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This evening's music features Piedmont blues singer and guitarist Blind Willie Mctell. Enjoy!

“Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.”

-- Patrick Cockburn

News and Opinion

When Is Assassination Not Assassination? When the Government Says So

It’s one of the most memorable scenes in Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen’s Green Beret captain is being briefed on his mission to find Col. Walter Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. ... A civilian spook then gives him a coded order: “Terminate with extreme prejudice.” ...

How — or if — killing a human with a remote-controlled flying robot differs from, say, a Green Beret killing a rogue colonel, has been discussed and debated for years now. “If it’s premeditated assassination, why call it a ‘targeted killing?’” wrote Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor, in 2013, channeling some of the complaints she received from readers.

Scott Shane, a Times national security reporter, had a ready answer: The Obama administration decreed it. He explained that since assassination is banned by executive order, using the term would indicate the administration is deliberately violating the ban. “This administration, like others, just doesn’t think the executive order applies,” he wrote to Sullivan. He crossed off the term “murder” for similar reasons. “This leaves ‘targeted killing,’ which I think is far from a euphemism,” Shane continued. “It denotes exactly what’s happening: American drone operators aim at people on the ground and fire missiles at them. I think it’s a pretty good term for what’s happening, if a bit clinical.” ...

Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies drone strikes, points out the government will develop legal justifications for any use of force the president decides upon. “I don’t particularly care how you describe it,” he says of targeted killing. “But I certainly understand why people have concerns about how it’s categorized. Words do matter.”

Should we criticize journalists, like those at the New York Times and Washington Post, for adopting euphemisms or watered-down language?

Zenko praised the work of investigative reporters and specifically mentioned Shane and Miller, noting that without them we would know little beyond the administration’s talking points. But with so much of the program shrouded in secrecy and strikes conducted in such distant locations, there are “a lot of points between you and reality,” as Zenko puts it. “When there’s a huge information gap, even really good national security and intelligence journalists become more reliant on sources within government. When you’re more reliant upon those sources, you might be more likely to adhere to — or at least make a case for why they use — the language and justifications that they do.”

US Sends 75 More Rebel Fighters Into Syria

Though there hasn’t been an official announcement from the US on the deployment yet, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that some 75 more US-trained rebels entered Syria Friday by way of the Turkish border and are somewhere near Aleppo.

This is the second round of rebels from the Pentagon scheme to create a “pro-US” faction on the ground in Syria. Back in July, the first class of rebels was sent. There were 54 of them to start, and last week officials confirmed there were “four or five” left. ...

Exactly what the new rebels are doing is unclear, but last week officials revealed that the plan is to stop having the tiny, ineffectual force fighting ISIS directly, and instead aims to have them “embed” with other factions to provide targeting information for US airstrikes.

Is the U.S. Secretly Welcoming Increased Russian Syria Involvement?

President Obama’s plan to arm the Syrian rebels has failed

Despite two years of amassing evidence that the “moderate” fighters in Syria are anything but, that the rebellion has become indelibly defined by Islamic jihadism, that neither side in this nasty civil war is even remotely compatible with American values, the Obama administration has always clung to the idea that somewhere—somewhere—lies a gleaming army of idealists immune to Salafist thought and prepared to demolish both Bashar al Assad and ISIS.

Until now. After the revelation on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon’s $500 million program in Syria had only trained and armed “four or five” rebels, even the Obama administration is admitting defeat. The New York Times reports:

By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This is as pathetic a statement as you’re likely to hear from any commander-in-chief.

Russian Mouse Threatens U.S. Elephant

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” So echoed the cry this week from the Pentagon, the US media and Republican candidates for president.

How silly. It seems the Russians have sent six tanks to Syria, some medium artillery and a bunch of military technicians to two bases on Syria’s coast near Latakia. According to Republican warmongers, the wicked Soviets…ooops, sorry, Russians…are intervening militarily in the five-year old Syrian War and planning new bases in the strategic Mideast nation.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The United States has about 800 bases and military installations around the globe. Russia has only a handful of small bases near its borders.

The exception is in Syria where Russia has had a small naval supply/repair facility in Tartus and an electronic listening post for almost 50 years. Moscow has long been Syria’s principal foreign ally and arms supplier. ...

The West’s objective in Syria was to overthrow its government, because it is closely allied to Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Russia. President Bashar Assad’s secular government in Damascus is just managing to hold off the rebels and mobs of fanatical jihadists sent by the Saudis and Washington – which pretends to be fighting the Islamic state. In fact, the Islamic State, or IS, is a tacit American ally.

Astoundingly, it appears that few in Washington’s power circles appear to have imagined that US machinations in Syria would eventually provoke a Russian response. ...

Did anyone really think that the very tough Putin would do nothing while the US and its allies tore Syria apart?

How stupid and arrogant was this. Imperial hubris married to arrant ignorance.

Syrian Rebels Foresee a Tough War with Russia

Rebels who have inflicted big losses on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad say Russia's intervention in support of its ally will only lead to an escalation of the war and may encourage the rebels' Gulf Arab backers to pour in more military aid.

Russia's deployment is prompting a reassessment of the conflict among insurgents whose advances in western Syria in recent months may have been the catalyst for Russia's decision. US officials say Russian forces are already arriving.

Rebels interviewed by Reuters say they have already encountered stronger government resistance in those areas — notably the coastal heartland of Assad's Alawite sect — and now predict an even tougher war with Russian involvement. ...

"The Russian intervention has come to save the regime," said the fighter with the Ahrar al-Sham group, part of an alliance that has advanced in the Assad-held west. Like other rebels interviewed for this article, he spoke via the internet.

US officials say Russia is undertaking a significant military buildup at the airfield, including fighter jets, helicopter gunships, artillery, and as many as 500 naval infantry.

While Russia has not been specific about its goals — saying its support for Damascus aims to fight terrorism — rebels in the west believe their area of operations is the priority because it poses the biggest immediate risk to Assad.

Russia operates its only naval facility on the Mediterranean in the Syrian city of Tartous near Latakia.

Pope Francis in Cuba: "The World Needs Reconciliation in This Atmosphere of a Third World War"

Kerry: US to accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, 100,000 in 2017

Scrambling to address a growing Syrian refugee crisis, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced Sunday that the United States would significantly increase the number of worldwide migrants it takes in over the next two years, though not by nearly the amount many activists and former officials have urged.

The U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees from around the world next year, up from 70,000, and that total would rise to 100,000 in 2017, Kerry said at news conference with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier after they discussed the mass migration of Syrians fleeing their civil war.

Many, though not all, of the additional refugees would be Syrian, American officials have said. Others would come from strife-torn areas of Africa. The White House had previously announced it intended to take in 10,000 additional Syrian refugees over the next year.

Asked why the U.S. couldn't take more, Kerry cited post-Sept. 11 screening requirements and a lack of money made available by Congress.

Planned Shelter for Migrants in Germany Burns in Suspected Arson Attack

German police said on Sunday that a planned accommodation center for migrants in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg was hit by an arson attack, the latest sign of tension as migrants flow to the country.

Police in the city of Heilbronn said nobody was in the sports hall in nearby Wertheim at the time of the attack, and it was not currently possible to enter the building because of fire damage. Some 330 beds for migrants had already been installed at the facility.

The attack came as a senior member of parliament in Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), spoke out in favor of tighter rules on granting asylum.

Military Refuses Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Gender-Affirming Treatment

Prison authorities are refusing jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning medically-necessary treatment for gender dysphoria, and are thereby denying her most basic human rights, she and her lawyers announced Friday.

According to a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. military issued "another denial in response to Chelsea Manning’s ongoing request for permission to follow female grooming standards—including growing her hair." ...

The military is now refusing to allow Manning to grow her hair or present it in a feminine manner. This is despite the fact that "the outside expert who evaluated her and the military’s own doctors agree that it is a medically necessary part of her treatment to follow the female grooming standards related to hair," according to the ACLU.

While the ACLU and Manning are vowing to fight the military's decision, the whistleblower faces other obstacles. Manning was told by military authorities on Thursday night that she will now start a 21 day punishment for innocuous charges, including possessing books and magazines related to LGBTQ issues, according to the Chelsea Manning Support Network. Manning's punishment will include severe restrictions on all activities deemed recreation, including time out of her cell, phone calls, television, music, exercise, and art supplies.

Government Argues: If Your Mobile Phone Provider Knows Where You Are, Why Shouldn’t We?

In one of the stronger defenses of Fourth Amendment rights in the digital age, a federal appellate court panel in August ruled 2 to 1 that law enforcement officials can’t request cell phone location records without a warrant.

The government is now asking the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule the panel’s earlier decision, arguing that by choosing to connect to a mobile network, users lose any reasonable expectation that their location is private.

Quoting the dissenting judge, the government wrote that the panel’s decision “flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s well-established third-party doctrine.”

The third-party doctrine is a legal theory that asserts that users voluntarily give up information like location data by subscribing to public services like communications providers, and thus have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when it comes to that information.

The Fourth Circuit panel had ruled that the third-party doctrine was never intended to allow the government to track people’s entire digital lives over the course of lengthy periods of time, and sided with lawyers for Aaron Graham, a Baltimore man convicted of armed robbery based on details found in seven months of his call records obtained from Sprint without a warrant.

“People cannot be deemed to have volunteered to forfeit expectations of privacy by simply seeking active participation in society through use of their cell phones,” the panel wrote in August.

Kim Dotcom in court for US extradition hearing after three years of delays

After more than three years of legal wrangling, two supreme court cases and 10 delays in the proceedings, the extradition hearing for internet tycoon Kim Dotcom and his co-accused has finally begun in Auckland. ...

Dubbed the “Mega Conspiracy” by the FBI, US authorities allege Dotcom and his associates – Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk – were involved in an organised criminal enterprise centred on copyright violation through Megaupload which earned them $175m (£112m).

The men are facing charges which, if they are found guilty in the US, carry decades of jail time.

Judge Nevin Dawson doesn’t have to decide whether the four are guilty or not, only if they should be surrendered to the US and go to trial there.

Apple removes malicious programs after first major attack on app store

Apple has had to remove more than 300 malware-infected apps from its app store after a tainted version of its developer tools led to a number of Chinese apps leaking users’ personal information to hackers. ...

It is the first reported case of large numbers of malicious software programs making their way past Apple’s stringent app review process. Prior to this attack, a total of just five malicious apps had ever been found in the app store, according to cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks.

Apple said the hackers embedded the malicious code in these apps by convincing developers of legitimate software to use a tainted, counterfeit version of Apple’s software for creating iOS and Mac apps, which is known as Xcode.

“We’ve removed the apps from the app store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software,” Apple spokeswoman Christine Monaghan said in an email. “We are working with the developers to make sure they’re using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps.“

She did not say what steps iPhone and iPad users could take to determine whether their devices were infected.

Pope Francis’s Philadelphia prison visit highlights crisis in US justice system

Behind barbed wire and under guard towers on the edge of north-east Philadelphia, Pope Francis will meet more than 100 men and women from a dangerously overcrowded prison population drawn largely from the poor, civil rights advocates say.

Some 80% of those inmates at that prison, Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), have not yet been convicted of the crime with which they were charged. Most of them are behind bars because they have not paid or cannot afford to pay bail while awaiting trial, prison spokesperson Shawn Hawes told the Guardian. ...

Per capita, Philadelphia incarcerates more people than any other of the 10 largest cities in the US. In 2009 alone, the city spent nearly $300m on jail expenditures, as much as its streets and health departments combined, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study on the prison system. ...

Bail often acts as a tool of coercion, reform advocates say, that convinces innocent people who cannot pay to plead guilty simply to escape the dangers and strains of life in an overcrowded cell.

“Time and time again,” Rudovsky said, “someone in custody on minor charges will be given the option after a week in jail: ‘Plead guilty on time in and we’ll let you out, or wait three months in jail for a trial.’ It’s not surprising then that a lot of people plead guilty.” ...

A February report by the nonprofit Vera Institute found that arbitrary bail terms often strain families struggling to free a loved one, especially when that person loses his or her income as a result of the pretrial detention. A 2012 New York-based report found that in non-felony cases without bail, only half the defendants were convicted. With pretrial detention, prosecutors convicted 92% of defendants.

Leaked Seattle Audit Concludes Many Mortgage Documents Are Void

A Seattle housing activist on Wednesday uploaded an explosive land-record audit that the local City Council had been sitting on, revealing its far-reaching conclusion: that all assignments of mortgages the auditors studied are void.

That makes any foreclosures in the city based on these documents illegal and unenforceable, and makes the King County recording offices where the documents are located a massive crime scene.

The problems stem from the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), an entity banks created so they could transfer mortgages privately, saving them billions of dollars in transfer fees to public recording offices. In Washington state, MERS’ practices were found illegal by the State Supreme Court in 2012. But MERS continued those practices with only cosmetic changes, the audit found.

That finding has national implications. Every state has its own mortgage laws, and some of the audit’s conclusions may not necessarily apply elsewhere. But it shows how MERS reacted to being caught defrauding the public by trying to sneak through foreclosures anyway. Combined with evidence in other parts of the country, like the failure to register out-of-state business trusts in Montana, it suggests that the mortgage industry has been inattentive to and dismissive of state foreclosure laws.

Syriza party leads vote in Greece's second general election this year

Alexis Tsipras Returns to Power in Greece With Strong Election Victory

Greek voters returned Alexis Tsipras to power with a strong election victory on Sunday, ensuring the charismatic leftist remains Greece's dominant political figure despite caving in to European demands for a bailout he once opposed.

With about a quarter of votes counted, Tsipras's Syriza party was on course to claim 35.3 percent of the vote, easily seeing off his main conservative challengers New Democracy, which received 28.1 percent of the vote.

The Interior Ministry said that would give Tsipras 144 seats in the 300-seat parliament, just five fewer than when he first stormed to power early this year. New Democracy swiftly conceded defeat.

A Syriza source said the party would turn once again to the small right-wing Independent Greeks party to form a coalition, restoring the alliance that first brought Tsipras to power nine months ago. ...

Third place in the election looked set to go again to Golden Dawn, a far-right party with a swastika-like symbol, with around 7 percent of the vote. ...

Apart from Golden Dawn and the communist KKE party, the major parties in the new parliament have now accepted the cash-for-reforms deal to keep Greece in the euro zone.

Varoufakis: The Double Purpose of Τhese Elections

"The Sunday elections serve a double purpose:

-First to nullify the brave NO which 62% of the Greek population (under media fear-mongering and closed banks-capital controls) said to dead end, humiliating and irrational bailout programs and memoranda.

-Second, the 'legalization' of the capitulation that followed the signing of the dead end, humiliating and irrational 3rd memorandum.

The 3rd bailout program is absolutely non-viable and, even worse, it deprives the Greek government (no matter how well-meaning it might be) of any tools in order to break the ties with the oligarchs and the self sustaining crisis (i.e. aiming for 3,5% GNP surplus until 2018 and onwards, closure of the Greek Financial Crime Agency and creation of a new agency which will be under the control of the Troika, the creation of a registry for public assets which will be under the control of the Euro Working Group, and a special note of understanding that will pass in the Greek Parliament mentioning that the government must agree with the institutions before taking any measures while the institutions do not have to do the same etc.)

For those reasons it is important that we support parties which (with the exception of the misanthropic and pseudo anti-systemic Golden Dawn) reject the rationale that claims that the only way for Greece in Europe is via the "optimum" realization of the 3rd bailout program. Given that the leadership of Syriza has accepted the T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative) dogma which has been used since 2010 as the reason for the acceptance of all the bailout programs and memoranda; those of us who consider that dogma completely fallacious (as well as its continuation for the sixth year destructive for the country and the society) are left with the following choices: The Communist Party of Greece (KKE), The Popular Unity (LAE), or parties which have no hope in entering the parliament".

If Congress won't listen to exploited workers, will they listen to the pope?

The pope has denounced the “structurally perverse” global economic system that exploits the poor. His message is about workers like me. I’m the chef at the Senate dining room inside the US Capitol. I work for a UK-based multinational conglomerate that makes billions in profit yet leaves workers around the globe destitute. ...

In recent months, my co-workers and I have walked off our jobs several times to protest poverty pay and shared our stories of struggle in these pages. Despite our strikes and our heart-breaking stories, the Senate has not taken any action to help us win living wages and a union. Even worse, the Senate has allowed our company to threaten and try to intimidate us into silence.

Now, we are appealing to a higher power. We have written a letter to Pope Francis asking him to grant us an audience when he comes to address a joint session of Congress. ...

I’ve worked as a Senate chef for 5 years, but I only make $13 dollars an hour. I’m a single father and it’s hard to support my son on a poverty wage. The cost of living in Washington is so expensive that I recently ended up homeless. I lived in an abandoned house for nearly two months. That’s how long it took me to save up enough money to rent a bedroom in an apartment. I often had to skip meals to save money.

Perhaps the lavish lifestyle of our politicians makes it hard for them to understand the challenges of the working poor. ... When the pope comes to Congress, I hope he tells the senators that the workers who serve them are their equals in the eyes of God and that we should be able to afford food and shelter just as politicians are able to do.

Fracture: Author Joy-Ann Reid on Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide

Democrats demand more debate time as intra-party rift reaches boiling point

When the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz took the stage at a party convention in New Hampshire this weekend, her speech was drowned out with a resounding chant of “we want debates”.

Just days before, Democratic activists brought the issue to the DNC’s front door with dozens of protesters gathered outside – some from the Martin O’Malley campaign and others waving #FeeltheBern signs – demonstrated outside DNC headquarters in Washington DC, to demand that their party allow more presidential debates.

As demand for more debates become increasingly louder, the issue has gone from being an embarrassing sideshow to one that the DNC – and Hillary Clinton – may no longer be able to ignore. But on Saturday, Wasserman Schultz, a US representative from Florida, showed no signs of backing down. ...

Democratic contender O’Malley, who is struggling to gain traction in the race, even as Clinton falters in the polls, has led an aggressive charge demanding more debates. During his speech at the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis he stood before the committee’s leaders and called the process “rigged” and challenged them to redraw the schedule, receiving loud applause for his lines. ...

Though Sanders hasn’t officially joined forces with O’Malley, he has stated that the DNC was “dead wrong” to restrict the primary debates and agrees there should be more. Democratic contenders former Virginia senator James Webb and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig also agreed the DNC should remove the barriers to debate.

Cornel West: Bernie Sanders is an insurgent on par with Jesse Jackson

Bernie Sanders is as much an insurgent as Jesse Jackson was, according to Cornel West, who worked for both Jackson campaigns and is now the socialist Democratic presidential candidate’s most high-profile black backer. ...

Jackson ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, winning 6.6m votes and 11 states in his second campaign, and his run was “historic”, West said.

But “the Sanders campaign is even more progressive than Jackson’s were, because his critique of Wall Street is more direct,” West said in an interview last week.

What Jackson had – and Sanders does not – was strong black support. But, said West, “that’s what we are going to get – once black people find out who Brother Sanders is”. ...

Sanders met in Washington last week with racial justice activists who called for him to get more specific with his proposals for community and criminal justice reform, even as the senator introduced new legislation to phase out private prisons. ...

Before this summer, Sanders was open to the charge that critiquing racism was absent from his critiques of capitalism. But then Black Lives Matter activists interrupted him in August, and he responded by listening to their point of view. He has recently added the words “end institutional racism” to his stump speech on the trail.

Sanders may not win the long fight. But he has overtaken Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire and is eating into her lead nationwide.

America Is Getting Its Bern Notice

Bigots on parade:

Ben Carson says no Muslim should ever become US president

The Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has said no Muslim should be president of the United States of America.

In an interview with NBC for broadcast on Sunday morning, the retired neurosurgeon said: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” ...

In his NBC interview, Carson was asked: “So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the constitution?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t, I do not.” ...

Carson, a Christian, is a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. In October, he will publish a new book, written with his wife Candy Carson and entitled A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties.

Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock Was “Half a Bomb,” Says Anti-Muslim Group With Ties to Trump, Cruz

The Center for Security Policy, a think tank that routinely partners with prominent Republican politicians, including many of the current presidential contenders, is defending the arrest of 14-year-old Muslim high school student Ahmed Mohamed for bringing a homemade clock to school. ...

Center for Security Policy vice president Jim Hanson argued on his organization’s podcast that the clock “looks exactly like a number of IED triggers that were produced by the Iranians and used to kill U.S. troops in the war in Iraq.” He said the clock “was half a bomb.” ...

The center’s fringe rhetoric has not prevented it from becoming deeply entwined with the conservative establishment. It routinely hosts prominent Republican politicians for events. ... The center is also funded by some of the largest defense contractors in the world, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Electric. Jack London, the chairman of the board of CACI International, a major defense contractor that serves the National Security Agency, sits on the Center for Security Policy’s board.

El Niño: a global weather event that may save California — and destroy the tropics

The current buzz in cafes across California is that snow from this year’s big El Niño will bring the best skiing in years. What fortunate skiers don’t realize is that the same periodic ocean-atmosphere interaction in the Pacific Ocean is one of the most devastating natural forces on Earth, endangering the wellbeing of over three billion people across the tropics. El Niño creates winners and losers on a global scale. Each year is like planetary roulette, and the current forecast is for families in the tropics to suffer in the coming months.

The last time a really large El Niño occurred was during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter of 1997-98. Droughts, floods and outbreaks of infectious diseases plagued villages across Africa. Floods inundated Peru. Megafires rampaged through Indonesia. Fisheries collapsed off the coast of South America. Crops failed across much of the tropics and global food prices rose. Civil conflicts broke out in Africa and Asia.

Today, in all likelihood, we stand about a month away from another major El Niño. Current state-of-the-art forecasts tell us that an event similar to 1997-98 is likely to return this winter. Our own research on the human toll of El Niño suggests that households in the tropics will begin to feel the heat as early as September. ...

This global asymmetry translates into major agricultural losses in tropical countries due to heat waves and drought and crop gains in temperate countries. Though the expected food gains from temperate countries could, in theory, more than offset potential losses in tropical countries, this has not happened historically, and countries in the tropics have endured turmoil and hunger mostly on their own. The challenge with El Niño is fundamentally about the limits in the global reallocation of food. ...

In the coming months, countries that experience bumper cereal yields under El Niño, as the United States likely will, should be prepared to quickly provide food aid to tropical countries when needed. Aid agencies, peacekeeping groups, refugee organizations and other international institutions should start, if they haven’t already, to carefully monitor the situation in the tropics.

Furthermore, the US Congress should consider relaxing the ethanol mandate for this coming year so that excess corn supplies can be redirected for international food trade rather than turned into fuel. International lending agencies should consider temporary repayment relief for tropical countries who may need to prioritize avoiding famine and social instability over debt repayment this year.

California wildfires destroy 1,000 homes with tally rising daily

It has been several days since two huge wildfires in northern California peaked in their ferocity, yet the damage they did is still being revealed daily.

The tally of homes destroyed topped 1,000 on Saturday after authorities assessing damage in the Sierra Nevada foothills counted another 250 houses destroyed by flames still threatening thousands of more structures. ...

The new count of 511 homes destroyed by one of the blazes up from 252 a day earlier comes as firefighters make significant progress against it. The fire, which killed at least two people, was 67% contained. Another 6,400 structures remain under threat.

A separate blaze in Lake County, about 170 miles northwest, has destroyed 888 structures, at least 585 of them homes. It has killed three people. ...

The Lake County fire tore through 62 square miles in 12 hours, causing thousands of residents to flee after it ignited a week ago. About 19,000 people were ordered to evacuate. The blaze had charred 116 square miles and was 50% contained on Saturday.

'It Can Be Done': New Report Details Path to 100% Renewables by 2050

With scientists and experts from around the world telling world leaders with increasing urgency ahead of upcoming climate talks in Paris that "It must be done," a new report says "It can be done."  ...

According to the report:

100% renewable energy for all is achievable by 2050, and is the only way to ensure the world does not descend into catastrophic climate change. Dynamic change is taking place in the energy sector. Renewable energies have become mainstream in most countries, and prices have fallen  dramatically.  The report shows we could transform our energy supply, switching to renewables, which would mean a stabilization of global CO2 emissions by 2020, and bringing down emissions  towards near zero emissions in 2050.

Produced in collaboration with researchers at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the new Greenpeace report—titled World Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook 2015—is the latest global energy analysis which shows that not only is the transition to cleaner energy sources possibly in the coming decades, the actual financial costs of taking on a such a massive transition would actually be cheaper over the coming decades than retaining the "dirty energy" status quo in the face of climate change.

Greenpeace admits the cost of its plan is "huge" but that "the savings are even bigger." According to their estimates, the global average of additional investment needed in renewables is roughly $1 trillion a year until 2050. However, because renewables don’t require continuous fuel inputs, the savings over the same period would be $1.07 trillion a year, more than covering the costs of the required up-front investment.

Also of Interest

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

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

#Halfabomb Explodes on Twitter After Think Tank Calls Boy’s Clock a Threat

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn't Bought U.S. Politics

Edward Snowden: we may never spot space aliens thanks to encryption

A Sense of Despair Is Sweeping Through Iraq

The poisonous paranoia of ‘see something, say something’

Bernie Bashes Billionaires in Big Apple, Challenges Dem Establishment in NH

A Little Night Music

Blind Willie McTell - Dying Crapshooters Blues

David Bromberg - Dying Crapshooters Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Searching The Desert For The Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Last Dime Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Broke Down Engine

Martin Simpson - Broke Down Engine

Blind Willie McTell - Delia

Roy Book Binder - Delia

Blind Willie Mctell - Blues Around Midnight

Blind Willie Mctell - Travelin' Blues

Blind Willie Mctell - Wabash Cannonball

Blind Willie Mctell - Atlanta Strut

Blind Willie Mctell - Kill It Kid

Blind Willie McTell - Dirty Mistreater

Blind Willie McTell - Bell Street Lightnin'

Blind Willie McTell - Georgia Rag

Blind Willie McTell - Come On Around To My House Mama

Blind Willie McTell - King Edward Blues

Alabama Gravy Soppers - Honey It Must Be Love

Chris Smither - Statesboro Blues

Taj Mahal - Statesboro Blues

Allman Brothers Band - Statesboro Blues

Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell