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This evening's music features Chicago blues mandolinist, guitarist and singer, Johnny Young. Enjoy!

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

-- Muhammad Ali

News and Opinion

Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery

Before a preseason game on Friday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When he explained why, he only spoke about the present: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. … There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” ...

Almost no one seems to be aware that even if the U.S. were a perfect country today, it would be bizarre to expect African-American players to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Because it literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans.

Few people know this because we only ever sing the first verse. But read the end of the third verse and you’ll see why “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not just a musical atrocity, it’s an intellectual and moral one, too:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[Click the link for an interesting history of the conditions that led slave-owner Francis Scott Key to write those lines into what would become the national anthem. - js]

If I were a gambling man, I would bet heavily that in the course of time, there will one day be a release of documents indicating the involvement of the US covert community and probably some nasty private-sector neoliberals in engineering the ascension of President Mauricio Macri. This is an interesting article, here's a tease:

Blaming the victims: dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina

Almost uniquely among nations that have suffered mass killings under brutal dictatorships, Argentina was able not only to put a large number of its former torturers behind bars, but to establish a consensus across all political sectors that its 1976-83 military regime had executed a lower-intensity Nazi-style genocide that lacked any moral justification.

The country’s dictator Jorge Videla was tried barely two years after the return of democracy, and since then more than 1,000 other former officers have been sentenced, making the country a standout among former South American dictatorships. Chile has attained a similar number of convictions, but its dictator Augusto Pinochet died without ever facing a day in court. In Brazil and Uruguay, where wide-ranging amnesties remain in place, a free pass was given to torturers to ensure a smooth democratic transition.

But Argentina’s consensus on the gravity of dictatorship-era crimes has suddenly shattered under centre-right President Mauricio Macri.

Earlier this month, Macri rattled nerves in the human rights community when he appeared to doubt the long-accepted historical understanding that 30,000 people died under the dictatorship. Asked in an interview with Buzzfeed how many people had been murdered, he testily replied: “I have no idea. That’s a debate I’m not going to enter, whether they were 9,000 or 30,000.”

Some sympathisers with the former regime have long raised doubts over the number of desaparecidos, but Macri’s words marked the first time that such denialist rhetoric gained admittance to mainstream political discourse.

Syrian troops enter Daraya after four year seige

Stop the press: Turkey's crackdown on its media goes into overdrive

Turkey has intensified its crackdown on the media since last month’s attempted coup, with rights groups decrying a wave of decrees that have turned the country into the world leader in locking up journalists.

During Turkey’s current three-month state of emergency the government has the authority to rule by decree and has ordered the closure of 102 media outlets, including 45 newspapers, 16 TV channels, three news agencies, 23 radio stations, 15 magazines and 29 publishing houses.

Arrest warrants have been issued for more than 100 journalists, and, according to the independent journalism platform P24, 48 have been arrested since the investigation into the alleged coup plotters began.

A total of 2,308 media workers and journalists, some employed by outlets with alleged ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the Turkish government accuses of masterminding the coup attempt, have lost their jobs. Hundreds of government-issued press accreditations have been cancelled, and an unknown number of journalists had their passports revoked, thus banning them from all foreign travel.

The Turkish governments insists these measures are justified for security reasons and says journalists currently in jail are being investigated or prosecuted for possible criminal activities.

Rights groups disagree. “One of the biggest problems in Turkey was the close relationship between the judiciary and the government, which was detrimental to press freedom,” said Erol Önderoğlu, Turkey representative for Reporters Without Borders.

“But the government can now bypass the courts altogether, leading to an even more arbitrary situation. Turkey now again leads the ranks of the worst countries for press freedom.”

US-allied Kurds say Turks attacked them in Syria

Turkish warplanes attacked a group allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), after Turkey earlier this week launched an offensive into northern Syria against Kurds and Islamic State forces.

Turkish tanks and special forces rolled into Jarablus earlier this week, backed by US air power and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, to expel Islamic State militants from Jarablus — a strategic border town — and to stop Kurdish militias from taking the town and moving further west along the Turkish border.

Reuters reported that the Jarablus Military Council — which is allied to the US-backed, Kurdish-led SDF — said Turkish aircraft attacked a village south of Jarablus, called al-Amarna, causing civilian casualties and conducting what the council called a "a dangerous escalation that threatens the fate of the region." ...

The attack is indicative of the complicated situation in Syria, where NATO member Turkey is allied with the US against Islamic State and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the US also supports the Kurds fighting Islamic State but who also support their ethnic brethren mounting an insurgency in Turkey. The US is also allied with Syrian rebels fighting Assad and Islamic State but who have also fought against the Syrian Kurds.

Turkey in the past had allowed Islamic State militants to move back and forth across its border as part of Ankara's effort to unseat Assad, but last week's Turkish offensive represents a commitment to driving the IS militants away from the border — where several of the group's key supply and smuggling routes were located — after Islamic State mounted several mass-casualty attacks on Turkish soil.

Turkey could be overplaying its hand with Syria ground offensive as civil war reaches crucial point

The biggest change in the political and military landscape is the Turkish intervention, though its extent remains unclear. The aim may be primarily defensive, limited to controlling the zone between Jarabulus and the Kurdish enclave of Afrin 70 miles to the west through Arab and Turkoman proxies backed by the Turkish armed forces. Alternatively, Turkey could build up an anti-Assad and anti-Kurdish base area north of Aleppo making it a main player in the region. ... Broader Turkish involvement, though tempting to some in Ankara, would embroil Turkey in the lethal swamp lands of the Syrian-Iraqi war. ...

It is an iron rule of politics in the Middle East that everybody at some point overplays their hand. The Israelis did so when they invaded and tried to dominate Lebanon in 1982 and the Americans did the same when they overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 and sought to become the predominant power in Iraq. The Syrian Kurds used the military effectiveness of their 50,000 fighters (these are their numbers which may be exaggerated) and the massive destructive firepower provided by the US air force, to overrun much of north east of Syria over the last eighteen months. Buoyed up by their victory over IS in the four-and-a-half siege of Kobani, which ended in early 2015, the ruling Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey - and their formidable paramilitary forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – have repeatedly defeated Isis.

But they too may have gone a step too far, advancing beyond the point that they could rely on the support of their US and Russian allies to stop Turkey intervening. The capture of the town of Manbij from Isis on 12 August by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a grouping dominated by the YPG, led to a further move towards Jarabulus to the north and Isis-held al-Bab to the east. This finally precipitated Turkish military intervention which had been under consideration for over a year. Turkey was faced with disaster in Syria, where it had failed to depose President Bashar al-Assad and opened the door to a section of the PKK, at war with the Turkish state for 32 years, setting up its own well-armed state. With a sanctuary in northern Syria, the PKK could sustain a guerrilla war in Turkey for as long as it wanted (much as the Taliban is undefeatable in Afghanistan because of its sanctuaries in Pakistan). IS, to whose activities Turkish intelligence had once turned a blind eye when it did not provide covert assistance, was carrying out repeated terrorist bomb attacks in Turkey. ...

All factions in Syria are to a greater or lesser degree the proxies of foreign powers and cannot go on fighting without their backing. These parties, regardless of whether they are pro or anti-Assad, Shia or Sunni, Arab or Kurdish, try to manipulate their foreign allies, suspecting that they will one day betray them in order to serve their own interests. ... As Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov meet in Geneva, the warring parties in Syria wonder what agreements were reached behind their backs about Turkish intervention and other matters. Paranoid by nature but with good reason for their suspicions, they will ask if they re about to be sold out or, more probably, the sell-out has already happened.

Turkey Attacks Syrian Kurdish Villages, Killing 35 Civilians

After last week’s invasion of northern Syria and the capture of the city of Jarabulus away from ISIS, Turkish officials were quick to insist that their real target was primarily the Kurds. They underscored this today with a flurry of attacks on a pair of Kurdish villages that left at least 35 civilians killed. ...

Turkey’s official statement claimed they’d only killed 25 people total, and that all were members of the Kurdish YPG. The YPG only had very limited presences in either village, however, and indications are that they had already withdrawn some time before the attacks began.

Still, Turkey’s notorious hostility toward all things Kurdish had many of the locals taking up arms to resist the takeover of their villages, and the Turkish-backed rebels, mostly the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham force, engaged in heavy fighting with the population before ultimately occupying both villages.

Former CIA Deputy Director Publicly Advocates for Bombing Syria's Assad

Pentagon: Fighting Between Turkey, Syrian Kurds ‘Unacceptable’

Pentagon officials came into Turkey’s invasion trying to be supportive, launching a few airstrikes to support the incursion and demanding the Kurds cede some territory. Now, however, they’re just insisting the clashes are “unacceptable” and demanding that everyone “stand down immediately.”

With the US not wanting to make an enemy of either side, however, the demands are ringing pretty hollow, and no one seems to be prepared to stand down. Turkey still insists they intend to take everything west of the Euphrates away from the Kurds, and the Kurds are still preparing to defend territory the US recently helped them capture from being overrun by the Turkish military.

The Pentagon insists the focus needs to be purely on ISIS, which ironically they weren’t interested in earlier this month when the same Kurdish YPG forces started attacking the Syrian military in Hasakeh. The YPG is giving lip-service to this idea, but the reality is that as Turkey’s gains mount the YPG will have less and less border with ISIS to fight in the first place.

Mosul Fight Is Redrawing the Map of Northern Iraq

While all the same doubts about being able to take the massive city of Mosul away from a substantial ISIS defensive force are still in place, the constant push for tiny swathes of land by both the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Peshmerga has many believing that the push into the city itself is close.

Whether that’s actually the case or not, however, remains to be seen, and with the Iraqi government having recently sacked their defensive minister adds dramatically to the idea that there simply isn’t the organization on the ground to carry out a protracted siege so far from their supply lines.

A much bigger factor driving both sides to keep pushing into areas on the outskirts of Mosul is that the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan and very malleable, and Kurdish leaders make no bones about the idea that villages north of Mosul that they are taking over aren’t just being “liberated” from ISIS, they’re being effectively annexed into Kurdistan.

This virtually obliges the Iraqi military to keep pushing into the area too, unprepared or not, to try to sack some strategically important targets for themselves, just to keep some of the valuable parts of Iraq’s oil industry inside Iraq, since the reality is that anything annexed by Kurdistan may ultimately be lost to Kurdish secession as soon as the war ends.

DOJ lawyer who leaked Bush spy program is censured for ethics failure

The Justice Department lawyer who disclosed the secret and warrantless surveillance program then-President George W. Bush adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks was publicly censured Thursday by a federal appeals court for breaching legal ethics. As a Lawyer for the Justice Department's Intelligence Policy and Review unit, Thomas Tamm violated professional conduct rules for disclosing to The New York Times "confidences" and "secrets," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded. (PDF) ...

Tamm, who could have been disbarred, but now can continue practicing law as a Maryland state public defender (he resigned from the Justice Department in 2006), said he learned that "these applications derived from special intelligence obtained not pursuant to prior applications to the Court, but from an extra-judicial source referred to as 'the program.'" After digging into it, he "concluded that it was probably illegal as it was not court-supervised."

Under the warrantless surveillance program, which The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing in December 2005, the NSA was scooping up the nation's electronic communications and eavesdropping on Americans' telephone calls in bulk. Litigation surrounding the snooping brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to this day, and it was bolstered by the disclosures of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower. Congress has adopted legislation legalizing the program and immunized the nation's telecoms from being sued for participating in it. ...

The court's public censure against Tamm essentially has no legal consequences, but the proceedings could have resulted in him losing his law license to practice in the District of Columbia. The outcome was expected—in March, Tamm agreed (PDF) to the public censure, which needed approval from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Glenn Greenwald: Rousseff Impeachment Trial Marks Complete Reversal of Democracy

Naomi Klein, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Others Condemn 'Coup' in Brazil

Naomi Klein, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sarandon, Arundhati Roy, and 17 other human rights activists, intellectuals, and public figures on Wednesday sent a letter to the Brazilian government condemning the impeachment of the country's President Dilma Rousseff, and demanding that Brazil's senate "respect the October 2014 electoral process which over 100 million people took part in."

In the letter, which was published by the U.K.-based group No Coup in Brazil, the luminaries argue that "Brazil is a major regional power and has the largest economy  in Latin America. If this sustained attack on its democratic institutions is successful, the negative shock waves will reverberate throughout the region."

Rousseff's impeachment trial began on Thursday, and was suspended briefly on Friday when the proceedings devolved into a shouting match.

"It is widely expected that, within a few days, senators will vote to definitively remove [Rousseff] from office," notes Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights.

"The impeachment—labeled a coup by many Brazilians—has generated outrage and frequent protests in Brazil," Mendonça adds.

Congressman to FCC: Fix phone network flaw that allows eavesdropping

A documented weakness in Signaling System 7 has been shown to allow widespread interception of phone calls and text messages (SS7 is the public switched telephone network signaling protocol used to set up and route phone calls; it also allows for things like phone number portability). This weakness in SS7 can even undermine the security of encrypted messaging systems such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

In an April segment of 60 Minutes, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu of California allowed hackers to demonstrate how they could listen in on his calls. In light of the mass leak of congressional staffers' contact information by hackers, Congressman Lieu is now urging the Federal Communications Commission to take action quickly to fix the problem with SS7. The hackers are purportedly tied to Russian intelligence.

The vulnerability in SS7 was revealed in a presentation at the RSA security conference in March. It exploits the use of SS7 by cellular networks to handle billing and phone location data for call routing. The vulnerability is open to anyone with access to SS7 signaling. This includes not just telecommunications companies that have "roaming" relationships with a phone's primary carrier, but any state actor or hacker who has access to those companies' networks. Using SS7, an attacker could create a proxy to route calls and text messages. He could intercept them and record them without the knowledge of the people on either end of the communications. An attacker could also spoof texts and calls from a number.

French mayors refuse to lift burkini ban despite court ruling

A majority of mayors who have banned burkinis in about 30 French coastal resorts are refusing to lift the restrictions despite the country’s highest administrative court ruling that the bans are illegal, leaving the state facing a dilemma about how to react.

More than 20 mayors have defiantly kept in place decrees under which municipal police can stop and fine any women in full-body swimsuits at the beach despite the ruling from the state council that the burkini bans are a “serious and manifestly illegal violation of fundamental freedoms”.

In a test case expected to set legal precedent, the court suspended the burkini ban in one French Riviera town, Villeneuve-Loubet, which was obliged to immediately scrap its decree. But the ruling was dismissed by many other mayors.

The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who has called for calm and warned against stigmatising Muslims in France, is expected to make an announcement on the issue on Monday. The Green housing minister, Emmanuelle Cosse, said mayors who refused to take the court ruling into account were playing with fire.

McConnell Signals No Lame-Duck Vote on TPP

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that the U.S. Senate will not vote on the 12-nation, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership this year, buoying progressive hopes that the trade deal will never come to fruition.

Grassroots groups have led a concerted campaign to prevent a vote during the so-called "lame-duck" session of Congress, after the November election and before President Barack Obama leaves office in January. The White House recently vowed to wage an "all-out push" in favor of such a vote.

"We never thought we would agree with Mitch McConnell on something, but we do agree on not bringing the TPP to a vote in the lame-duck session," said Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder, on Friday. "There's widespread, bipartisan opposition to the corporate-written TPP and an unaccountable, lame-duck Congress voting on it."

TTIP Has 'De Facto Failed,' Says German Economic Minister

Germany's Vice Chancellor and Economic Minister said that the controversial Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has "de facto failed," admitting that negotiations between the U.S. and E.U. have completely stalled.

"Negotiations with the U.S. have de facto failed, because of course as Europeans we couldn't allow ourselves to submit to American demands," Sigmar Gabriel told the German news station ZDF in an interview that will air at 7pm German time Sunday, according to Der Spiegel.

"Everything has stalled," Gabriel said.

"Nobody is really admitting it," Gabriel added, according to the Independent.

Is 'Our Revolution' the Way To Build Transformative Politics?

Department of Homeland Security Has Surprise for Bernie Supporters at DNC Lawsuit Hearing

Mavi Ramierez is a Mom, a social media entrepreneur and a dedicated citizen journalist who took a day off from work to cover the first hearing on August 23 in the Federal lawsuit that has been filed by Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters against the Democratic National Committee and its former Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The lawsuit, which currently has more than 100 plaintiffs and more than a thousand in the wings with retainer agreements, is charging the DNC with fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive conduct, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, and negligence. ...

Since mainstream media has failed to report on this first court hearing, the interviews conducted by Mavi Ramierez outside the Federal courthouse last Tuesday take on added significance. Ramierez interviewed the Sanders’ supporters and attorney for plaintiffs as they emerged from the hearing. But throughout these interviews, there was a constant, annoying, and distracting honking coming from an SUV parked on the sidewalk. One gutsy interviewee, who goes by the Facebook name of Jessica Rose Grfl, strolled down to the SUV, peered inside, and tells the videographer that this is an unmanned vehicle. The honking appears to be by remote control. Ramierez and her videographer move closer to the SUV and show viewers that it is from the Federal Protective Service of the Department of Homeland Security. ( Go to -31:00 on the video.) ...

Ramierez comments on the video outside the Federal Courthouse on August 23 that the honking only started when she began to livestream her video. ...

The August 23 hearing was itself a continuing effort by the DNC to evade accountability for its conduct while stalling meaningful court action by challenging the manner in which the lawsuit was served on the DNC. See our in-depth report here.

Obamacare’s Faltering for One Simple Reason: Profit

There have been dozens if not hundreds of news articles about Aetna leaving the Affordable Health Care Act’s online marketplaces in eleven states, and whether this signals serious problems for Obamacare down the road.

But none of them have truly explained that what’s happening with Aetna is the consequence of a flaw built into Obamacare from the start: It permits insurance companies to make a profit on the basic healthcare package Americans are now legally required to purchase. ...

Why does this matter? The answer is complicated but extremely important if Obamacare is going to avoid collapsing.

Insurance companies like Aetna complain that fewer young people than anticipated are buying insurance on the exchanges. The Obama administration was aiming at over 38 percent of the exchange pool being between 18 and 35 years old, but right now that number is just 28 percent. That means insurers have to pay more in health costs for customers who are older and sicker than anticipated, making those insurers more likely to abandon the exchanges. ...

The failure of young people to sign up in expected numbers is connected to the weakness of the Obamacare mandate. ... By contrast, in other countries with private health insurance, the government response is ferocious if you don’t buy the basic package. ... It is, of course, technically feasible to set up something similar in the U.S. But it will never be politically feasible. That’s because there would, rightfully, be an intense political backlash if the government started garnishing our paychecks and sending the money to Aetna, whose CEO made $28 million last year.

FBI detects breaches against two state voter systems

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found breaches in Illinois and Arizona's voter registration databases and is urging states to increase computer security ahead of the November presidential election, according to a U.S. official familiar with the probe.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Monday that investigators were also seeking evidence of whether other states may have been targeted.

The FBI warning in an Aug. 18 flash alert from the agency's Cyber Division did not identify the intruders or the two states targeted. ...

David Kennedy, chief executive officer of information security consulting company TrustedSec, said the attacks referenced in the FBI alert appeared to be largely exploratory and not especially sophisticated.

"It could be a precursor to a larger attack," he added.

Citing a state election board official, Yahoo News said the Illinois voter registration system was shut down for 10 days in late July after hackers downloaded personal data on up to 200,000 voters.

The Arizona attack was more limited and involved introducing malicious software into the voter registration system, Yahoo News quoted a state official as saying. No data was removed in that attack, the official said.

Libertarian Gary Johnson: crazy election cycle means 'I might be next president'

The Libertarian candidate for president, Gary Johnson, said on Sunday he “might actually run the table on all this” and win the White House in November, thanks to “the polarisation of Clinton and Trump.”

Johnson, who favours the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and proposes making legal immigration easier, said his candidacy represented what a lot of Americans wanted but couldn’t find in either of the major-party nominees.

“You know how crazy this election cycle is,” he told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. “I might be the next president.”

A crucial hurdle for Johnson is to gain inclusion in the presidential debates, for which he needs to register at least 15% support in polls. Asked by Wallace if “it’s game over” if he does not make it on to the debate stage, Johnson agreed but said he was “really optimistic” that he could.

“The Presidential Debate Commission has identified five polls,” he said, referring to the surveys on which qualification with a 15% threshold will be based. “We’re at 10% flat on those five polls. And that’s an increase really of probably about 4% consensus over the last six or seven weeks. So we’re optimistic that we’re going to actually get into the debates.

“We’re spending money right now in many states. In five states right now, I’m at 16%. So I’m just really optimistic.”

Glenn Greenwald: Why Are Saudis Donating Millions to Clinton Foundation?

Why Hillary Clinton won't do a press conference

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton hasn't held a press conference in 2016—265 days and counting—and grumblings from the press have now built into a dull roar. Clinton's campaign has said these complaints are not "fair" since Clinton has participated in more than 300 one-on-one interviews with the media so far this year. ...

But there are significant differences between doing a press conference and holding a one-on-one interview: press conferences are far less predictable and candidates often have little to gain by submitting themselves to rapid-fire questions on any topic.

In interviews, by contrast, campaigns trade access to the candidate for varying degrees of control over the interview topics, logistics and even the interviewer's questions. In this setting, the power is decisively with the campaigns, which have a variety of options — from newspapers to late night shows to podcasts to cable news — to choose from. ...

In her inaugural press conference in March 2015, Clinton responded to reporters' inquiries about her private email server by claiming "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email." Defensively, she added that she was "certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material." Last month, FBI director James Comey testified to Congress that this was a lie—that "there was classified material emailed"—testimony Clinton's Republican opponents have been happy to highlight.

Then in August 2015, the former secretary of state abruptly ended a press conference after a tense exchange with a reporter about her private email server. In that short time, she managed to make headlines for a bad joke when the reporter asked if she had wiped the server clean. "What, like with a cloth or something?" she said.

These unforced errors have likely contributed to Clinton slipping back into the familiar pattern of avoiding press conferences even though it draws criticism from journalists and Republicans. Her general election opponent, Donald Trump, this week launched a daily "Hiding Hillary Watch" tracking the days since her last press conference.

Greenwald: Journalists Should Not Stop Scrutinizing Clinton Just Because Trump is Unfit for Office

Private Prison Involved in Immigrant Detention Funds Donald Trump and His Super PAC

GEO Group, the second largest private prison company in the U.S., and a major player in for-profit immigrant detention, filed a disclosure this month revealing that it provided $50,000 through its political action committee to Rebuilding America Now, the Super PAC backing the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

While Trump has not used his campaign to purchase campaign advertisements, an unusual dynamic noted by many in the campaign press, Rebuilding America Now has become his de facto paid media voice, with $2 million in recent anti-Hillary Clinton ad buys.

Trump has promised sweeping policies to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a policy platform that he routinely references at rallies across the country.

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age

Experts say human impact on Earth so profound that Holocene must give way to epoch defined by nuclear tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.

“The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009.

“If our recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.”

In Blow to Colorado Residents, Anti-Fracking Measures Fail to Make Ballot

Proponents, who faced a well-funded opposition campaign led by Big Oil, have 30 days to appeal the decision

Two measures seeking to restrict fracking in Colorado have failed to make the 2016 ballot, Secretary of State Wayne Williams said Monday.

Williams said supporters failed to collect enough "valid voter signatures" for Initiatives 75 and 78, which would have given local authorities more power to regulate fracking and implemented mandatory setbacks for oil and gas activity around schools, playgrounds, and hospitals, respectively.

As Denverite explains:

The state office looked over roughly 5,000 signatures for each of the measures, per normal procedure, and rejected about a quarter of them for being "invalid."

The state then took that rejection rate and applied it to the total number of signatures collected, essentially knocking out a quarter of the submitted signatures and putting them below the requirement.

The state identified "several potentially forged signature lines" on Initiative 78.  ...

According to the Denver Post on Monday, a statement sent by Yes for Health and Safety Over Fracking, which helped lead the ballot effort, indicated that organizers still were deciding whether to appeal. ...

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a fracking supporter, was among those opposing the initiatives. He predicted last week that the measures would not make the November ballot.

Rare blue whales spotted off New England coast in 'unheard of' event

Two blue whales have been seen off the New England coast, in a rare sighting of the largest creatures on earth.

Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conversation cofounder Dianna Schulte told WMUR-TV she was working aboard the Granite State off the coast of Rye Harbor, New Hampshire, on Friday when she spotted the whales.

The group’s executive director, Jen Kennedy, said sightings of the animals, which can be up to 100ft long, are rare in New England. Spotting two together is even rarer. ...

“We might see a blue whale every five to 10 years, so it was possible, but rare. And we’ve never seen two together in our last 20 years of whale watching and research off the New Hampshire coast.”

Zika babies will create a new challenge for America's health system

In nine months, the growing Zika outbreak in Florida will present a grave new challenge to the nation's health system — babies born to mothers infected with the virus that causes severe birth defects, many of which we have yet to discover.

There are nearly 1,400 pregnant women in the US and its territories known to have contracted Zika to date. More than 500 of those women live in the continental 48 states and 70 of them are in Florida. Experts estimate that by September we can expect eight women to get infected in their first trimester from Florida's local outbreak. ...

Most people experience mild or no symptoms after they've been infected, but during pregnancy the virus can have severe impacts on the fetus. The most well-known is microcephaly, a condition where the newborn's head is abnormally small and their brain is underdeveloped. ...

But while pictures of microcephaly have gotten the public's attention, the effects of Zika on newborns will span far beyond small head size. Zika was discovered 50 years ago but it wasn't until the outbreak in Brazil last year that it was linked to microcephaly, and researchers are only beginning to discover other developmental issues connected with the disease.

"[There are a] large number of infants who were exposed to Zika infection during pregnancy that at birth don't show microcephaly," said Don Bailey, early childhood development fellow at RTI International. "But I think we're all thinking that a substantial proportion of babies will have more subtle cognitive problems."

Also of Interest

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

The Man Who Captured Abu Zubaydah Says It’s Time to End His Ordeal and Send Him Home

Sheriff’s Raid to Find Blogger Who Criticized Him Was Unconstitutional, Court Rules

American consumers are the only reason the economy is still growing

President Obama’s “Now Watch This Drive” Moment

Overwhelming Evidence that a Guaranteed Income Will Work

Lost festival: blacked-out buses, secret locations and absolutely no phones

A Little Night Music

Johnny Young's South Side Blues Band - Stealin'

Johnny Young - Keep on Drinking

Johnny Young & Little Walter - Crawling Kingsnake

Johnny Young - Driving Wheel

Johnny Young & Big Walter Horton - Stockyard Blues & Strange Girl

Johnny Young's South Side Blues Band - Crosscut Saw, Slam Hammer

Johnny Young - Pony Blues

Johnny Young - One More Time

Johnny Young & Big Walter Horton - Ring Around My Heart & On The Road Again

Johnny Young & his Chicago Blues Band - Wild, Wild Woman

Johnny Young - I'm Having A Ball