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10 Million at Risk of Hunger Due to Climate Change and El Niño, Oxfam Warns

At least ten million of the poorest people face food insecurity in 2015 and 2016 due to extreme weather conditions and the onset of El Niño, Oxfam has reported.

In Oxfam’s new report called Entering Uncharted Waters, erratic weather patterns were noted including high temperatures and droughts, disrupting farming seasons around the world.

Countries are already facing a “major emergency,” said Oxfam, including Ethiopia where 4.5 million people are in need of food assistance due to a drought this year.

US Tax Dollars and Ukraine’s Finance Minister

By Robert Parry

The U.S. government is missing – or withholding – audit documents about the finances and possible accounting irregularities at a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund when it was run by Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who has become the face of “reform” for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev and who now oversees billions of dollars in Western financial aid.

Before taking Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister in December 2014, Jaresko was a former U.S. diplomat who served as chief executive officer of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by Congress in the 1990s with $150 million and placed under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help jumpstart an investment economy in Ukraine.

After Jaresko’s appointment as Finance Minister — and her resignation from WNISEF — I reviewed WNISEF’s available public records and detected a pattern of insider dealings and enrichment benefiting Jaresko and various colleagues. That prompted me in February to file a Freedom of Information Act request for USAID’s audits of the investment fund.

How to Spy the 9/11 Lie

A recent book written by three veteran CIA officers describes how deception can be identified by simple observational techniques. In Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception, authors Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero outline a number of verbal and visual behavioral clues that are demonstrated by people who lie in response to questioning. These proven techniques for recognizing deception can be easily applied to see that U.S. leaders have lied repeatedly about the attacks of 9/11.

The authors make clear that there are two important guidelines to employ when analyzing these verbal and visual clues. First, timing is important. Due to the fact that people think ten times faster than they speak, the behaviors are more important when the first one occurs within five seconds of the question. Secondly, when the behavioral clues occur in groups of two or more, called clusters, they are more indicative of deception on the part of the person being questioned. The more clues exhibited, the more clear the deception becomes.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

In a December 15, 2001 press conference, President George W. Bush was asked an unexpected question about 9/11. In a remarkably delayed response, Bush exhibited both a verbal clue for deception, the failure to answer, and a visual clue called an anchor-point movement. The latter is when the anxiety raised by the question causes the person questioned to shift his body to relieve physical instability. As Bush replied, he shook his head, moved his hands, and seemed to be shuffling his feet uncomfortably.

Amid the Crowing of the GOP and Clinton, Sanders Is on the Rise

How easy it is to mock the Republican candidates. They’re the gang in the clown car climbing all over each other to offer a reactionary message of disarray that has all but destroyed the chances of the Bush family dynasty continuing. But isn’t that a grand achievement for the democratic process?

Why continue a political legacy that has failed in so many dramatic ways to serve the needs of the American public, instead giving us irrational but high-tech wars dealing death from the skies, heartless banking deregulation boosting the fortunes of the rich at the expense of the vast majority, and a vast state apparatus of surveillance enforced by the imprisonment of any whistleblowers who dare reveal its existence?

Good riddance to bad rubbish, except that the alternatives of Trump, Fiorina or Carson only make Jeb Bush look stunningly reasonable in comparison. The other problem is that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate, is not fundamentally different from the scion of the Bush dynasty. She is instead a perfect stand-in for Jeb Bush if, as appears likely, the Republican Party should reject him for the sin, as with House Speaker John Boehner, of appearing too moderate. For Democrats, appearing moderate is quite easy, as Clinton proved as a senator and secretary of state: Just carry water for the military-industrial complex and Wall Street while pretending to be concerned about the ordinary folks who suffer from those costly policies.

Warmer Winters Slow the Growth of Forest Giants

LONDON—Spring is arriving ever earlier as greenhouse gas levels rise and global temperatures warm, and the northern hemisphere growing season is now two weeks longer  than it was in 1900.

But, paradoxically, new research shows that forest giants that once responded to the early spring are beginning to slow down—because they miss the chill.

Yongshuo Fu, an Earth system scientist at Peking University, Beijing, and colleagues report in Nature journal that they have measured a slowdown in the response of oaks and other forest citizens to the change in temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Where these species, on average, unfolded their first leaves four days earlier, with every 1?C rise in temperature, they now do so only 2.3 days earlier for every additional 1?C.

Energy Democracy: Building a Solar Dream in a Tar Sands Nightmare

In a community of five hundred people in northern Alberta, a 20.8 kW solar installation has been set up to power the First Nation's health centre, and put additional energy back in to the grid. The Indigenous community of the Lubicon Cree used to be self-sufficient and was able to live off the land. Now the community deals with contaminated water, polluted air and a compromised landscape. In 2011, the community dealt with one of the largest oil spills in Alberta's history.

After dealing with three decades of intensive oil, gas, logging, fracking and tar sands exploitation in our homeland, my community of Little Buffalo has chosen to forge a new future and become powered by the sun. First Nation communities have been on the front lines of resource extraction for far too long, and we have paid dearly for the price of humanity's addiction to oil, but we have hope that we will find a way out of the crisis we are currently facing in Alberta and around the world.

Refusing to be victims in this game of fossil fuel roulette, communities like Little Buffalo are leading the way towards energy independence – making The Leap towards a new future that some of our leading thinkers say everyone else must follow.