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“If you think atomic explosions in Asia wouldn't affect Americans, consider this. A study published in Scientific American in 2010 looked at the probable impact of a "small" nuclear war, one in which India and Pakistan each dropped fifty atomic bombs. The scientists concluded that the explosions would ignite massive firestorms, sending enormous amounts of dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This would block some of the sun's light from reaching the earth, making the planet colder and darker - for about ten years. Farming would collapse, and people all over the globe would starve to death. And that's if only half of one percent of all the atomic bombs on earth were used.

In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight.

And, like it or not, you're in it.”

-- Steve Sheinkin

News and Opinion

U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified for First Time

Plans to Target People (“Population”) Violated International Legal Norms

The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.

The SAC study includes chilling details. According to its authors, their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and “friendly forces and people” to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout. Moreover, the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw. Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby). ...

The SAC document includes lists of more than 1100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base. With the Soviet bomber force as the highest priority for nuclear targeting (this was before the age of ICBMs), SAC assigned priority one and two to Bykhov and Orsha airfields, both located in Belorussia. At both bases, the Soviet Air Force deployed medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers, which would have posed a threat to NATO allies and U.S. forces in Western Europe.

A second list was of urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction.” SAC listed over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established. Moscow and Leningrad were priority one and two respectively. Moscow included 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) while Leningrad had 145, including “population” targets. In both cities, SAC identified air power installations, such as Soviet Air Force command centers, which it would have devastated with thermonuclear weapons early in the war.

According to the study, SAC would have targeted Air Power targets with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons. Exploding them at ground level, as planned, would have produced significant fallout hazards to nearby civilians. SAC also wanted a 60 megaton weapon which it believed necessary for deterrence, but also because it would produce “significant results” in the event of a Soviet surprise attack. One megaton would be 70 times the explosive yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

It looks like "international norms" against attacks on civilian populations are still something that the US and its military believes are to be upheld by other (less exceptional) militias.

Officials Seek to Ditch Restrictions on Bombing Targets in Syria

Pentagon and White House officials continue to try to present the ongoing ISIS war as being conducted with excessive care, attributing the lack of admitted civilian casualties to this. Of course, rights groups have reported large civilian casualties in several US airstrikes, but the Pentagon has simply refused to admit it.

Either way, there are growing calls, particularly from the military, to ratchet up the strikes in Syria, and ditch the efforts to be precise in the name of escalation, a move that would then justify a further increase of civilian casualties that would be even harder to deny. ...

The US had actually ditched a lot of the restrictions meant to avoid civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria years ago, however, and has been targeting civilian infrastructure ever since.

Secret Norwegian Government Report Confirms Turkey Helping ISIS Sell Its Oil

A new “secret” report [has been] prepared on behalf of the Norwegian foreign ministry by Rystad Energy. According to Dagens Næringsliv (translated), the report shows that “large quantities of oil have been smuggled across the border to Turkey from IS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq.” The “oil is sent by tankers via smuggling routes across the border [and] is sold at greatly reduced prices, from 25 to 45 dollars a barrel,” the report says.

Dagens Næringsliv goes on to implicate the same network of traffickers who helped Saddam avoid international sanctions, in helping ISIS export crude and import cash.

Turkey: Mounting Security Operation Deaths

Kurdish civilians, including women, children and elderly residents, have been killed during security operations and armed clashes since July 2015 in southeastern Turkey. Local human rights groups have recorded well over 100 civilian deaths and multiple injuries. After unprecedented military deployments to the region in recent days, several cities are under curfew and some of their neighborhoods the scenes of shelling by the military and heavy clashes with armed Kurdish groups. The civilian death toll is likely to rise steeply in the coming days.

Human Rights Watch focused on police and military operations during three extended curfews in September and November, documenting 15 of the killings of civilians in detail through interviews with relatives and witnesses as well as the accounts of eight civilians injured with gunshot wounds and shrapnel, and three cases of serious ill-treatment in detention. Wounded people have been denied access to medical treatment. The populations of entire neighborhoods have had their water and electricity cut during state-imposed curfews and have been left without access to food. Many have fled their homes to escape fighting.

“The Turkish government should rein in its security forces, immediately stop the abusive and disproportionate use of force, and investigate the deaths and injuries caused by its operations,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “To ignore or cover up what’s happening to the region’s Kurdish population would only confirm the widely held belief in the southeast that when it comes to police and military operations against Kurdish armed groups, there are no limits – there is no law.”

Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that security forces repeatedly opened fire on anyone on the streets or who left their homes, failing to distinguish between people who were armed and those who weren’t and making no assessment of the threat an individual posed or the necessity of using lethal force.

Kurds brave gunfire to get to the grocery store

Syria’s Kurds Have Nearly Tripled Their Territory Fighting the Islamic State in 2015

Amid the chaos in Syria, the country's Kurds have managed to resist the advances of the Islamic State and carve out a zone of unprecedented autonomy in their own lands.

Over the past year, the YPG Kurdish militia beat back the Islamic State (IS) and nearly tripled the size of Kurdish-controlled territory in Northern Syria, all the while helping shrink the size of the IS caliphate by around 14 percent.

That's according to a new report by the IHS Jane's, a private intelligence company that analyzes international security issues, and has been tracking the ground war in Syria.

As a result, the Kurds are essentially in control of their own mini-state — which they call Rojava — that runs across the Turkish-Syrian border. Administered by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) the political arm of the YPG, the government in Rojava has reached an understanding with the Assad regime that allows the Kurds to govern their own territory, while beating back IS from the borders.
"The Kurds have had autonomy thrust upon them," explained Michael Gunter, a professor of political science at Tennessee Tech University, and the author of Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War, a recent study of Kurdish politics in Syria. "There's no way they will go back to a subservient position of not controlling their own lands anytime in the future."

New ISIS Radio Station Fuels Fear of Their Growth in Eastern Afghanistan

For most people, the impression of ISIS’ scope in Afghanistan is a purely theoretical thing, to be determined from Pentagon reports of them achieving “operational” status, or local reports of them fighting Taliban leaders over rural territory. For people in Jalalabad, the signs of growing ISIS influence are as close as their radio.

Over the past week, ISIS has begun broadcasting “caliphate radio” which can be picked up in and around the eastern city, admonishing locals to reject the “infidel government” and to avoid interaction with all non-Muslims.

Evolution of US position on Assad's role in Syria

White House Schizophrenia – Kerry: ‘Assad Can Stay’; Obama: ‘Assad Must Go’

Just three days ago, emerging from Moscow meetings with Russian foreign minister Lavrov and president Putin, US Secretary of State John Kerry signaled a major shift in US foreign policy toward Syria. “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change,” he told the media. The media rightly reported the apparent US about-face as, “Assad can stay.”

The shift was seen as paving the way for the adoption of a UN Security Council Resolution calling for a ceasefire and political solution to the nearly five-year old brutal war in Syria. ...

But then President Obama opened his mouth at his end-of-year press conference this afternoon and hung his Secretary of State and entire foreign policy apparatus out to dry.

No, Obama decided this afternoon, Assad cannot stay. Assad must go.

Humanitarian Pandora Samantha Power is immune to irony.

UN Says the US-backed Saudi Campaign in Yemen Has Disproportionately Targeted Civilians

Two days after peace talks adjourned with little sign of progress, the UN's human rights chief told Security Council members on Tuesday that an inordinately high percentage of attacks on civilians in Yemen's 9-month civil war can be attributed to a Saudi-led and US-backed coalition fighting there.

According to figures presented by High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein at the council's first open session on the conflict, more than 2,700 civilians have been killed, and more than 5,300 injured since late March, when Riyadh's coalition began bombing Yemen.

"I have observed with extreme concern the continuation of heavy shelling from the ground and the air in areas with high concentration of civilians as well as the perpetuation of the destruction of civilian infrastructure — in particular hospitals and schools — by all parties in the conflict," Zeid told the council. He added, however, that "a disproportionate amount appeared to be the result of airstrikes carried out by Coalition forces." ...

For the US, and Samantha Power, the war and their initially blanket support of the Saudi coalition has in recent months come under heavy criticism from human rights groups. Not a month goes by without reports from the likes of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International implicating the US, as well as the UK, in arms sales to the Saudis -— and in the case of Washington, directly offering services to Riyadh without which the coalition would likely falter. Saudi strikes, say both groups, have been directly tied to hundreds of civilian deaths, and could constitute war crimes. ...

All this makes for an awkward spectacle at the UN, where Power was able to conclude her remarks on Tuesday by saying "the parties have a chance to end the conflict, and the United States joins the other members of this Security Council in urging them to do so," — evidently not considering her own government's role in the war.

Researchers Solve Juniper Backdoor Mystery; Signs Point to NSA

Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works. Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used by an array of corporate and government systems, announced on Thursday that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper’s devices.

The researchers’ findings suggest that the NSA may be responsible for that backdoor, at least indirectly. Even if the NSA did not plant the backdoor in the company’s source code, the spy agency may in fact be indirectly responsible for it by having created weaknesses the attackers exploited.

Evidence uncovered by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, founder and CEO of Comsecuris, a security consultancy in Germany, suggests that the Juniper culprits repurposed an encryption backdoor previously believed to have been engineered by the NSA, and tweaked it to use for their own spying purposes. Weinmann reported his findings in an extensive post published late Monday.

, a pseudo-random number generator that Juniper uses to encrypt traffic passing through the VPN in its NetScreen firewalls. But in addition to these inherent weaknesses, the attackers also relied on a mistake Juniper apparently made in configuring the VPN encryption scheme in its NetScreen devices, according to Weinmann and other cryptographers who examined the issue. This made it possible for the culprits to pull off their attack. ...

Although the party behind the Juniper backdoor could be the NSA or an NSA spying partner like the UK or Israel, news reports last week quoted unnamed US officials saying they don’t believe the US intelligence community is behind it, and that the FBI is investigating the issue. Other possible culprits behind the sophisticated attack, of course, could be Russia or China.

If someone other than the US did plant the backdoor, security experts say the attack on Juniper firewalls underscores precisely why they have been saying for a long time that government backdoors in systems are a bad idea—because they can be hijacked and repurposed by other parties.

Apple's Tim Cook defends encryption. When will other tech CEOs do so?

It seems everywhere he goes these days, Apple CEO Tim Cook is out there forcefully and publicly defending his company’s decision to provide iPhone users with end-to-end text messaging and FaceTime encryption to protect against the constant threat of criminal hackers and foreign governments. The question is: when will other tech company leaders follow his lead?

If we’re going to avoid having a horrible law banning encryption passed in the next year, more of the tech company giants’ high-profile representatives – the Mark Zuckerbergs, Marissa Mayers and Eric Schmidts – need to use their platforms as the world’s most well-known technology chiefs to make crystal clear how important encryption is to users everywhere. ...

Unfortunately, Cook is badly outnumbered by an onslaught of ignorant politicians making misleading and false statements about how encryption works and why we should ban it. ...

But this is much more than an engineering fight – it’s a political one where public opinion is crucial. And if the CEOs of these tech companies and their highest-profile representatives aren’t out there every day loudly fighting for our right to encryption where millions of people can hear them, then it’s quite likely we might wake up one day and find that the US or UK has passed some awful bill, which will only encourage China to do the same – and very soon half the world may try to outlaw encryption in some way, shape or form.

Error 451: A New Dystopian Internet Code With a Very Important Meaning

A new internet code inspired by the dystopian writings of Ray Bradbury aims to let users know when websites are unavailable because they have been censored by the state—Error Code 451.

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), a global body which reviews internet standards, on Monday approved the XML specification, which can be used to alert users when requested content has been blocked by "legal obstacles," typically government censorship. Tim Bray, a former Google engineer and co-author of the code, suggested the term in 2012 as a reference to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a 1953 novel in which books are outlawed and burned—an allegory for state suppression of free speech.

Black Lives Matter organizers to protest at Mall of America despite judge's order

Organizers expect to draw hundreds of protesters at the Minneapolis mall on the day before Christmas Eve, to draw attention to the police shooting of Jamar Clark, a black man who died the day after he was shot in the north of the city.

Organizers expect to draw hundreds of protesters at the Minneapolis mall on the day before Christmas Eve, to draw attention to the police shooting of Jamar Clark, a black man who died the day after he was shot in the north of the city.

Earlier this week, the mall sought a court order blocking the planned protest. On Tuesday, a judge barred three organizers from attending the demonstration but said she doesn’t have the power to prevent others from showing up to demonstrate. The privately owned mall had sought to block the entire Black Lives Matter group from protesting, saying the action would result in lost sales.

“The court does not have a sufficient basis to issue an injunction as to Black Lives Matters or to unidentified persons who may be acting as its agents or in active concert with the Black Lives Matters movement,” Hennepin County district court judge Karen Janisch wrote.

The judge also denied the mall’s request to order the organizers to remove posts about the protest from social media and to alert followers that the demonstration had been canceled. The organizers’ attorney argued during a Monday hearing that those demands were clearly unconstitutional.

Free Speech Not Allowed? Mall of America Can't Stop Black Lives Matter Rally over Jamar Clark Death

The US Stopped a British Muslim Family From Visiting Disneyland — With No Explanation

A British family on their way to Disneyland were barred by US officials from boarding a plane at London's Gatwick airport and removed from the airport.

The news that the family of 11 was removed with no explanation and no refund for tickets costing more than $13,000 has sparked accusations of Islamophobia and calls for the UK prime minister to step in.

The group had been granted the travel authorization required for all British citizens to travel to the US ahead of a planned trip to visit family and theme parks in southern California.

But while they were waiting in the departure lounge — and after they had checked in — US Department of Homeland Security officials told them they would not be allowed to travel, while providing no explanation as to why.

Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, one of the family members who was turned away, told the Guardian the reason it happened was "obvious." "It's because of the attacks on America — they think every Muslim poses a threat," he said.

Didn't somebody tell Obama that the propaganda is a feature, not a bug? How else are we to preserve the purity of Disneyland?

Obama Is Right: Terrorism Has Taken Over Cable News

In an interview with NPR this week, President Obama complained that the media is oversaturated with coverage of terrorism.

The Intercept analyzed network news coverage of various topics, using Internet Archive’s TV News Archive search of television captions, and found that terrorism did dominate news. ... A search of CNN coverage between November 21 and December 21 of this year yielded 427 hits (instances where an individual show mentioned the word at least once) for the search phrase “terrorism” and 404 hits for “ISIS”; the same search for “poverty” yielded only 34 hits.

Kim Dotcom's Extradition to the US Has Now Been Cleared by a Judge

German tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has lost a bid to block his extradition from New Zealand to the United States to face charges including copyright infringement and money laundering — a major victory for the US Department of Justice in the long-running case.

The decision on Wednesday by a New Zealand court comes almost four years after police raided Dotcom's mansion west of Auckland at the behest of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and shut down his popular file-sharing website, Megaupload.

"I'm disappointed," Dotcom told reporters as he left the court, promising to fight the ruling and wishing onlookers a Merry Christmas.

The US has stopped a British Muslim family from going on holiday – we can’t look the other way

As a young girl I dreamed of going to Disneyland. Like many of my friends I hoped to one day visit places I’d only seen on television shows and in films. That’s why when I heard from a family of 11 from my Walthamstow constituency whose holiday to LA had had to be abandoned, my first thought was for their kids. How long they had watched their parents save for the trip; how excited they must have felt telling their friends they would see Mickey Mouse, and how upset they must have been at Gatwick airport to watch their dad being taken aside by officials and told that their right to travel was being revoked. Instead of heading to Universal Studios for two weeks of fun, they were told to go back home and unpack.

This is more than a sad consumer affairs story about missed gate numbers or paperwork problems. The official who stopped them was from the US Department of Homeland Security – and in the ensuing furore other local residents have come forward to say that they, too, have been summarily refused entry to America.

What is the one thing these stories have in common? Religion. A growing number of UK Muslim citizens say they have been similarly treated. This raises troubling questions well beyond how to diffuse the heartache of small children unable to meet Elsa from Frozen. Indeed, if the US thinks it has good grounds for stopping people going there, we cannot be contented that the UK does not take any action to follow this up here.

Will Sandra Bland Get Justice? Family Speaks Out After Grand Jury Won't Indict in Her Death

As Commondreams' headline for this story states, "Nothing says `Happy Holidays' like an illegal occupation."

Israeli ambassador to US sends festive presents from occupied territories

Ron Dermer sends holiday gifts sourced in the occupied territories in order to combat the boycott, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign

Holiday gifts from the Israeli embassy in the United States this year will be deliberately sourced from settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Golan Heights, the country’s US ambassador has announced.

Ron Dermer said in a letter posted to social media on Tuesday that the gesture was intended to combat the boycott, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign, which he described as “the latest effort by Israel’s enemies to destroy the one and only Jewish state”. ...

Dermer, who formerly worked for US Republicans, has been a controversial figure in Washington since he took up the ambassador’s post in 2013.

Private Prison Exec Waves Off Criminal Justice Reform, Predicts More Profits

A senior executive with the second-largest for-profit prison company in America assured investment bankers last summer that despite talk of drug policy and criminal justice reform, the country will continue to “attract crime,” generating new “correctional needs.”

“The reality is, we are a very affluent country, we have loose borders, and we have a bad education system,” said Shayn March, the vice president and treasurer of the Geo Group. “And all that adds up to a significant amount of correctional needs, which, thankfully, we’ve been able to help the country out with and states with by providing a lower cost solution.”

In blockbuster poll, Sanders destroys Trump by 13 points

Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump's 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives. ...

It is noteworthy that in this Quinnipiac poll, Sanders runs so much stronger than Clinton against Trump. It is also noteworthy and important that both Sanders and Clinton run so far ahead of Trump in general election match-up polling. And it is profoundly important and revealing that Sanders would defeat Trump by such a huge margin — 13 points in this poll — that analysts would be talking about a national political realignment and new progressive era in American history if an enlightened candidate such as Sanders would defeat a retrograde race-baiting candidate such as Trump by a potentially epic and historic margin.

What Influence Does Wall Street Have Over Candidates Clinton and Sanders?

NOOR: And Bill, I wanted to ask you one last quick question. You know, one of the criticisms that the Sanders campaign has received is that with a Republican-controlled Congress, you know, what he's--even if he's elected, how much of this, how much of these policies can he push, you know, how much of these policies can he get passed? And it's likely that if Obama can't pass, won't pass Glass-Steagall through this Congress--or I guess he didn't even want to. But the question is, what unilateral action can Sanders take to rein the banks in?

BLACK: Okay. So there's a 100 percent failure rate if you don't try.

NOOR: Right. Exactly.

BLACK: And that's what Obama did, and that's what Hillary Clinton [is] promising to do. You can bring back much of Glass-Steagall by regulation. And Bernie Sanders is the only candidate, period, from any party that is pledged to do that. The other thing is simply the too big to fail banks and Hillary Clinton wants to keep them, and Senator Sanders says this is insane. We are rolling dice. I mean, the definition of one of these banks is when, not if, when the next one fails, it will likely cause a global financial crisis.

So why not shrink them to the point where they no longer pose a global crisis when they fail? We know that when you make them this big they get another implicit federal subsidy, which makes life bad, and we know that they make true democracy impossible for the reasons we've talked about earlier, in terms of the inevitable political power when you allow entities to become this large. So that's the other major difference.

More Than Exxon: Big Oil Companies for Years Shared Damning Climate Research

It wasn't just Exxon that knew fossil fuels were cooking the planet.

New investigative reporting by Neela Banerjee with Inside Climate News revealed on Tuesday that scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company may have for decades known about the impacts of carbon emissions on the climate.

Between 1979 and 1983, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry's most powerful lobby group, ran a task force for fossil fuel companies to "monitor and share climate research," according to internal documents obtained by Inside Climate News.

According to the reporting:

Like Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon's and focused on climate modeling, said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force. 

"It was a fact-finding task force," Nelson said in an interview. "We wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions."

The 'CO2 and Climate Task Force,' which changed in 1980 its name to the 'Climate and Energy Task Force,' included researchers from Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, and Sohio, among others.

Maryland accused of race discrimination over scrapping of Baltimore rail project

Republican Governor Larry Hogan faces a civil rights lawsuit after axing plans for a light rail line serving African American areas and switching funds to roads in the suburbs

Civil rights groups are alleging Maryland violated federal discrimination laws when it canceled plans for a long-considered Baltimore transit line that would have benefited predominantly African American neighborhoods.

In a Title VI civil rights complaint filed this week against Maryland, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) charges that the decision by the Republican governor, Larry Hogan, to eliminate the plans for an east-west light rail line in Baltimore – and transfer the state funds slated for it to road projects in largely white suburban and rural parts of the state – discriminates against the city’s black residents.

“Maryland’s cancellation of the Red Line is the latest chapter in a long history of racially discriminatory decisions regarding the allocation of transportation and housing resources in the state,” said the complaint, filed with the US Department of Transportation on behalf of a coalition of civil rights groups and the African American residents of Baltimore.

A transportation economist cited in the complaint found that the switch from a subway line to the new highways initiative would cost African Americans $19m in user benefits by 2030, while white Maryland residents will gain more than $35m in user benefits during that period.

Wind Energy Is Actually Booming in the US. You Just Have to Look for It.

The amount of electricity generated from wind-powered turbines reached new heights in 2015, buoyed by plummeting costs, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the industry's leading trade group. And that's good for prospects of transitioning the nation away from the fossil fuels that cause air pollution and contribute to climate change.

Wind now accounts for 70 gigawatts of the nation's generation capacity, which is enough to power 19 million households. Fifty thousand turbines are now in operation in the United States and costs have dropped 66 percent in the last six years. ...

Wind energy contributes as much as 5 percent of the nation's electrical supply and Hunt pointed to the number of jobs that the industry supports in manufacturing, construction, development, and operations.

"At the end of 2014, we found that the wind industry was recording 73,000 jobs across 50 states," Hannah Hunt, a senior research analyst at AWEA, said.

Also of Interest

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

Federal Court Gives Blessing to Cross-Border Tar Sands Pipeline Expansion

Your Business Been Hacked? Thanks NSA!

Challenging US Overseas Military Bases

U.S. Officials Warned of Mali Terror Strike Prior to November Attack

What really happened to the U.S. train-and-equip program in Syria?

Joint Chiefs Worked To Undermine ‘Special Relationship’ with Al Qaeda in Syria

A Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack

Clinton Lies (Again)

I was locked up because I went to a Texas national park without my papers

A Little Night Music

Pacific Gas and Electric - Stormy Times

Pacific Gas and Electric - Motor City's Burning

Pacific Gas And Electric - Staggolee

Pacific Gas and Electric - Wade In The Water

Pacific Gas And Electric - She's Long And She's Tall

Pacific Gas And Electric - Heat Wave

Pacific Gas & Electric - Dirty Mistreater

Pacific Gas & Electric - The Hunter

Pacific Gas and Electric - Jelly Jelly

Pacific Gas and Electric - Long Handled Shovel