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"The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction."

-- Jawaharlal Nehru

News and Opinion

Islamic State’s Goal: “Eliminating the Grayzone” of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West

In a statement published in its online magazine, Dabiq, this February, the militant group the Islamic State warned that “Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two choices.” Weeks earlier, a massacre had occurred at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The attack stunned French society, while bringing to the surface already latent tensions between French Muslims and their fellow citizens.

While ISIS initially endorsed the killings on purely religious grounds, calling the murdered cartoonists blasphemers, in Dabiq the group offered another, more chilling rationale for its support.

The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come. ...

What the group is seeking to accomplish ... mirrors its strategy of divide-and-conquer in Iraq. Through increasingly provocative terrorist attacks, hostage executions, and videotaped threats, the Islamic State is consciously seeking to trigger a backlash by Western governments and citizens against the Muslim minorities living in their societies. By achieving this, the group hopes to polarize both sides against each other, locking them into an escalating spiral of alienation, hatred and collective retribution. In a such a scenario, the group can later attempt to pose as the only effective protector for increasingly beleaguered Western Muslims.

Following the deliberately shocking attacks in Paris, some nativist politicians in both Europe and the United States have already responded with calls to collectively punish Muslims en masse through discriminatory migration policies, restrictions on religious freedoms, and blanket surveillance by law enforcement.

While politically popular among some, such measures, effectively holding Muslims collectively to blame for the atrocities in Paris, would be self-defeating. The Islamic State is deeply unpopular among Muslims. Like their non-Muslim compatriots, French Muslims recoiled with disgust at the recent atrocities in Paris. Indeed, several of them were killed in the attacks.

Film Shows Chilling Climate for Muslims in Post-Hebdo France

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article that was deeply alarming from the headline to the last line: “After Paris Attacks, a Darker Mood Toward Islam Emerges in France.” It describes how the relationship between France and “its Muslim community” is now “tipping toward outright distrust, even hostility” in the aftermath of last Friday’s violence. It highlights the fear experienced by French Muslims as they endure government vows of radical domestic crackdowns, a growing far-right anti-Muslim party, and waves of violently bigoted sentiments spreading on social media.

The NYT suggests this is a new phenomenon by contrasting it with the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders, which prominently included “grand public appeals for solidarity with Muslims.” But now, says the NYT, there is “a palpable fear, even anger” toward Muslims.

But over the summer, Max Blumenthal and James Kleinfeld traveled to Paris to examine the post-Hebdo climate for French Muslims. They interviewed numerous Paris residents whose voices are rarely heard in these debates — French Muslims, immigrants, French Jewish leftists — as well as other French citizens expressing the more conventional anti-Muslim views (including Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice (one of France’s largest cities) who warns of national television of a “Fifth Column” composed of French Muslims and calls the battle against it “the Third World War”).

Man in Joker Mask Vows to Kill 'One Arab a Week' Across Quebec

Montreal police are investigating a chilling video in which a man wearing a Joker mask threatens to kill "one Arab a week."

"As of next week, there will be murders all across Quebec," he says in a Quebecois-sounding accent. In the background, a baby is wailing. "We will eliminate all of them, one by one. Islam has harmed us enough." The video has since been deleted.

Referencing the Paris attack, the unidentified male claims he's recruited more than ten others to take part in the crime spree. "I will fire a bullet in the head of one Arab per week, starting next week," he says, brandishing a handgun, although it's not known if it is real or fake. "I guarantee you that I am serious." ...

The threat comes amidst a climate of increased Islamophobia in Canada. This week, a Peterborough mosque was torched, a Toronto woman was assaulted and several other cases of threats and harassment were reported. ...

A Facebook page for the Quebec branch of anti-Muslim group PEGIDA has been a forum for some exceptionally hateful comments, with one user posting a list of Montreal-area mosques and prompting people to "act." PEGIDA eventually dissociated itself from the user and the comment was deleted.

"A Disturbing Increase in Islamophobia": U.S. Mosques Threatened, Canadian Mosque Set on Fire

The UN Is Warning Countries It’s a Terrible Idea to Stop Accepting Syrian Refugees

The United Nations is warning nations that have pledged to accept Syrian refugees not to backtrack on their promises in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks.

Briefing the Security Council on Monday, Stephen O'Brien the UN's humanitarian coordinator, said that recent violence in Syria has forced tens of thousands of people to flee the country. O'Brien said that in the besieged city of Aleppo, "at least 50,000 people are confirmed to have been displaced since early October." He added that the total could in fact be twice that figure. ...

Last Friday's deadly terror attacks in Paris have accelerated calls from many leaders on the continent to staunch the flow of Syrians and other refugees and migrants. On Tuesday, the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres attempted to push back amid reports that one of the Islamic State-linked Paris attackers may have had a forged Syrian passport.

"It's not the refugee outflows that cause terrorism, it is terrorism, tyranny and war that create refugees," said Guterres, speaking at a refugee center in Presovo, Serbia, on the border with Macedonia.

"It is clear that the Daesh strategy is not only to set Europeans against migrants, but within Europe, to se citizen against citizen within communities, community against community within countries, and countries against country in the Union," he added, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

​'Offensive and hysterical’: Obama lashes Republicans over Syrian refugees

President says Congress lawmakers and state governors are doing Islamic State’s work by wanting to lock refugees out or only accept Christians

Barack Obama has hit back at Republicans who want to stop the US taking in Syrian refugees – with the president saying some of the language used in the wake of the Paris attacks only serves to strengthen the Islamic State terror group.

Obama rounded on Republicans in Congress who are preparing legislation that threatens to suspend a US refugee program for Syrians – and on state governors who have said threatened to try to block the refugees’ entry. The Obama administration has revealed details of its screening system to reassure sceptical lawmakers worried about terrorist infiltration.

The House speaker, Paul Ryan, escalated the political row that has been growing since the Paris attacks by announcing on Tuesday that he had formed a taskforce to examine ways of forcing Barack Obama’s hand on the issue.

Obama, speaking in the Philippines where is attending a regional summit, said: “We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.

“When individuals say we should have a religious test and that only Christians, proven Christians should be admitted, that’s offensive.

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for Isil [Isis] than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate.

EU states miss deadline to appoint officers for refugee relocations

Relocation of refugees, projected to take two years, would take 166 years to implement at current rate

EU nations have once again missed their own deadline for appointing liaison officers required to coordinate refugee relocations with Greece and Italy, according to information provided by the European commission this week.

European council conclusions from 9 November noted that member states committed to appointing the liaison officers to Italy and Greece “preferably by 16 November”.

But the figures released the day after the self-imposed deadline show that 11 member states still have not done so – and six of these – Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia and Slovakia – have not provided liaison officers at all. ...

The pace of relocation of refugees from the most affected countries – such as Greece and Italy – remains slow. Only 128 refugees from Italy and 30 from Greece have been relocated so far.

EU member states agreed in September to relocate 160,000 people in “clear need of international protection” through a scheme set up to relocate Syrian, Eritrean and Iraqi refugees from the most affected EU states to others.

There is No Military Solution: Could ISIL Be Strengthened by U.S., French, Russian Bombing?

Airstrikes on Raqqa Hitting Empty Areas, Accomplishing Little

US, Russian, and French warplanes are pounding the ISIS capital city of Raqqa over the past several days, a dramatic escalation in numbers, which have raised questions about why, if these nations had so many targets available, they’re only getting around to attacking them now.

The reality so far seems to be that these aren’t targets at all, with witnesses on the ground saying the strikes are hitting empty areas or abandoned buildings, doing virtually nothing to ISIS forces, and seemingly designed primarily to avoid civilian deaths.

Abdel Bari Atwan: Inside How the U.S. & Saudi Arabia Aided Growth of the Islamic State

Hysterical Corporate Media Fueling War Fervor, Xenophobia in 24/7 Cycle

Just as they did in the wake of 9/11, corporate media outlets—led by cable news networks—are spreading hysteria, fueling anti-immigrant sentiment, and beating the drum for war by providing "context-free coverage of terror," as one analyst put it this week.

The 24/7 coverage of Friday's attacks in Paris and their aftermath, marked by speculation and sensationalism, is only helping the media conglomerates.

According to Deadline: "Fox News Channel and CNN both logged their biggest primetime crowds of the year, excluding presidential debates, when viewers tuned in to learn about the attacks in Paris on Friday that killed at least 129 people and injured hundreds more. The two cable news networks traded hourly wins in the news demo that night."

Political analyst and media critic Heather Digby Parton, writing at Salon on Tuesday, agreed that the media has been complicit in pushing problematic foreign policy.

"It was well documented that during the run-up to the Iraq war there was tremendous pressure coming from the executive suite of the news networks to cheerlead for the administration," she argued. "Those who resisted were marginalized and fired if they refused to go along. It's unlikely that the word went forth on Saturday that reporters should get on a war footing and issue demands that the president use 'the greatest military in the world' to 'take out these bastards.' But they don’t have to say it explicitly do they? Everyone knows the drill."

Islamic State Sustains Itself Through a War Economy

Military leaders dubious of bigger war against ISIL

U.S. military leaders are skeptical about calls for escalating the war against the Islamic State, saying they have watched too many of their troops’ hard-won victories slip away amid civilian inattention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even as U.S. and allied aircraft step up their bombing campaign against the terrorist group after Friday’s attacks in Paris, senior military officials privately express worries that political leaders in Washington and foreign capitals still haven’t absorbed the lessons of America’s last two big wars. In both cases, the military defeated the Taliban, Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Iraqi insurgents, but civilian leadership failed to do the political, economic and diplomatic heavy-lifting needed to sustain those wins.

The same thing could happen again in the fight against ISIL, the military officials say, unless far more is done to train and arm local allies, beef up the State Department's capacity to assist foreign allies to improve governing structures, counter the terrorist group's message in mosques and in social media and employ much more international leverage to end the Syrian civil war. Otherwise, the growing pressure to strike back hard against ISIL will mean that guns and bombs once again get far more attention and resources than the other levers of power that would ultimately prove more consequential.

The military officials say these concerns are behind President Barack Obama’s refusal to launch a more expansive military operation that includes American ground troops against the terrorists.

“We can kill a lot of them, maybe all of them,” said one senior military official, who like most of the others who spoke to POLITICO was not authorized to speak publicly about the year-old U.S.-led campaign. “We can probably convince some to quit and embrace a more moderate view. But if that is all we do, we will be back here again.”

Syria could be weeks away from big transition, says John Kerry

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has given an upbeat assessment of prospects for diplomatic efforts to end the war in Syria and fight Islamic State, saying a ceasefire between Bashar al-Assad and the rebels fighting to overthrow him could now be just weeks away.

Kerry told reporters in Paris that Saturday’s agreement in Vienna for a ceasefire and talks between the Syrian government and opposition would boost the international campaign against Isis, galvanised by the atrocities in the French capital.

“That’s a gigantic step,” Kerry said. “If we can get that done, that opens up the aperture for a whole bunch of things. We’re weeks away conceivably from the possibility of a big transition for Syria, and I don’t think enough people necessarily notice that. But that’s the reality.”

The US is seeking to build on the momentum of the Vienna agreement, in which 19 countries – including bitter rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia – signed a UN statement supporting a 1 January deadline for the start of talks between Assad and the rebels, with the aim of agreeing a ceasefire by 14 May 2016 and holding free elections a year later.

French intel predicted Paris attack, but got the timing wrong

French intelligence services believed with near certainty that the Islamic State was planning a major attack in Paris but got the timing wrong. They thought the group would aim for the UN Climate Change Conference starting in Paris on November 30, when dozens of world leaders will be on hand.

The agencies also thought ISIS might strike immediately after the summit, when the security forces would be exhausted. The attack that occurred 17 days before the conference caught everyone off guard.

Former senior defense and law enforcement officials say that despite the many warnings, a system malfunction let the perpetrators — nearly all of whom were known to the French and Belgian authorities — prepare, collect weapons and evade surveillance.

“We’re not surprised in retrospect. Timing the attack to coincide with a soccer game attended by President [Francois] Hollande was perfect from their perspective,” says Alain Bauer, a criminology professor at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, a former national security adviser to French prime ministers and a close associate of the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

“One should remember that this attack came after six months in which security forces were on high alert with no incidents occurring,” notes Bauer, adding that fatigue was only natural.

“There isn’t really a sense of war here. We’re waging a war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but it’s more like a video game when a plane drops a bomb from 30,000 feet. No one really thought the war would arrive on our doorstep.”

U.S. Mass Surveillance Has No Record of Thwarting Large Terror Attacks

Despite the intelligence community’s attempts to blame NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the tragic attacks in Paris on Friday, the NSA’s mass surveillance programs do not have a track record — before or after Snowden — of identifying or thwarting actual large-scale terrorist plots. ...

The recent history of terror arrests linked to ISIS is documented in an internal unclassified Department of Homeland Security document provided to The Intercept via SecureDrop. It shows that terror arrests between January 2014 and September 2015 linked to ISIS were largely of people trying to travel abroad, provide material support, or plan attacks that were essentially imaginary.

The document, dated before the Paris attacks, includes a list and map of 64 U.S. persons arrested on terror-related charges over the course of nine months who were “assessed to be inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIS.

The document assigns six categories to types of arrests made in the given time period: a foiled attack, “aspirational” planning, “advanced attack plotting,” failed travel, travel, or material support.

The only foiled attack involved the arrests of Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, who traveled from Arizona to Garland, Texas, bearing assault weapons and body armor, intending to shoot up an art contest involving the drawing of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Both attackers were shot by local police officers.

The Surveillance-Industrial Complex

Israel Approves Another 454 Settlement Homes in East Jerusalem

A hugely controversial set of settlement expansion plans, mostly in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, was announced today by the Israeli government, reviving a plan which was frozen back in 2012 under heavy international pressure.

The Ramat Shlomo plan was for 436 settlement housing units as part of a 660 unit plan back in 2010. This segment was frozen in 2012 amid harsh criticism from US and EU officials. Today’s announcement unfreezes these, and adds 18 m,ore units in Ramot.

Though the prime minister’s office didn’t offer any details on the reasoning, it is widely believed today’s move is “retaliation” for the European Union’s decision to label Israeli products differently if they come out of settlements in the occupied territories.

Spain issues arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu

A Spanish judge has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other former and current government officials for a deadly fight at sea in 2010. As long as the warrant is in effect, if Netanyahu and those officials set foot in the western European country, they could be detained and questioned.

The 2010 incident was a flotilla raid, in which a group of pro-Palestinian human rights activists attempted to disrupt an Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israeli naval forces were able to stop the flotilla, but when they boarded one of the activists’ ships, the Mavi Marmara, they were attacked by knives and clubs.

In an ensuing gun battle, nine activists died. Most of the deceased were part of a Turkish NGO, the IHH, that has alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Loretta Lynch: no data to support 'Ferguson effect' policing theory

US attorney general Loretta Lynch said on Tuesday there was “no data” to support the idea that law enforcement officers are policing less aggressively because of increased scrutiny of their tactics following a series of highly publicized killings mostly of black men.

Lynch spoke during a House judiciary committee hearing on Tuesday and discussed the controversial theory, termed the “Ferguson effect”, in the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the Missouri city last year.

“While certainly there may be anecdotal evidence there, as all have noted, there’s no data to support it,” she said during an oversight hearing on the Justice Department held by the committee. ...

FBI director James Comey has cited anecdotes to support the theory, and has been joined by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Rosenberg, head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, in blaming an increased focus on police tactics for making officers less aggressive.

San Francisco police beating captured on video prompts call for charges

Security footage showing the brutal beating of a suspect by two police officers in San Francisco’s Mission District has sparked anger and comparisons to the 1991 assault of Rodney King in Los Angeles.

“The brutal attack on a defenseless man in my city is disgusting,” Rachel Gaines, 34, a server who works in the Mission, said on Tuesday. “I hope that justice will happen.”

The beating of the suspect, 26-year-old Stanislav Petrov, by two Alameda County officers is under investigation, and two public defenders have called for criminal charges. ...

The video of the beating shows one deputy knocking the man to the ground near Clinton Park and Stevenson Street early on Thursday. The deputy then punches Petrov, who is lying on the ground. A second deputy then uses his baton to hit the man on the head. Petrov is heard screaming for help as both officers use their batons to hit him. Petrov is still in the hospital, according to Jeff Adachi, the San Francisco public defender.

Adachi has called for criminal charges to be brought against the officers involved. His office released the video to the public on Friday, which sparked public frustration amid a national debate over police officers’ use of force.

“The video is shocking in its brutality,” Adachi said. “The relentless baton strikes on a prone, injured man are reminiscent of the Rodney King beating. As a society, we must stand up for due process and reject the notion that police are entitled to beat a person bloody if he runs or makes them angry.”

Minneapolis man shot in altercation with police dies in hospital

Jamar Clark, the 24-year-old shot on Sunday morning following an altercation with police, died in hospital from his injuries on Monday night, police have confirmed.

Clark was shot in the head by police early on Sunday morning following an altercation with officers and paramedics. Police said at first that Clark was shot following a struggle, but eyewitnesses have said he was already in handcuffs when he was shot. Family members have described Clark’s shooting as “execution-style”.

In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions, who are handling the investigation, said that while several videos had been obtained from housing authority cameras and from the ambulance rig that was at the scene at the time Clark was shot, they would not be released to the public at this time.

He also said that the bureau was investigating whether Clark was handcuffed at the time he was shot – walking back previous statements from law enforcement which had strongly suggested that he was not – and confirmed that Clark was not armed.

“There were handcuffs at the scene,” he said. “We’re still examining whether they were on Mr Clark at the time of the shooting.”

‘There is zero control’: report on Freddie Gray protests feeds crisis of confidence in police

The findings of an independent report on the Baltimore police department’s flawed handling of the protests following Freddie Gray’s death in April came as little surprise to Michael Wood, a former BPD officer and vocal critic of the department.

“Everybody thinks there is some plan but there is virtually zero control that goes on in the agency,” Wood said.

The dysfunctional department that Wood has described is not far from the picture painted by the Police Executive Research Forum (Perf) in its independent review of the police force’s performance. It found inadequate planning, poor training and unclear policies among a long list of “major shortcomings” in the department’s response. ...

Protesters say that the current police commissioner, Kevin Davis, has taken a harder line with protesters, a stance that will be tested at the end of the month when the trials of the officers involved in the death of Gray begin – and the city’s murder rate continues to rise past 300, a number it has not seen since 1999. ...

Davis was second in command at the time of the unrest and his appointment resulted in the arrests of numerous protesters, including high school students, who took over city hall during his confirmation last month.

One Chart That Should Make Americans Wake Up

Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement and more recent cross-country stumping by Senator Bernie Sanders, millions of Americans have awakened to the frightening reality that corrupted power in America is now fully engaged in running an institutionalized wealth transfer system cleverly masquerading as an economic model.

Above is the Capacity Utilization rate for total industry in the United States since the 1960s. This is a measure of how much of our productive capacity at plants and mines and utilities are actually being used in response to demand. Lower rates of utilization mean there is too much slack in the economy with not enough people able to afford to buy the goods or output that could be produced at 100 percent utilization. Low and declining levels of capacity utilization are completely consistent with high levels of income inequality. This also invariably leads to plant closings, layoffs, and, thus, a continuing vicious cycle of less disposable income, more slack, more layoffs, more plant closings.

If America was truly on the right track, would our plants and utilities have been operating at 85 percent of capacity in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and now only operating at 77.5 percent as of this October – despite trillions of dollars spent on unprecedented fiscal stimulus, Fed loans to Wall Street and three rounds of quantitative easing since the crash?

Gender pay gap closing partially because of men's declining wages, report says

Almost half of the progress made toward closing the gender pay gap since 1979 is not due to women’s gains in the workplace, but to men’s wages falling and the sharp rise in overall inequality, according to a grave new report released Wednesday.

Women in the US have made lopsided advances in education, and they have entered the workforce in growing numbers and at higher-paying positions than before. But the researchers found that those strides only accounted for 60% of the reason why women’s compensation is approaching parity with men’s. The other 40% is the work of an illusion: as men’s wages are disproportionately hurt by globalization and the decline of unions, women have only appeared to catch up.

The analysis, from the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, is the first effort to quantify the impact that 25 years of wage stagnation and growing inequality have had on American women’s wages as they caught up with men’s. ...

All workers’ pay, regardless of gender, has failed to rise with a longterm increase in worker productivity. But as a share of what wages would be, if they had kept pace with the growth of the economy, women earn even less than men. If all earnings had grown in concert with economic output, the median worker today would take home $26.04 an hour. In reality, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, that the median hourly wage for men is $18.35. For women, it’s $15.21.

Standing for Refugees, Sanders Urges Against Post-Paris 'Demagoguery'

As media pundits, Republican leaders, and more than half of U.S. states moved to slam the door on war refugees from Syria in the wake of attacks in Paris, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a speech in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday night saying the nation must "not succumb to Islamophobia" or give into such "demagoguery and fear-mongering."

Speaking to a crowd of 7,000 at Cleveland State University, Sanders, who is running for president in 2016 as a Democrat, said that in "these difficult times.... We will not turn our backs on the refugees." ...

[Sanders told] an enthusiastic audience, "What terrorism is about is trying to instill terror and fear into the hearts of people. And we will not let that happen. We will not be terrorized or live in fear."

He also reiterated his support for the construction of an international coalition, including Middle Eastern nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia and supported by the U.S. and other Western forces, to lead the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).

"I say to my Republican colleagues, yeah, we have got to be tough—but not stupid," Sanders said.

This is why they hate us: The real American history

The soi-disant Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has a long and iniquitous history of overthrowing democratically elected leftist governments and propping up right-wing dictators in their place.

U.S. politicians rarely acknowledge this odious past — let alone acknowledge that such policies continue well into the present day.

In the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely admit exists.

“I think we have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I vote against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that regime change — whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary.”

“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.

“Regime change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in Washington, yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S. foreign policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.

'Another Arctic Victory' as Norwegian Oil Giant Abandons Offshore Leases

Following Shell's departure, Statoil will stop looking for oil in Alaska's Chukchi Sea

BAM! Another #SavetheArctic victory! #StatOil quits the #Arctic. Help protect it: https://t.co/oCRc4yggvR #climate pic.twitter.com/ZA5jhxJx40

— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) November 17, 2015

Norweigan oil company Statoil on Tuesday announced that, following in the footsteps of Royal Dutch Shell, it too would end its Arctic oil exploration program.

Although their terms do not expire until 2020, the oil giant is abandoning 16 Statoil-operated leases, and its stake in 50 leases operated by ConocoPhillips, all in Alaska's Chukchi Sea. No wells were ever drilled.

US Quest for Oil Exacerbates Global Depletion of Freshwater

In an ironic footnote to a devastating global cycle—wherein the burning of fossil fuels drives climate change, resulting in extreme new weather patterns that impact millions worldwide—a new study released Monday finds that United States' oil demand is depleting freshwater supplies in water-scarce regions across Asia and the Middle East.

At the intersection of energy policy and international trade, this growing crisis heretofore has evaded scrutiny but the report (pdf), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), examines how the world's richest nations' reliance on fossil fuels is exacerbating freshwater depletion in developing nations. ...

Led by Dr. Robert Alan Holland, an ecologist and conservation scientist at the UK's University of Southampton, the researchers used joint models of trade and environmental factors to examine pressure on freshwater resources associated with three energy sectors (oil or petroleum, gas, and electricity) across the global economy. The study considers the water usage "along the complete supply chain from extraction and conversion of raw material through to generation of power."

While consumption associated with gas and electricity production is largely confined within the country where the demand originates, the impact of oil production varies widely. "For example, although the United States and China have similar demand associated with the petroleum sector, international freshwater consumption is three times higher for the former than the latter," reads the study.

For the U.S., the oil sector is having a significant impact on international freshwater supplies, particularly in the Middle East, which has become increasingly subject to punishing droughts and spiking heatwaves. According to the study, 29 percent of the sector's freshwater supplies come from western Asia, 13 percent from southern Asia, 7 percent from eastern Asia, and 6 percent from northern Africa.

El Niño rains for dry California but scientists fear for coral reefs

The northern stretch of the US, from Maine to Oregon, is set to experience above-average temperatures this winter, Noaa said, but El Niño will bring relief for California’s drought, which has lasted for four years. The area around Los Angeles will have around a 60% chance of above-normal precipitation. ...

The prospect of a record El Niño is a grim one for the world’s coral reefs, however, after scientists confirmed that the third-ever worldwide bleaching event is under way. High underwater temperatures over the past year have caused corals to whiten and die off in oceans around the world, with 38% of the planet’s coral expected to be affected.

Prolonged high temperatures cause corals to reject their plant partners, crucial for their growth, causing them to turn snow white. If the warm temperatures do not abate, the coral will die.

With the El Niño event driving ocean temperatures further upwards, the coral die-off in 2016 could be particularly severe. This presents a perilous situation for the vast number of fish and crustaceans that rely upon coral reefs for food and shelter – despite corals covering just 0.1% of the ocean’s floor they nurture 25% of the world’s marine species.

Also of Interest

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

France Is at War… With Germany

Highly recommended:

It’s Paul Krugman vs. Noam Chomsky: This is the history we need to understand Paris, ISIS

Hillary Clinton's Libya

Paris: No Grave Too Warm for the Political Class to Dance On

ISIS Wants to Destroy the 'Grey Zone'. Here's How We Defend It

Can We Afford the Future?

Most Hispanics vote Democrat, so why are so many Hispanic politicians Republican?

My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up.

Obama Administration Goes Easy on For-Profit-College Company With Goldman Sachs Ties

A Little Night Music

The Falcons - Sent Up

The Falcons - Good Good Feeling

The Falcons - Just For Your Love

The Falcons - Darling

The Falcons - You're So Fine

The Falcons - The Teacher

The Falcons - Good Good Feeling

The Falcons - I Can't Help It

The Falcons - Swim

The Falcons - Oh Baby

The Falcons - I'll Never Find Another Girl Like You

The Falcons - ( I'm A Fool ) I Must Love You

The Falcons - Lah-Tee-Lah-Tah

The Falcons - Country Shack

The Falcons - You're Mine

The Falcons - Let's Kiss & Make Up

The Falcons - Pow You're In Love