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This evening's music features Memphis blues singer Will Shade leader of the Memphis Jug Band. Enjoy!

"Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors."

-- Dennis Kucinich

News and Opinion

Police ordered to arrest Dakota pipeline protesters and destroy bridge they built

The US army corps of engineers ordered North Dakota police to arrest Native American protesters and destroy a bridge that activists built over a creek at the center of the increasingly tense Dakota Access pipeline demonstrations.

The Morton County sheriff’s office announced on Wednesday that police were in a “standoff with protesters on the banks of the Cantapeta Creek” while activists said they were engaged in a peaceful water ceremony.

Police claimed that the protesters – who have for months been attempting to block construction of the $3.8bn oil pipeline that they say threatens sacred lands and their water supply – were trying to gain access to private property known as the Cannonball ranch. The group had built a “handmade wooden pedestrian bridge” across the creek, the sheriff said in a statement.

“Officers responded and ordered protesters to remove themselves from the bridge and notified them that if they cross the bridge they would be arrested.”

Police, who deployed pepper spray and teargas, said the activists were “violating numerous federal and state laws”, including the Clean Water Act and the Safe River and Harbors Act.

An army corps spokesman said the agency had given police permission to enter the federal property “to prevent further campsites from developing and threatening public safety”.

Standing Rock Protectors BRUTALIZED By Cops In Standoff

Ladonna Bravebull Allard: Why do we punish Dakota pipeline protesters but exonerate the Bundys?

Last week we saw how justice works in this country: armed ranchers are treated with compassion and their charges are dropped, while indigenous people are physically attacked and charged with trespassing on our own ancestral lands.

While we stand in prayer, we have assault rifles aimed at us, we are attacked by dogs, pushed from our sacred sites with pepper spray, shot with rubber bullets and bean bag rounds and Tasers, beaten with sticks, handcuffed and thrown in dog kennels. Our horses have been shot and killed. Our elders have been dragged out of ceremonies, our sacred bundles seized, our sacred eagle staff pulled from our hands. My daughter was stripped naked in jail and left overnight for a traffic violation. An arsonist set the hills across from our camp afire, and for hours Morton County did nothing but prevent tribal authorities from responding.

Both the Bundys and the water protectors at Standing Rock stand for our convictions on what is claimed to be federal land. But that is where reasonable comparisons end. The land they claimed to take back was cleared of our relatives and the buffalo nation so that white ranchers like the Bundys could graze their cattle there.

The Bundys assert a property right which was only made possible through the genocide of indigenous peoples and the continued occupation of our lands by the same government they claim to fight. Their white supremacist ideology is the foundation of the settler state, and their ranching would not be possible without it. Their racist fear blinds them to the fact that they are actually supporting their enemy and fighting themselves.

The Bundy militia were fighting for their right to make money, while we are fighting our children’s rights to clean drinking water. ...

Right in the path of the Dakota Access pipeline are Sundance grounds and village sites, held sacred not only by the Sioux Nations, but also the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne. The day after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed papers identifying the burial places of our ancestors, Dakota Access intentionally destroyed them to avoid federal regulation. ...

Erasing our footprint from the world erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end; it is that simple. If we allow an oil company to dig through and destroy our histories, our ancestors, our hearts and souls as a people, is that not genocide?

A #NoDAPL Map

Thousands of Native Americans and their allies have gathered on unceded Sioux land delimited by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie to try and stand in the way of the “black snake” that could poison the Standing Rock Reservation’s water supply. Many have noted that the pipeline corridor was repositioned from its original route north of Bismarck after white citizens spoke up against the threat a spill would pose to their drinking water ― a threat duly recognized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Yet the Corps failed its federal mandate for meaningful consultation with the Standing Rock Tribe before signing off on a route that moved the pipeline to their doorstep.

"I Do Not Play for Oil Interests": Jackson Browne to His Biggest Fan, the Billionaire Behind #DAPL

Native Protesters Have The Last Laugh, As North Dakota Cops Admit They Can’t Afford To Keep Up Police Presence For Much Longer

A legislative committee will be reviewing an emergency request to borrow MORE money from the Bank of North Dakota to cover the cost of law enforcement related to protecting of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, reports Kota Territory News.

The expenditure hemorrhage has grown since using the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), which was supposed to be for natural disasters, but is instead being used to protect the pipeline that is planned to go through 1851 treaty land. ...

North Dakota officials have also requested federal officials to reimburse the state for the additional law enforcement costs. ...

How much taxpayer money will be wasted defending an illegal pipeline that is scheduled to be put through stolen land?

Iraq ‘ready for war’ with Turkey over who should control Mosul after Isis

Iraq and Turkey are threatening to go to war with each other over who should hold power in Mosul and the surrounding region after the defeat of Isis. Turkish tanks and artillery have deployed along the border and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said that while Iraq “did not want war with Turkey” it is ready to fight one if necessary.

The confrontation is sharpening as the Iraqi Army enters eastern Mosul and Shia militia known as the Hashd al-Shaabi advance towards the town of Tal Afar, threatening to cut Isis’s last escape route from Mosul to Syria. Turkey sees itself as the protector of the Sunni Arabs of Mosul and northern Iraq, a community left vulnerable by the likely defeat of Isis by Shia and Kurdish forces backed by US-led airpower. ...

The Iraqi government reacted angrily to the possibility of Turkish intervention. “The invasion of Iraq will lead to Turkey being dismantled,” said Mr Abadi at a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday. “We do not want war with Turkey, and we do not want a confrontation with Turkey, but if a confrontation happens, we are ready for it.” He added that Iraq would consider Turkey as an enemy and would deal with it as an enemy.

Iraqi leaders in Baghdad have long privately blamed Turkey for aiding or tolerating al-Qaeda-type movements like Isis which operated in Iraq, but the ill-will is now becoming more public on both sides. On 11 October President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a furious tirade against Mr Abadi, saying: “He insults me. You are not on the same level as me! You are not my equal! Scream all you want from Iraq! It will not change anything! We will do what we want to do.” On 23 October, Mr Erdogan further raised the stakes by asserting Mosul has historically belonged to Turkey and it should therefore play a role in determining its future.

Iraq: IS group leader al-Bagdadi confident over Mosul victory urges militants to "keep up the fight"

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urges his supporters to keep waging war

In his first message in almost a year, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has urged his followers to hold their ground rather than “retreating in disgrace” and to turn the blood of opponents into rivers. While he avoids directly addressing the current battle for control of Mosul, the IS leader urges fighters around the world to “turn the unbelievers’ night into a day, demolish their homelands, and turn their blood into rivers.”

The 34 minute audio recording was released on Thursday morning by IS media wing Furqan, and is entitled “This Is What Allah and His Messenger Promised Us”. It is the first statement by al-Baghdadi since December 26, 2015.

Multiple experts are convinced that this is the voice of al-Baghdadi, helping dispel any rumors about his supposed death. The IS leader’s location is still unclear, but a senior Kurdish official told the Independent on Wednesday that al-Baghdadi is likely still holed up inside Mosul.

The recording was made in the last 10 days according to IS expert Hussan Hussan, as al-Baghdadi references comments by former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki which were made on October 23rd.

Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘hiding in Mosul’ as Iraqi forces reach city

The Iraqi Army has entered Mosul for the first time in over two years at the start of a battle which is likely to end in a decisive defeat for Isis. The significance of the fight for Mosul will be all the greater for Isis because its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is believed to be still inside the city, a senior Kurdish official has told The Independent.

Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, said in an exclusive interview that his government had information from multiple sources that “Baghdadi is there and, if he is killed, it will mean the collapse of the whole [Isis] system.” Isis would have to choose a new caliph in the middle of a battle, but no successor would have the authority and prestige of Baghdadi, the leader who surprised the world by establishing the caliphate after capturing Mosul in June 2014.

Baghdadi has kept himself concealed for the last eight or nine months according to Mr Hussein, who added that the caliph had become very dependent on Isis commanders from Mosul and Tal Afar, a city just to the west of Mosul. Other senior and better known figures in Isis, particularly those from Syria and other countries, have been killed since their initial triumphs in the summer of 2014 when they took over much of northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

The presence of Baghdadi in Mosul may complicate and prolong the battle for Mosul as his surviving adherents fight to the death to defend him. Mr Hussein said that “it is obvious that they will lose, but not how long this will take to happen.” He said that Kurdish Peshmerga forces had been impressed by the extraordinary number of tunnels that Isis had dug in order to provide hiding places in the villages around Mosul.

Defense Secretary: US Talking to Turkey About Future Role in Raqqa

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today confirmed that negotiations with Turkey are ongoing related to the upcoming invasion of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital city of ISIS. Carter suggested Turkey’s involvement would only happen “further down the road.”

The US announced that it intends to launch an invasion of Raqqa very soon, will conduct the operation concurrent with the ongoing invasion of Mosul in Iraq, and that Kurdish YPG forces will be providing the vast majority of the forces for this offensive.

That’s irked Turkey, particularly the last part, as Turkish officials repeatedly warned the US against allowing Kurds anywhere near Raqqa and have suggested their own involvement was contingent on there being no Kurds involved.

The Lockheed F-35 Needs Another Half Billion Dollars

The Pentagon will need as much as $530 million extra to finish the development phase for Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35, the most expensive U.S. weapons system ever, defense officials said.

The F-35 program office made the request for more money to complete development, which is supposed to be in its last stretch after 15 years, during a closed-door review last month by the Defense Acquisition Board, according to the officials.

The Defense Department and the military services that are counting on the three versions of the F-35 are assessing how to pay for a request that would go into the department’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal. Approving the added funds would probably be the first F-35 decision to reach the desk of the next defense secretary.

The call for more money comes as the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester has issued a fresh warning that the aircraft, projected to cost $379 billion for a fleet of 2,443 U.S. planes, is far from showing it has full combat capability.

The fatal expense of American imperialism

The single most important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, “guns versus butter.” The United States is getting this choice profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overreach.” If our next president remains trapped in expensive Middle East wars, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems. ...

The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. ... The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of “successful” US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. ...

At the start of the Cold War, in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz dreams of US dominance were taking shape, the United States accounted for around 22 percent of world production. By now, according to IMF estimates, the US share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States, at around 18 percent. By 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund, the United States will produce roughly 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy. ...

In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast over-investment in the military. Today the United States has similarly over-invested in the military, and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. It’s time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.

Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors.

Washington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people.

As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket. ...

The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria.

The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments, notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow. Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, which has received funding from Saudi Arabia, the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy.

As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress, admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style.

This is the sort of moron that gets appointed to run NATO:

Former NATO Chief: We Need US as ‘World’s Policeman’

In a new interview with Britain’s Sky News, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen brought out the old narrative of America as the “world’s policeman,” but with a lot more upbeat of an attitude about it than one would generally see.

Rasmussen criticized President Obama for not being hawkish enough, saying his successor needs to be much more interventionist, and declaring “we need America as the world’s policeman,” adding that the US needs to “restore international law and order” through wars.

Rasmussen, who was always a relative hawk in the post but seems to have taken it to an entirely new level, set out a series of things the US needs to fix militarily, including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, China, and North Korea. This of course closely mirrors recent Pentagon talk of wars in the decades to come.

US Pledges $30 Million to Rebuild Ukraine’s Navy

The host of one of Russia’s main fleets until the secession of Crimea, calling Ukraine’s own navy a mess would be an understatement. Built around aging Soviet hand-me-downs, the ships they did have largely defected along with Crimea.

Indeed, while they have some small attack boats and the like, it would be fair to classify Ukraine’s entire “navy” as one ship, the Hetman Sahaydachnyy, their flagship, which is in the process of being repaired and refitted. Even this ship is just a frigate, but apart from coastal patrol boats and tug boats, it is what’s left.

Ukrainian Navy Commander Vice Admiral Ihor Voronchenko is playing up the repairs and upgrades to their ship as the beginning of a major increase in capacity which will allow them to “counter Russia” in the Black Sea. The US is bankrolling part of this effort with $30 million in aid.

Turkey Abandons the European Integration Project in Favor of Extreme Power Consolidation

The UK is still leaving the EU, it’s just going to take a lot longer

Three senior judges at London’s High Court have ruled that British Prime Minister Theresa May will need to seek approval from parliament before beginning the UK exit from the European Union — a decision that will delay Brexit significantly but likely won’t stop it from happening. ...

While the ruling is being seen as a victory for those who voted to remain in the EU, the reality is that Brexit is still going to happen, but now it’s going to take a lot longer. The government has already said it will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, with a court date in early December likely. If the Supreme Court is unable to reach a verdict on the matter, it will have to transfer it to the European Court of Justice. ...

The Prime Minister  had been hoping to trigger Article 50 by March of next year — or even earlier — but could now face a long drawn out debate over each detail as the UK negotiates its exit from the EU.

Ai Weiwei to west: tackle China on human rights whatever the cost

Western governments should challenge China on human rights and stand up for their principles, dissident artist Ai Weiwei has said – lamenting the repression faced by Chinese activists but declaring that Beijing’s “business partners” in the rest of the world should not fear making it worse.

One of the world’s most famous living artists, Ai has long run foul of Chinese authorities, culminating in 81 days of detention in 2011 amid a wider crackdown on political dissent. He was subsequently banned from travelling overseas for more than four years and his passport was confiscated.

“It doesn’t matter it will hurt me or not, you have to do what you think is right,” Ai said during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “You have to believe they have to listen. You know, they have to care about their business partner … or they have to respect.”

He encouraged western governments to maintain pressure on China, even with the potential that it may lead to harsh treatment for activists. In recent years more and more foreign politicians have been willing to forgo discussions of human rights issues in order to forge closer economic ties with Beijing. ...

Ai’s more recent work has turned away from critiques of the Chinese government and focused instead on Syrian refugees and a series of Lego portraits of celebrated human rights crusaders from around the world. ...

He has compared the conditions he experienced to those faced by refugees in Europe, saying that although he experienced extreme and violent treatment in China, he “could never have imagined conditions like this”.

Protesters clashed with police as former Klansman David Duke debated his fellow Senate candidates

David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was invited to New Orleans’ historically black Dillard University Wednesday to debate five other candidates for the U.S. Senate.

Students at the school, however, were not invited. ...

And while the 66-year-old Duke, a former Louisiana State Representative, was not the focus of the debate, his presence couldn’t be ignored. Just two minutes in, fellow candidate Caroline Fayard, a Democrat and lawyer, called him a “bad guy” during her opening statements, and expressed a desire to “cut off the head of his hatred once and for all.”

Duke did not attempt to normalize his views in the presence of the other more mainstream candidates, three of whom were Republicans and two of whom were Democrats. Instead, he described himself as a “white supremacist” and spoke openly about his belief that “white human rights” are under attack. ...

As the hour-long debate lurched on, protests outside the auditorium escalated and turned violent, with campus police using pepper spray on demonstrators.

Protester gets taser aimed at him by Dillard University Police as he tries to stop U.S. Senate debate at Dillard University @theadvocateno pic.twitter.com/QWOhNLiLpC

— Matthew Hinton (@MattHintonPhoto) November 3, 2016

Black church in Mississippi torched and spray-painted with “Vote Trump”

A historically black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was burned and spray-painted with the words “Vote Trump” late Tuesday evening.

Firefighters and police officers responded to an emergency call at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Tuesday night around 9 p.m. to find the century-old church “heavily engulfed” in flames, Greenville Mayor Errick D. Simmons said at a press conference Wednesday. There were no reported injuries and no one was inside the church when the incident occurred.

There was no surveillance video and police have not named any suspects yet, but local authorities said they are investigating whether it was a hate crime.

Taking a Page from Joe McCarthy

One trick of the original McCarthyism from the Old Cold War was to take some innocuous or accurate comment from a leader in Moscow — saying something like “poverty is a cruel side of capitalism” or “racism persists in the U.S.” — and to claim that some American reformer who says much the same thing must be a Kremlin tool.

Now, in the New Cold War, we are seeing a similar trend in the way some Democrats and the mainstream U.S. media are citing accurate assessments from Russian President Vladimir Putin and claiming that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is somehow in league with Putin for observing the same realities.

A case in point is Tuesday’s editorial in The Washington Post, entitled “The Putin-Trump worldview” (in print) and “Trump and Putin share a frightening worldview” (online). The editorial quotes Putin as “observing that Mr. Trump ‘represents the interests of the sizable part of American society that is tired of the elites that have been in power for decades now … and does not like to see power handed down by inheritance.’”

The Post’s editorial writers then snidely note that “Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump have an uncanny way of echoing each other’s words.”

But that is a classic example of McCarthyistic sophistry. Just because some demonized figure like Putin says something that is undeniably true and an American sees the same facts doesn’t make that American a “Putin puppet” or a “Moscow stooge” or any of the other ugly names now being hurled at people who won’t join in today’s trendy Russia bashing and guilt by association.

Putin is not wrong that many of Trump’s supporters – along with many Americans who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders – are “tired of the elites” that have behaved arrogantly and stupidly for decades. Many Americans also don’t believe that a family’s name should decide who becomes the leader of the United States, whether that be the Bushes or the Clintons.

Indeed, what Putin is saying amounts to almost a truism, yet here is The Washington Post not only suggesting that because Putin is saying something that it must be false but then smearing Trump (or anyone else) who detects the same reality.

Barack Obama delivers stinging critique of FBI: 'We don't operate on leaks'

Barack Obama has criticised the way the FBI revealed a new investigation of emails possibly linked to Hillary Clinton’s private server, a move that has rocked the US presidential election in its final stretch.

Opinion polls show the race between Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump tightening since FBI director James Comey’s bombshell announcement last Friday. One even gave Trump a one-point lead, though the Democrat remains the clear favourite.

In his first public comments on the controversial decision, Obama told the online outlet NowThisNews: “I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo. We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.

“When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the justice department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn’t anything there that was prosecutable.”

Comey said it was unclear whether the emails – reportedly found on the laptop of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony Weiner – are significant.

There's a lot of detail in the article that can't be fairly excerpted. If you are following the evidence of Hillary's enormous corruption and the corruption of the Obama administration, this is an excellent article.

Secret Recordings Emerge in Clinton Foundation Probe

Last night, at 10:04 p.m., two reporters at the Wall Street Journal tossed an incendiary device into the already smoldering debris of what is attempting to pass for a U.S. presidential election – where one of the two leading candidates is under a criminal investigation and the other was caught on tape bragging about being able to randomly grab women by their genitals.

Wall Street Journal reporters Devlin Barrett and Christopher Matthews revealed last evening that the FBI has had an active investigation underway into the Clinton Foundation since last summer but in February of this year the Justice Department told the FBI agents to “stand down” on that investigation. ...

The Attorney General of the Justice Department, Loretta Lynch, was sworn in on April 27, 2015. She met secretly with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona on June 28 of this year, at a time when Hillary Clinton was under a criminal investigation over her use of a private email server to transmit classified government material during her time as Secretary of State. Now, as the Wall Street Journal article makes clear, the Clinton Foundation has also been under a year-long investigation by the FBI, a unit of the Justice Department. Bill Clinton continues to serve as a Director on the Clinton Foundation’s Board. Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, serves as its Vice Chair.

Likely causing great angst in the Clinton campaign camp this morning is the further revelation in the Wall Street Journal article that the FBI investigation had advanced far enough to have made “secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made….” and that the FBI has at least “two confidential informants.” ...

CNN also reported yesterday that FBI agents believe the Justice Department may be attempting to protect a powerful political person. A group of CNN reporters said they had interviewed “more than a dozen officials close to the matter.” The report indicated that the FBI agents had “pressed to take more overt steps in the Clinton Foundation probe, including possibly issuing subpoenas,” but the Justice Department had “opposed such moves.”

World on track for 3C of warming under current global climate pledges, warns UN

The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) said that pledges put forward to cut emissions would see temperatures rise by 3C above pre-industrial levels, far above the the 2C of the Paris climate agreement, which comes into force on Friday.

At least a quarter must be cut from emissions by the end of the next decade, compared with current trends, the UN said.

The report found that emissions by 2030 were likely to reach about 54 to 56 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, a long way astray of the 42 gigatonnes a year likely to be the level at which warming exceeds 2C.

Erik Solheim, chief of Unep, said the world was “moving in the right direction” on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate change, but that measures should be taken urgently to avoid the need for much more drastic cuts in emissions in future. “If we don’t start taking additional action now, we will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy.”

He warned in particular that people would start being displaced from their homes by the effects of climate change, suffering from drought, hunger, disease and conflicts arising from these afflictions. Mass migration as a result of climate change is hard to separate from other causes of migration, but is predicted to become a much greater problem.

Florida's Deceptively-Worded Solar Initiative, Backed by Utilities Companies, Loses Support

As utilities companies funnel millions of dollars into a last-ditch effort to convince Florida voters to pass an anti-solar initiative, the latest polling data shows support for the measure falling.

Florida's Amendment 1 is "deceptive," environmentalists argue, as it is written in pro-solar language but would in actuality block widespread adoption of solar power in the Sunshine State.

The measure is backed by a political committee formed by utilities companies, which has so far raised more than $26 million to fund the campaign.

"As we like to say, 'it's a monopoly wolf in solar sheep's clothing,'" Dr. Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a founding member of Floridians for Solar Choice, told the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine. "We are in a pitted battle to stop the utilities from choking off citizen-owned solar."

The initiative would "write people's right to own or lease solar panels and other equipment into the state constitution," InsideClimate News explains. "But it would also make it unconstitutional to require a utility's non-solar customers to subsidize those who do go solar. Those subsidies have helped make home solar affordable and are the best incentive to push the fast-growing energy source to widespread use."

Support for the measure fell markedly after an audio recording leaked to the public last month in which a lobbyist working for electric companies bragged about the measure to industry insiders.

Also of Interest

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

Obamamometer Whispers DAPL Sweet Nothings to Lure Progressives

What I learned after 100,000 miles on the road talking to Trump supporters

Barrel Bomb: the Cataclysmic Close of Campaign 2016

Phony ‘Corruption’ Excuse for Ukraine Coup

John Podesta Was Warned in 2008 to Start Encrypting Sensitive Emails

Too Smug to Jail

Alzheimer's treatment within reach after successful drug trial

Pimp my bike: Detroit's custom cycles

A Little Night Music

Will Shade - Better Leave That Stuff Alone

Memphis Jug Band - Peaches In the Springtime

Memphis Jug Band - Insane Crazy Blues

Memphis Jug Band - Evergreen Money Blues, Papa's Got Your Water

Will Shade And Furry Lewis - The Train

Memphis Jug Band - Gator Wobble

Memphis Jug Band - Move That Thing

Memphis Jug Band - Jazzbo Stomp

Memphis Jug Band - Got A Letter From My Darlin