Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features soul and funk singer Sharon Jones. Enjoy!

“Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people.”

-- Jared Diamond

News and Opinion

Clashes between protesters and police escalated overnight at Standing Rock

Police hit hundreds of unarmed protestors who gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota with water cannons Sunday night. Protestors also reported being hit with rubber bullets, teargas, pepper spray, and percussion grenades during the clashes.

The activist group Digital Smoke Signals posted live video to Facebook of the confrontation, shining a light on tactics a well equipped police force deployed against protestors in freezing temperatures.

“They were attacked with water cannons,” Standing Rock Sioux tribe member LaDonna Brave Bull Allard told the Guardian. “It is 23 degrees [-5 °C] out there with mace, rubber bullets, pepper spray, etc. They are being trapped and attacked. Pray for my people.” ...

In a video statement posted on Twitter by the Indigenous Environmental Network, a medic reported at least four wounds from rubber bullets, with three of those to the face or head. A spokeswoman for the group told The Guardian that 167 people were injured, and seven were taken to the hospital.

Jeremy Scahill: TigerSwan Security, Linked to Blackwater, Now Coordinates Intel for Dakota Access

Clinton & co are finally gone. That is the silver lining in this disaster

Hillary Clinton has given us back our freedom. Only such a crushing defeat could break the chains that bound us to the New Democrat elites. The defeat was the result of decades of moving the Democratic party – the party of FDR – away from what it once was and should have remained: a party that represents workers. All workers.

For three decades they have kept us in line with threats of a Republican monster-president should we stay home on election day. Election day has come and passed, and many did stay home. And instead of bowing out gracefully and accepting responsibility for their defeat, they have already started blaming it largely on racist hordes of rural Americans. That explanation conveniently shifts blame away from themselves, and avoids any tough questions about where the party has failed. ...

After the investment bankers gambled away our economy the New Democrats bailed them out against the overwhelming objection of the American people. This heralded the Obama years, as the New Democrats continued to justify their existence through a focus on social causes that do not threaten corporate power. Or as Krystal Ball put it so powerfully: “We lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege.” Add to this that we did it while their life expectancy dropped through self-destructive behaviors brought on by economic distress. ...

So here is our silver lining. This is a revolutionary moment. We must not allow them to shift the blame on to voters. This is their failure, decades in the making. And their failure is our chance to regroup. To clean house in the Democratic party, to retire the old elite and to empower a new generation of FDR Democrats, who look out for the working class – the whole working class.

We Are All Deplorables

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.

Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not to condone them.

The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings. ...

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The only route left is revolt. If this revolt is to succeed it must be expressed in the language of economic justice. A continuation of the language of multiculturalism and identity politics as our primary means of communication is self-defeating. It stokes the culture wars. It feeds the anti-politics that define the corporate state. ...

Our enemy is not the white working poor any more than it is African-Americans, undocumented workers, Muslims, Latinos or members of the GBLT community. The oligarchs and corporations, many of them proponents of political correctness, are our enemy. If we shed our self-righteousness and hubris, if we speak to the pain and suffering of the working poor, we will unmask the toxins of bigotry and racism. We will turn the rage of an abandoned working class, no matter what its members’ color, race or religious creed, against those who deserve it.

Neocons, War Criminals & White Nationalists: Jeremy Scahill on Trump's Incoming Advisers & Cabinet

Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms

Donald Trump's national security team is discussing plans to dismantle the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization that was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to an adviser to the president-elect and a former senior intelligence official. ...

The Trump national security team has been meeting in recent days, planning the removal of the cabinet-level position and assessing how to fold parts of the organization into the 16 federal intelligence agencies it oversees, according to both people with knowledge of the plans. If the restructuring is accomplished, it would undo legislation passed by Congress in 2004, dismantle the biggest American intelligence bureaucracy created since the end of World War II, and roll back a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. ... The office, which launched in 2005, was designed to fill gaps that contributed to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by facilitating information sharing among the 16 federal agencies that make up the intelligence community. ...

The Trump team sees removing the office as an opportunity to reorganize other parts of the intelligence community, something that some career officials have long sought. ... Last year, Brennan restructured the CIA by removing the wall between analysts and spies, putting them together in mission centers, rather than geographic divisions, as had been the organization since the agency was created. The new structure was largely modeled after the Counterterrorism Center, which had become the agency’s dominant section after 9/11. Critics from inside the agency complained that it weakened the core skill of the agency — human espionage — and removed expertise. ...

David Priess, author of “The President’s Book of Secrets” and a former intelligence officer, said that concerns about the office and the size of its bureaucracy are not new, but that actually eliminating it would be a difficult undertaking for a new administration. “The office of the DNI is not like so many other things that they’ve talked about reversing and overturning,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s a law, not an executive order at the whim of the president; it was part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act; [they] can’t unilaterally decide it no longer exists, they would have to pass a new law unwrapping all the things in that law.”

Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump’s New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead.

President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed.

Pompeo has supported nearly unfettered NSA surveillance, has blamed Muslim leaders for condoning terror, and is one of the most hyperbolic members of Congress when it comes to describing the Islamic State, which he has called “an existential threat to America” and “the most lethal and powerful terrorist group ever to have existed.” ...

In a 2014 letter, Pompeo accused Snowden of “intentional distortion of truth that he and his media enablers have engaged in.” Pompeo supports virtually no legal barriers to having the NSA spy on Americans, and has alarmed civil liberties advocates with many of the positions he has taken while serving on the House Intelligence Committee. Not only has he argued that the NSA should resume its phone records program, he has called on Congress to “pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.” ...

Pompeo is also a staunch defender of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it an “important national asset,” and repeatedly arguing that closing the facility would endanger Americans. He has also defended CIA torturers, saying that “these men and women are not torturers,” and that “the programs being used were within the law.” He called the exhaustive, 6,000-page Senate torture report “some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Sen. Feinstein.”

Obama’s Last Big Con

... Now, to add to the disappointing list of false hopes and promises, it turns out that Obama is no constitutional scholar either…or a man with even a scintilla of spine or principle.

The evidence: On a final trip to Europe, Obama, in an interview with the German news weekly Der Spiegel, asked whether he would consider pardoning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, replied, “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point.”

This facile answer is simply wrong. The founders deliberately gave presidents unlimited pardon powers, exempting only the right to pardon him or herself in the case of an impeachment — a logical exclusion. Otherwise there are no constraints on and no power to undo a presidential pardon. Nor does a pardon have to follow a person’s being convicted or even indicted.

President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his resigned predecessor Richard Nixon is a case in point. As Obama, the “Constitutional law” expert, surely knows, Nixon, though impeached in the House, was never tried by the Senate. He resigned rather than face that trial, which his advisors convinced him he would lose. President Bill Clinton also issued a pre-prosecution pardon to financier Marc Rich, who had fled the country rather than face federal racketeering charges.

In other words, President Obama could easily pardon Edward Snowden if he wanted to. Instead, he fell back on a convenient fiction, perhaps hoping that the German reporter and his editors would be ignorant enough about the US Constitution and about US history that his lie would slip by them.

Donald Trump's CIA pick backs torture and increased surveillance of Americans

Should Donald Trump decide that he wants the CIA to get back into the business of torturing alleged terrorists — as he warned he would do during his presidential campaign — he would likely have the support of Mike Pompeo, the fiercely partisan Tea Party Republican congressman from Kansas who the President-elect just nominated to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Two years ago, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its landmark report on the efficacy of the CIA’s torture program Pompeo called it legal and said the men and women who subjected the detainees to so-called enhanced techniques like waterboarding “are not torturers, they are patriots.”

Pompeo’s nomination has been lauded by intelligence officials, such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden who said he was “heartened” by the announcement, as well as Pompeo’s Republican colleagues in Congress, who said he was a smart choice to lead the CIA. But some Democrats are being cautious and are taking a wait-and-see approach before heaping praise on Pompeo. ...

CIA personnel breathed a sigh of relief Friday over Trump’s selection of Pompeo. Two other Republicans that were floated to head the CIA — former Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (who turned down the job) — were not well received by many of the career-analysts at Langley, according to congressional and CIA sources. ...

Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said he is eager to question Pompeo during confirmation hearings. He told VICE News in an interview this week that he is poised to battle the Trump administration on civil liberties, encryption, and expanded surveillance powers.

Could David Petraeus, Rumored Candidate for Secretary of State, Get a Security Clearance?

After months of criticizing Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary of state, Donald Trump is reportedly considering David Petraeus for the same job, even though the four-star general and former CIA director pled guilty to passing classified information to his former lover and biographer. ...

It was unclear from his plea deal whether Petraeus kept a Defense Department or CIA security clearance, but he continued to advise the White House on counterterrorism strategy in Iraq — possibly requiring him to have access to classified materials.

When asked by The Intercept whether Petraeus still had a security clearance, the CIA declined to comment. The DOD also declined to comment “as a matter of individual privacy.”

When reached through his assistant at KKR, Petraeus also declined to comment. ...

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AG pick was accused of suppressing black votes

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general will almost certainly dredge up allegations of racism and voter suppression that sunk his 1986 nomination for a federal judgeship. ...

Three decades ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee — in Republican hands and chaired by Strom Thurmond — rejected Sessions’ nomination to the federal bench, only the second time such a nominee was rejected by the committee in 49 years.

Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware and the ranking Democrat on the committee, said that Sessions’ past statements were “inappropriate for someone holding public office.” Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts said Sessions was “a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past.”

“How any black person would be able to feel they are going to have impartial justice from Mr. Sessions is beyond me,” said Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio.

Jeff Sessions: Trump's attorney general pick accused of racial slur in 1981

Donald Trump’s nominee for US attorney general was once accused of calling a black official in Alabama a “nigger”, and then gave a false explanation to the US Senate when testifying about the allegation.

Senator Jeff Sessions was said to have used the racist term in November 1981, when talking about the first black man to be elected as a county commissioner in Mobile, where Sessions was a Republican party official and a federal prosecutor.

Asked about the alleged remark five years later, during Senate hearings on his ill-fated nomination by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship, Sessions denied saying it and claimed the alleged timing did not stand up to scrutiny.

“My point is there was not a black county commissioner at that time,” Sessions said, in response to questions from Joe Biden, then a senator for Delaware. “The black was only elected later.”

But this was not true. Public records show Douglas Wicks had become the first black person elected to one of Mobile’s three county commission seats in September 1980 – more than a year before Sessions allegedly referred to him using the racist term.

Wicks, a Democrat, said in an interview that he was made aware of Sessions’s alleged remark about him at the time. He alleged that Sessions was hostile toward him and other African Americans.

“Sessions wasn’t the only one,” said Wicks. “It was commonplace at the time. You had a very racist atmosphere.”

Jeremy Scahill: Mike Pence Has "Militant Agenda" Against Women, the Poor, Immigrants, LGBTQ People

Heh, well there's one neocon that is now "emboltoned" by his interview with Trump to act like a racist bully.

Bolton warns Obama on Israel action at UN

Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton warned Sunday that President Obama should not take any actions before leaving office that could hurt Israel at the U.N.

Bolton said during an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis that there is "a lot of speculation over in Turtle Bay at U.N. headquarters about resolutions that recognize a Palestinian state or that try and set a boundary for Israel based on the 1967 ceasefire lines."

"I think that’d be very inadvisable for the president to do that," he said.

GOP Factions Battle Over Control of Trump’s Foreign Policy

In recent history, a presidential election which puts the other major party in power has led to a pretty orderly transfer of power, with each party having its own collection of usual suspects that quickly and predictably fill in all the top spots. President-elect Donald Trump’s outsider status, and the number of Republican leadership figures openly opposed to his campaign, means he doesn’t have such a ready-made cabinet, nor likely the inclination to install one.

Instead, Trump’s cabinet is being assembled very publicly, amid a battle that includes neo-conservatives and establishment hawks arrayed against a group of outsiders including the libertarian right, Tea Party Republicans, and a bloc of realists who would normally not be in line for top positions.

Many of the neo-cons and the rest of the establishment had a substantial “Never Trump” bloc that opposed his election  appear to feel entitled to the top positions in the cabinet, and indeed, Trump seems to be entertaining candidate like ultrahawk John Bolton for some of his biggest positions.

These establishment candidates are pushing a predictable line of more and bigger wars and an ever-increasing US military role abroad, in particular playing up the idea that this would “reassure” US allies abroad amid very public concern from many NATO members about Trump’s victory.

Russian President Putin says Trump confirmed willing to mend ties

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday U.S. President-elect Donald Trump confirmed to him he was willing to mend ties, though he also said he would welcome President Barack Obama in Russia.

"The President-elect confirmed he is willing to normalize Russian-American relations. I told him the same. We did not discuss where and when we would meet" ...

Putin said he thanked Obama during Sunday's meeting in Lima "for the years of joint work".

Senators vow to counter Trump on Russia

Senators are pledging to take a firm line with Russia next year, setting up a potential conflict with incoming President Donald Trump.

Skeptical of Trump’s warmer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, lawmakers in both parties are breaking with the incoming administration to carve out a tougher stance.

Lawmakers would like the president-elect to rein in Russia, but they’re also signaling that Congress will act on its own.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said when it comes to Russia he’s planning to be “a bit of a hard ass.” ...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, questioned the choice of former military intelligence chief Michael Flynn as Trump’s national security advisor.

"I am deeply concerned about his views on Russia, which over the last 12 months have demonstrated the same fondness for the autocratic and belligerent Kremlin which animate President-elect Trump's praise of Vladimir Putin," Schiff said.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) echoed that Friday, saying he is “disturbed by General Flynn’s relationships and ties with Russian actors.”

Ukrainians express shock as politicians report vast wealth

Sarkozy defeated in primary for French right's presidential candidate

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s political career has been effectively ended, after he was dealt a humiliating defeat on Sunday by his former prime minister François Fillon in the first round of the race to choose the rightwing Republican party’s candidate for the presidency next spring.

Fillon, a socially conservative, free-market reformer who admires Margaret Thatcher and voted against same-sex marriage, came close to winning the nomination straight out, with around 43% of the poll.

He now faces a second-round runoff against more moderate Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux who was prime minister under Jacques Chirac.

The divisive former president Sarkozy suffered a humiliating defeat, knocked out of the race after he ran a hard-right campaign on French national identity, targeting Muslims and minorities. His poor score after a campaign in which he suggested banning Muslim headscarves from universities and was forced to protest his innocence faced with several legal investigations into corrupt campaign financing, showed he had become just as much a hate figure on the right as on the left.

Tony Blair weighs up a return to politics

Tony Blair is considering a return to politics, according to The Sunday Times. The former U.K prime minister is allegedly searching for new offices in Westminster in order to be close to the British parliament.

Blair is said to be seeking to play a part in Brexit negotiations, which are fast becoming increasingly complicated, with demands from the U.K and the EU piling up. ...

A source told The Sunday Times: “He’s not impressed with Theresa May… He thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a nutter and the Tories are screwing up Brexit. He thinks there’s a massive hole in British politics that he can fill.”

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel has confirmed she will seek re-election

German chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking a fourth term in office — and gearing up for what she expects to be her toughest campaign to date. ...

Merkel, who has been in office since 2005, saw her poll numbers start to slip in the last year amid criticism that her “open-door” policy for the refugee crisis had left Germany vulnerable to Paris-style terror attacks. She conceded defeat in several traditionally CDU strongholds in the state elections earlier this year, and acknowledged that her position on refugees had contributed to her decrease in support. More than a million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015.

Merkel is also up against the growing pull of populism. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged onto the political landscape just three years ago and saw a surge of support in the state elections.

How Taxes Were Shifted off the Donald Trump's of the World and onto Homeowners

Obama created a deportation machine. Soon it will be Trump's

Among the many asphyxiating gut punches delivered by Donald Trump’s election, his denigration of immigrants and pledge to deport them en masse stand out. Trump has now signaled that he will move to deport as many as three million immigrants after he takes office, and roll back Barack Obama’s executive action protecting more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. ...

What’s received little attention is that Trump would probably use tools developed by the Bush and Obama administrations to orchestrate mass deportations. Over the last 16 years, the federal government has used local police and jails as a key tool to orchestrate mass deportations – and that’s precisely what Trump plans to do on a more frightening scale than ever.

One tool, Obama’s favorite, is Secure Communities, now called the Priority Enforcement Program. It links an FBI database comprising fingerprints entered by local law enforcement bodies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Under Obama, Secure Communities made local arrests the key entry point to a deportation pipeline that removed 2.5 million from the country. Another is 287(g), authorized by Bill Clinton but first implemented under Bush, which deputizes local police and jails to search out undocumented immigrants. ...

For years, establishment leaders like Clinton, Bush and Obama have attempted to placate rising nativism on the right instead of confronting it, implementing immigration and border crackdowns. Instead of sating the nativist right’s hunger for enforcement, the establishment has lent credence to their paranoiac fears over criminal immigrants.

Rather than fighting their extreme policy initiatives, the establishment built the right a monstrous deportation machinery that could now be used to utterly monstrous ends – which, frankly, is how they’ve been used all along.

Strangely enough, what sounds so terrifying coming out of Trump’s mouth today is not so different from what Obama, minus the brazen racism, has articulated as policy in recent years.

Clemency Applicants Urge Obama to Act Before Trump Presidency Crushes Hope

When Brigitte Barren Williams realized Donald Trump had won the presidential election, “it felt like somebody let the air out of a balloon,” she said. Her brother, David Barren, is locked up at a federal prison in West Virginia, serving life plus 20 years on federal drug conspiracy charges. Now in his 50s, Barren has served almost 10 years of his sentence — the minimum portion required before he is eligible to seek a commutation under President Obama’s clemency initiative.

Tens of thousands of people convicted of nonviolent federal drug crimes have sought mercy under the program, which was announced in April 2014. Obama ramped up his commutations in advance of the election, and Williams prayed with each clemency announcement that her brother’s name might be on the list. After the last round came out, on November 4, Williams was forced to hope that if Obama didn’t grant her brother clemency, perhaps his successor might.

But the chances of that almost certainly dissolved on election night. Trump has called the clemency recipients “bad dudes,” warning one audience this summer that “they’re walking the streets. Sleep tight, folks.” After winning the White House on such fearmongering rhetoric — and promptly naming a white supremacist to his cabinet — Trump chose Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as his attorney general, an opponent of criminal justice reform and defender of mandatory minimums. There is little reason to believe President Trump will show mercy to people like Barren.

Trump is a threat to the Paris agreement. Can states like California defend it?

The climate movement, working with unions, faith groups and everyone who doesn’t want to see the world burn, could push individual states to commit to draw up their own climate plans in line with the Paris agreement, effectively becoming honorary signatories to the accord.

Currently only UN member states are signed up to the Paris agreement’s parent treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but observer members are permitted (the Vatican is an observer), and when it comes to the most important fight in human history, no quibbles should be made around technicalities.

There is precedent for this kind of state-level action – after the US’s failure to sign the Kyoto protocol in the 2000s, a student group called Kyoto Now had similar objectives, calling for university campuses to draw up their own climate action plans in line with the Kyoto agreement. The difference between then and now is that the US climate movement is a hundred times stronger, and ready for this fight.

For example, California alone is the sixth biggest economy in the world by gross domestic product, as well as the second-biggest state in the union for carbon emissions. California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has already reacted to Trump’s victory by saying California will continue with its nation-leading climate plans, and has dispatched a team to the UN climate talks in Marrakech. ...

If the Paris agreement could effectively cover large parts of America, this could send a hugely powerful signal to the rest of the world that not everyone in the US wants the country to become a “rogue state” on climate (as Mary Robinson, UN climate envoy, warned last week). It would do much to undermine the Trump administration’s denialism on the international stage and embolden other nations to continue the progress we’ve made so far.

Unified Against Trump Threat, World Vows To Push Ahead on Climate Action

Underscoring the "climate pariah" that the United States is expected to become under a President-elect Donald Trump, world leaders concluded the United Nations climate talks on Friday by re-committing to the goals of the Paris accord and vowing to take swift action to reduce global emissions. 

"We call for the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority," reads the Marrakech Action Proclamation (pdf), which was signed by 196 countries. ...

The declaration calls for "strong solidarity with those countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change," as well as efforts to "eradicate poverty" and "ensure food security" as global warming takes its toll on agriculture, particularly in the Global South. The document further calls on "all non-state actors to join us for immediate and ambitious action and mobilization" to reduce emissions and transition to sustainable development and energy sources.

Benjamin Schreiber of Friends of the Earth U.S. said at the conclusion of the talks, "Climate change is not going to wait for U.S. action and the rest of the world is clear it is moving forward. Trump's election must unify the world in treating the U.S. as a climate pariah, and respond to his Presidency by redoubling ambition."

Obama Halts Arctic Oil Leases and Undoing It Won't Be Simple for Trump

No new offshore oil and gas leases will be offered in the Alaskan Arctic through 2022, according to a new five-year plan for offshore drilling released Friday by the Obama administration. President-elect Donald Trump could overturn the ban, but that could take years and may not draw much industry interest if oil prices stay low.

The Interior Department's five-year plan laid out all of the proposed auctions for drilling rights on the outer continental shelf of the United States. It allowed for no leases between 2017 and 2022 in the Beaufort or Chukchi seas, Arctic waters north and west of Alaska. ...

"The plan focuses lease sales in the best places—those with the highest resource potential, lowest conflict, and established infrastructure—and removes regions that are simply not right to lease," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said. "Given the unique and challenging Arctic environment and industry's declining interest in the area, foregoing lease sales in the Arctic is the right path forward."

Also of Interest

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

'Something will crack': supposed prophecy of Donald Trump goes viral

If Berlusconi is like Trump, what can Italy teach America?

What to Do About ‘Fake News’

Why Are State Sponsors of Terrorism Receiving U.S. Taxpayer Dollars?

Donald Trump’s Mass Deportations Would Cost Billions and Take Years to Process

Can a Mass Movement Seize This Anti-Trump Moment?

Career Racist Jeff Sessions Is Donald Trump’s Pick For Attorney General

Trump’s Team Will Start New Wars in the Middle East

Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features

A New Documentary Explores the Devastating Effects of Drone Warfare on Victims and Whistleblowers

The Infamous Post-9/11 “Sleeper Cell” Case in California Continues to Unravel

Sharon Jones: a soul survivor who helped rejuvenate a classic sound

A Little Night Music

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - Retreat!

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - I'll Still Be True

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - I'm Still Here

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - Better Things

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - Midnight Rider

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Tell Me

Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings - Live at the Olympia