WASHINGTON—In the wake of Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement that he would leave office following the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union, tens of millions of Americans expressed their confusion to reporters Friday about a system of government in which a leader would resign after making a terrible decision. ... What?” said Colorado Springs, CO resident Evan Austin ... Where’s the part where he denies any wrongdoing or tries to blame somebody else? This is absolutely crazy.”

How Western Military Interventions Shaped the Brexit Vote

HUDSON: Well, almost all the Europeans know where the immigrants are coming from. And the ones that they’re talking about are from the near East. And they’re aware of the fact that most of the immigrants are coming as a result of the NATO policies promoted by Hillary and by the Obama administration.

The problem began in Libya. Once Hillary pushed Obama to destroy Libya and wipe out the stable government there, she wiped out the arms–and Libya was a very heavily armed country. She turned over the arms to ISIS, to Al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda. And Al-Qaeda used these arms under U.S. organization to attack Syria and Iraq. Now, the Syrian population, the Iraqi population, have no choice but to either emigrate or get killed.

So when people talk about the immigration to Europe, the Europeans, the French, the Dutch, the English, they’re all aware of the fact that this is the fact that Brussels is really NATO, and NATO is really run by Washington, and that it’s America’s new Cold War against Russia that’s been spurring all of this demographic dislocation that’s spreading into England, spreading into Europe, and is destabilizing things.

So what you’re seeing with the Brexit is the result of the Obama administration’s pro-war, new Cold War policy.

The Leave campaign is backtracking on immigration promises

Leave campaigners are trying to wriggle their way out of a quandary: How to honor the promises they made to their voters, without alienating the 48.1 percent of the country who voted against Brexit.

Particularly when it comes to immigration.

Boris Johnson – former mayor of London, chief Leave campaigner, and one of the most likely candidates to replace David Cameron as Prime Minister – broke his silence on Monday for the first time since last Thursday's Brexit vote to write his weekly column in the Telegraph. ...

Johnson, in his column, did not acknowledge that immigration has played a significant part in the referendum.

"It is said that those who voted Leave were mainly driven by anxieties about immigration," Johnson wrote. "I do not believe that is so. After meeting thousands of people in the course of the campaign, I can tell you that the number one issue was control – a sense that British democracy was being undermined by the EU system."

Polls have indicated otherwise. According to this year's Pew research survey, 70 percent of UK participants disapproved of the EU's handling of the refugee crisis – compared to 55 percent who were dissatisfied with the way the EU had handled economic issues.

This is a really interesting article about Brexit, written from a left perspective. It probably has a great deal of relevance beyond the EU for left movements struggling against neoliberal governments and austerity. The fact that putative racists and bigots are attacking neoliberal structures perhaps for wrong reasons doesn't mean that left movements should stop fighting against neoliberalism, trade globalization and austerity.

Brexit and the Diseased Liberal Mind

The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological – and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

A few years ago the American writer Chris Hedges wrote a book he titled the Death of the Liberal Class. His argument was not so much that liberals had disappeared, but that they had become so coopted by the right wing and its goals – from the subversion of progressive economic and social ideals by neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine in prosecuting aggressive and expansionist wars overseas in the guise of “humanitarian intervention” – that liberalism had been hollowed out of all substance.

Liberal pundits sensitively agonise over, but invariably end up backing, policies designed to benefit the bankers and arms manufacturers, and ones that wreak havoc domestically and abroad. They are the “useful idiots” of modern western societies. ...

The Brexit vote is a huge challenge to the left to face facts. We want to believe we are free but the truth is that we have long been in a prison called neoliberalism. The Conservative and Labour parties are tied umbilically to this neoliberal order. The EU is one key institution in a transnational neoliberal club. Our economy is structured to enforce neoliberalism whoever ostensibly runs the country.

That is why the debate about Brexit was never about values or principles – it was about money. It still is. The Remainers are talking only about the threat to their pensions. The Brexiters are talking only about the role of immigrants in driving down wages. And there is good reason: because the EU is part of the walls of the economic prison that has been constructed all around us. Our lives are now only about money, as the gargantuan bail-outs of the too-big-to-fail banks should have shown us.

There is a key difference between the two sides. Most Remainers want to pretend that the prison does not exist because they still get privileges to visit the living areas. The Brexiters cannot forget it exists because they are never allowed to leave their small cells.

The left cannot call itself a left and keep whingeing about its lost privileges while denouncing those trapped inside their cells as “racists”. Change requires that we first recognise our situation – and then have the will to struggle for something better.

Beyond Bernie: Socialism and the Struggle Against Capitalism

This is worth reading in full, but this part really stuck out for me:

Beyond Bernie: Still Not With Her

The stated purpose of The People’s Summit last weekend was a mass discussion about the way forward. ... Unfortunately, the answers to the key questions facing Sandernistas were not on offer: discussion of who to vote for in November was shockingly kept off the agenda, Jill Stein was denied a chance to speak, concrete strategies were not put forward (except to support “down ballot” Bernie Democrats), no organizational forms were proposed, and audience participation (by “the people”) was excluded.

At the Summit’s first session, Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! opened by telling a cautionary tale of 1968, when some activists refused to vote for establishment Democrat Hubert Humphrey, ending with a warning not to repeat the “mistakes of the past” (translation: not voting Democratic). These comments were later repeated and fleshed out for Monday’s Democracy Now! audience.

Of course the balking at demands to vote for Humphrey, especially by young people, had everything to do with a (correct) rejection of a Democratic Party administration that had just escalated the horrors of the Vietnam War. And what Gonzalez left out of his political parable was the broader outcome of the anti-establishment movement’s refusal to support the Democratic Party’s candidate that year. Republican Richard Nixon, under enormous pressure from that same revolt of youth and working people that was refusing to back down, was forced to concede more gains to the 99% than virtually any other president in U.S. history (with the exception of FDR’s concessions to the labor and socialist movements with the New Deal). These included the creation of major public programs for environmental protection (the Environmental Protection Agency), for workplace safety (the Occupational Safety and Health Act), and for racial and gender equality (Affirmative Action). It also resulted in, for the first time in U.S. history, a war being stopped by a protest movement, including a powerful revolt of the soldiers themselves.

None of this was because these policies in any way matched the conservative Nixon’s politics – they reflected instead the establishment’s need to stave off a deeper radicalization and upheaval driven by that same militant movement.

As Extreme Weather Sweeps Across U.S., Is New Democratic Platform on Climate Change Too Weak?

Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Ticks Up In Polls. Again.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) poll released Tuesday shows Green Party candidate Jill Stein gaining support for her presidential bid yet again. The poll of 891 registered voters conducted from June 16-19 showed Stein earning the support of 7 percent of respondents.

An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released a week earlier showed Stein polling at five percent. In mid-April she was at only two percent, according to a press release from her campaign.

In other words, her support has more than tripled over the past couple of months.

As The Progressive Standard previously reported, if Stein can reach the 15 percent threshold in national polls, she’ll be eligible to participate in the televised presidential debates. The CNN/ORC poll, along with the overall trajectory of polling numbers, suggests that Stein is well on her way to reaching that goal.

As if this question really needs asking...

Is Hillary Clinton a neocon?

Another week, and another set of Republicans have endorsed Hillary Clinton. Is it because of existential threat of Donald Trump, or could it be because many of Clinton’s potential policies conveniently line up with theirs?

Longtime Republican foreign policy stalwart and Iraq warmonger Robert Kagan became the latest neoconservative to endorse Clinton for president last week. He has even offered to host a fundraiser on her behalf, as Foreign Policy Magazine first reported on Thursday. Kagan has followed the likes of former Bush deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and a slew of lower-profile officials in their endorsement of Clinton over Trump. ...

While she’s hit Trump for being too erratic and dangerous a man to have in charge of the nuclear codes, she also promised more ground troops in the fight against Isis, expressed support for a no-fly zone in Syria (effectively a declaration of war against Assad) and called for more weapons for various rebels in the region. ...

On the economic front, Hank Paulson – former Goldman Sachs chief and the man who oversaw the financial collapse and economic bailout as George W Bush’s treasury secretary – put himself firmly in the #NeverTrump camp while also endorsing Clinton in a Washington Post op-ed. After talking about Trump’s business acumen (or lack thereof) and Trump’s appeal to ignorance, Paulson says this: “I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch social security, Medicare and Medicaid.” ...

with the Clinton camp planning on pushing for more Republican endorsements, it does leave open the question: if Paulson is so appalled by Trump’s alleged positions on Medicare and social security, does he think Clinton is more likely to “reform” – ie cut – them too?

Is Trump Really the Anti-Neocon?

Pro-Israel neocons have said they will jump off the Republican ship and vote for Hillary Clinton, because she will continue business as usual with regard to our militarized foreign policy. Apologists for Donald Trump argue that he will pursue a more restrained and less warlike foreign policy, including a more balanced policy toward Israel.

But a recent report by Stuart Winer in the Times of Israel suggests Trump’s bombastic “art of the deal,” at least when applied to pol-mil policy, will turn out to be yet another politician’s distinction without a difference — to wit:

“A senior adviser to Donald Trump said Wednesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should wait for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to win the White House before signing a military aid deal with Washington, because Trump would offer a better deal than the Obama administration." ...

Could it be that the choice for President in 2016 will have no effect on America’s militarized foreign policy, and if so, would this be something new and different?

As with most political questions in Versailles on the Potomac, the pathway to answering this question is less one of Ivory-tower policy analysis than a gritty one of following the money  — in this case the money flowing through the triangular relations of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex.

Oakland Ban on Dirty Coal Kills Plan for Massive Export Terminal

The City of Oakland, California took a bold step towards protecting the health of its citizens and the global environment on Monday after city council members voted unanimously to ban the storage and handling of coal and petroleum coke in the city.

The ban, sought by local environmental groups for over a year, is expected to derail plans for a massive export terminal on the city-owned waterfront, known as the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT).

According to the San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club, the port developers "have been quietly soliciting a partnership with four Utah counties to export up to ten million tons of coal out of Oakland each year. The partnership would make Oakland the largest coal-export facility on the West Coast, and would increase national coal exports by a whopping 19 percent." ...

The vote came three days after city staff released a long-anticipated report that recommended the ban based on its findings that OBOT "would pose a serious health risk to both workers at the planned terminal and West Oakland residents, who already suffer from high levels of asthma and other respiratory illnesses," the Mercury News reports.

The ordinance, which requires a second vote to become finalized, was proposed by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Councilman Dan Kalb, who argued that such projects pollute the air and pose serious risks to workers and community members. While the new rule specifically pertains to future projects, the council also voted unanimously on a resolution to apply the ordinance to OBOT.

California: Fires Burn at "Exponential Rates" Amid Blistering Heat Wave and 5-Year Drought

US, Canada and Mexico pledge 50% of power from clean energy by 2025

Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto will commit to a new regional clean power goal at a summit this week in Ottawa, the White House has said.

The leaders of the US, Canada and Mexico, meeting on Wednesday at the so-called “Three Amigos” summit, will pledge to have their countries produce 50% of their power by 2025 from hydropower, wind, solar and nuclear plants, carbon capture and storage, as well as from energy efficiency measures. ...

It is a jump from the current collective clean power levels of about 37% and will require the most work from the United States, which produces about 75% of the countries’ power.

About a third of US power now comes from clean energy sources.

New York's whales to be studied for the first time

The habits of New York’s little-understood whale population is to be fully analysed for the first time, with scientists hoping the new information will help protect the marine behemoths that navigate one of the busiest shipping areas in the world.

An acoustic monitoring buoy has been deployed off the coast of Long Island to eavesdrop on the cacophony of underwater noises made by whales that feed and travel through New York waters.

Data from the research project will plug a surprising gap in scientists’ knowledge of the world’s largest creatures. Despite the large human population of New York and its continual shipping traffic, little is known about the presence of whales in the New York Bight – a stretch of water spanning New York to New Jersey.

The buoy will listen out for whales from its position 22 miles out to sea from Fire Island, a strip of land in the central part of Long Island. The project, overseen by the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) New York aquarium and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), will run for an initial two years, although funding will be sought to extend this.

Humpback whales are regularly spotted off areas such as Brooklyn, while fin whales are known to inhabit the waters around the eastern tip of Long Island. Five other species, including the endangered North Atlantic right whale and minke and sperm whales, have also been seen or heard in New York waters.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Defecting Democrats, Trump and bitterness: Why Jill Stein just might turn November upside down

Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America

In Photos: Argentine villagers blame pesticide spraying for serious health problems

Across the world minds are narrowing. We must fight back

WPost’s ‘Agit-Prop’ for the New Cold War

How George Orwell's Dystopian Novel '1984' Illuminates the U.S.'s Endless War on Terror

Declassifying the Syrian Jihad: CIA vs. the Pentagon

Leave Won Because It Has a Better Story

A Little Night Music

Whistlin' Alex Moore - Whistling Alex Moore's Blues

Whistlin' Alex Moore - Blue Bloomer Blues

Whistlin' Alex Moore - It Wouldn't Be So Hard

Whistlin' Alex Moore - Ice Pick Blues

Whistlin' Alex Moore - Miss no good weed

Whistlin' Alex Moore - Wiggle Tail

Whistlin' Alex Moore - The Katy Blues