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"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

-- Abraham Lincoln

News and Opinion

South Korea set to change policy on North as liberal wins election

Moon Jae-in, a left-leaning liberal who favours engagement with North Korea, looks set to win South Korea’s presidential election, raising hopes of a potential rapprochement with Pyongyang. The former human rights lawyer won 41.4% of the vote, according to an exit poll cited by the Yonhap news agency, placing him comfortably ahead of his nearest rivals, the centrist software entrepreneur Ahn Cheol-soo and the conservative hardliner Hong Joon-pyo.

During a campaign in which Moon sought to add conservative voters to his liberal support base, the Democratic party candidate captured the public mood with vows to reform South Korea’s powerful chaebols, family-owned conglomerates, and tackle rising inequality and youth unemployment. Moon has called for a more conciliatory approach to North Korea, after weeks of tensions over the regime’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes.

Once Moon has appointed a prime minister, which requires parliamentary approval, he is expected to adopt the more conciliatory approach towards North Korea advocated by the Nobel peace prize-winner Kim Dae-jung and another former president, Roh Moo-hyun, whom Moon served under as chief of staff.

Syria safe zones on hold amid concern over how deal will be enforced

Russian-backed plans for de-escalation zones in Syria are on hold as the US, France and the UK seek further detail on how exactly the agreement will be enforced. The deal, jointly signed by Russia, Iran and Turkey in Kazakhstan last week, agreed the establishment of four zones intended to halt conflict between government forces and rebels in key areas, and would potentially be policed by foreign troops.

However, the deal has offered little detail on the specifics of the enforcement and in an effort to provide assurances, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will meet the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, on Wednesday in Washington, amid western diplomatic concerns about how the ceasefire will be enforced and monitored.

The Syrian opposition has said it cannot accept a ceasefire agreement being enforced by Iran, as the Astana agreement proposes, while the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has vetoed a role for the UN or other international forces as peacekeepers. The Syrian government says under the agreement, it will be the duty of opposition forces to help expel jihadi fighters from the de-escalation zones.

However, groups such as the al-Nusra Front have gained military strength in the Idlib region and some moderate opposition forces would be reluctant to join Syrian or Russian forces to make them leave, risking further conflict.

Syria says up to 5,000 Chinese Uighurs fighting in militant groups

Up to 5,000 ethnic Uighurs from China's violence-prone far western region of Xinjiang are fighting in various militant groups in Syria, the Syrian ambassador to China said on Monday, adding that Beijing should be extremely concerned about it. China is worried that Uighurs, a mostly Muslim people who speak a Turkic language, have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for militants there, having traveled illegally via Southeast Asia and Turkey.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the killing of a Chinese hostage in 2015, highlighting China's concern about Uighurs it says are fighting in the Middle East.

Hundreds of people have been killed in Xinjiang in the past few years, most in unrest between Uighurs and ethnic majority Han Chinese. The government blames the unrest on Islamist militants who want a separate state called East Turkestan. Syria's ambassador in Beijing, Imad Moustapha, told Reuters on the sidelines of a business forum that while some of the Uighurs were fighting with Islamic State, most were fighting "under their own banner" to promote their separatist cause.

U.S. poised to expand military effort against Taliban in Afghanistan

President Trump’s most senior military and foreign policy advisers have proposed a major shift in strategy in Afghanistan that would effectively put the United States back on a war footing with the Taliban.

The new plan, which still needs the approval of the president, calls for expanding the U.S. military role as part of a broader effort to push an increasingly confident and resurgent Taliban back to the negotiating table, U.S. officials said.

The plan comes at the end of a sweeping policy review built around the president’s desire to reverse worsening security in Afghanistan and “start winning” again, said one U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The new strategy, which has the backing of top Cabinet officials, would authorize the Pentagon, not the White House, to set troop numbers in Afghanistan and give the military far broader authority to use airstrikes to target Taliban militants. It would also lift Obama-era restrictions that limited the mobility of U.S. military advisers on the battlefield.

Turkey's president raises tensions with criticism of Israel

Tensions have resurfaced between Turkey and Israel, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticising the “racist and discriminatory” treatment of Palestinians, and Tel Aviv responding by summoning the Turkish ambassador and condemning Ankara’s human rights record.

Erdogan, Turkey’s president, denounced Israeli practices during an address in Istanbul on Monday night, describing the blockade of Gaza as having “no place in humanity”.

He urged Muslims to visit the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem as a means of supporting the Palestinian cause and called for the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. Erdogan also condemned a Knesset (Israeli parliament) bill to muffle the azan, the Muslim call to prayer, in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

“If you have faith in your religion, why are you afraid of the azan?” he said. “We will not allow the azan to be stopped in al-Quds [the Arabic name for Jerusalem].”

Macron Wins in France

Macron, who ran Hollande’s disastrous economic policy, will be a Trudeau-style leader, very shiny and so on, good on talking about social issues, but his policies are standard neoliberal: Take away workers’ rights, and grind them down in the name of labor market flexibility. These policies won’t improve the economy. ...

It remains a pity that we have to grind this out, in great misery, rather than simply leaping to candidates like Corbyn, Melenchon, or (to a lesser extent) Sanders, but the electorate is still not willing to actually embrace positive change. Even when they want change, they want it done by assholes (Cameron/May/Trump) or by people whose track records indicate servile subservience to neoliberal norms (Trudeau, Obama, Macron).

So be it. We will simply have to wait for death and the time to make changes. It will cost us much misery and many deaths, but it is unavoidable.

Skip to 4:32 if you aren't interested in the presidential election 2nd round wrap-up. France will now be having its legislative elections, which is an opportunity of sorts for the people to determine whether they will stand for Macron's neoliberal bankster agenda.

Emmanuel Macron: Jean-Luc Melenchon warns the President-Elect

Jimmy Carter and Bernie Sanders Explain How Inequality Breeds Authoritarianism

On Monday night, one day after the far-right Marine Le Pen lost France’s presidential election but garnered a record number of votes for her political party, Bernie Sanders and Jimmy Carter sat down together to discuss rising authoritarianism across the globe. ... Asked by the moderator about the rise of authoritarian politics in the United States and elsewhere, both the Vermont senator and former president agreed on a single root cause: political and economic inequality.

“I think the root of it is something that I haven’t heard discussed much,” Carter replied. “I believe the root of the downturn in human rights preceded 2016, it began earlier than that, and I think the reason was disparity in income which has been translated into the average person, you know good, decent, hard-working middle class people feeling that they are getting cheated by the government and by society and they don’t get the same element of health care, they don’t get the same quality education, they don’t get the same political rights.”

“I agree with everything that President Carter said,” Sanders replied.

“Look, here is the situation. You got all over this country tens of millions of people who are extremely angry and they are disappointed. Now we all know as a result of technology workers are producing more today than they did 20 or 30 years ago. Yet despite that you’re seeing people work not 40 hours a week, they’re working 50 or 60 hours a week. Their wages are actually going down!”

Rand Paul asks Intel panel for details on any Obama-era surveillance

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants the Intelligence Committee to disclose whether he or any other members of Congress were surveilled under the Obama administration or by the intelligence community.

Paul sent a letter to Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) pointing to an article from the website Circa alleging that the Obama administration circulated intelligence reports last year that included unredacted names of Americans, including members of Congress. 

"I reiterate my previous requests that your committee promptly investigate whether my name or the names of other members of Congress, or individuals from our staffs or campaigns, were included in queries or searches of databases of the intelligence community, or if their identities were unmasked in any intelligence reports or products," Paul wrote in a letter released publicly Monday. ...

Paul also publicly released an April letter to Trump, which references the same report from Circa, shortly after his tweet. "An anonymous source recently alleged to me that my name, as well as the names of other members of Congress, were unmasked, queried or both in intelligence reports or intercepts during the previous administration," Paul wrote in the letter to Trump, dated April 10.

Trump's FCC Chair Declares New War on Net Neutrality After 10-Year Battle for Free & Open Internet

FCC hit by online attacks after John Oliver criticizes net neutrality proposal

Hours after the comedian John Oliver attacked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, urging viewers to criticize a proposal to loosen net neutrality rules, the website was hit by distributed denial of service attacks, leading it to crash. ...

“Net neutrality is about more than just speed,” Oliver said on the Sunday episode of his show Last Week Tonight. “At its heart, it is the principle that internet service providers, or ISPs like these guys, should not be able to engage in any sort of fuckery that engages or manipulates the choices you make online.”

So Oliver asked viewers to visit a domain named gofccyourself.com — a URL which took users directly to an FCC.gov page where they could make comments about the proposal.By Monday evening, the proposal had nearly 185,000 comments.

Puerto Rico's Financial Future Now in the Hands of a Single Judge Overseeing Massive Bankruptcy

This is an interesting and detailed explanation of what is happening in the Puerto Rico debt crisis. Here's a teaser to get you started:

Puerto Rico’s $123 Billion Bankruptcy Is the Cost of U.S. Colonialism

Last week, Puerto Rico officially became the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the American public bond market. On May 3, a fiscal control board imposed on the island’s government by Washington less than year ago suddenly announced that the Puerto Rico’s economic crisis “has reached a breaking point.” The board asked for the immediate appointment of a federal judge to decide how to deal with a staggering $123 billion debt the commonwealth government and its public corporations owe to both bondholders and public employee pension systems.

The announcement sparked renewed press attention to a Caribbean territory that many have dubbed America’s Greece. The island’s total debt, according to the control board, is unprecedented for any government insolvency in the U.S., and it is certain to mushroom quickly if no action is taken. Detroit’s bankruptcy, by comparison, involved just $18 billion — one-ninth the size of Puerto Rico’s.

Within days, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, acting under a provision of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (known as PROMESA), which was enacted last June, appointed federal judge Laura Taylor Swain from the southern district of New York to take over the Puerto Rico case. A former bankruptcy court judge who was appointed to the federal court by President Clinton, Swain famously presided over the long criminal trial of employees of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. ...

The PROMESA control board has warned that even with massive cuts to government services and new projected revenues from higher taxes and fees, Puerto Rico will still generate slightly less than $8 billion in budget surpluses over the next ten years, when some $35 billion in debt service comes due. In other words, three-quarters of the debt cannot be repaid. ... Years of court battles between Puerto Rico and contending groups of creditors are now certain. “The economy of Puerto Rico will be put on hold for years,” Andrew Rosenberg, adviser to the Ad Hoc Group of Puerto Rico General Obligation Bondholders, told the Associated Press. “Make no mistake: The board has chosen to turn Puerto Rico into the next Argentina.”

Keiser Report: Never-ending Greek bailout

Who’s Watching Wall Street? The Feds Turn a Blind Eye to Goldman’s Game

Goldman Sachs is on a shopping spree. Last week, it spent $500 million to buy 12 percent of Riverstone Holdings, a private equity firm focused on energy investments. This is part of a $2 billion private equity strategy for the vampire squid. Through a couple of subsidiary funds, Goldman has already acquired stakes in private equity players Littlejohn & Co. and ArcLight Capital Partners, and  Accel-KKR, a firm specializing in tech companies.

There’s only one problem with these investments: They’re supposed to be illegal under the Dodd-Frank Act. But “the law” is only as good as the men and women willing to enforce it, as Goldman Sachs has discovered to its delight. Big banks have turned one key section of Dodd-Frank into mush, such that Goldman can flaunt its defiance openly without an ounce of fear. It makes me wonder why House Republicans are working so hard to repeal Wall Street reform when regulators have shown so much willingness to repeal by neglect.

Trump's remarks about Muslims could be what ends the travel ban, testimony suggests

Testy exchanges between judges and lawyers over Donald Trump’s travel ban on Monday indicated that the legality of the president’s executive order could be determined by his prior comments about Muslims. ...

Almost immediately, judges questioned the acting US solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall, about past statements made by Trump on the campaign trail during the presidential election in which he promised a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US.

The comments made by Trump and other remarks about the order that were later made by those in his administration were cited by judges in Maryland and Hawaii as evidence of the order’s animus towards Muslims when the order was blocked in March. “This is not a Muslim ban. Its text doesn’t have to anything to do with religion,” Wall argued on Monday as a number of judges peppered him with questions.

Judge Henry Floyd, a Democratic appointee, asked Wall if there was “anything other than willful blindness” that could prevent the court from interpreting Trump’s prior remarks in connection with the revised order. Judge Robert King, also a Democratic appointee, later added: “He has never repudiated what he said about the Muslim ban. It’s still on his website.”

Just minutes before the hearing began, the pledge appeared to have been removed from Trump’s campaign website, where it had been since December 2015.

Mississippi African Americans besieged by illegal searches, ACLU lawsuit says

Black people in a racially segregated county in Mississippi are living under a permanent state of siege, subjected to repeated unlawful and humiliating searches at police roadblocks, at pedestrian “checkpoints” and even in their homes, according to a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In a complaint lodged with a federal court on Monday, the ACLU paints a devastating picture of systematic racial discrimination by the sheriff’s department of Madison County. The nonpartisan group says the abuses have gone on for decades, in tune with a history of constitutional violations that can be traced in an unbroken line back to the civil rights era. ..

The complaint, prepared by the ACLU and lawyers from the New York firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, has 10 individual plaintiffs acting on behalf of a class of victims that is alleged to stretch into the thousands over at least two decades. It is directed against Sheriff Randy Tucker, who took over the department in 2012 and who is accused of extending and expanding the county’s long history of discrimination, and the local board of supervisors, who allegedly have known about the systematic targeting of black people for at least a decade but have failed to do anything to stop it.

Congressional Republicans are about to see a whole lot of “dead” progressives

Die-ins are the new town halls.

At least, that appears to be the plan of progressive “Resistance” groups Indivisible, MoveOn.org, and the Town Hall Project. On Tuesday they’re set to unveil the Payback Project, a response to the recent passage by House Republicans of Trumpcare. And their version of payback is deadly — metaphorically, at least.

“May 4th will go down in history as the day Republicans set the stage for their own loss of the House in 2018,” says a version of the website shown to VICE News before the public announcement. “But before then, we have work to do.”

The marquee events of the Payback Project will be die-in protests in which demonstrators lay down and play dead to represent the potential toll of the Republican health care bill; it’s a tactic used in the past by AIDS, environmental, and gun-control activists. The Payback Project plans to stage the die-ins outside of congressional offices, fundraisers, and anywhere else a member of Congress who voted for Trumpcare may be.

Sally Yates Testimony Shows White House Lied About Michael Flynn

The true story of Michael Flynn’s departure from the Trump White House is shaping up to be very different from the story the White House pushed forward at the time of his resignation as national security adviser. On Monday afternoon, after weeks of delay, Congress heard public testimony from Sally Yates, a former career prosecutor at the Department of Justice who served as acting attorney general during the first days of Trump’s presidency. Yates testified that she warned Donald F. McGahn II, Trump’s White House counsel, that Flynn’s contacts with the Russian government differed from claims that Vice President Mike Pence and others had made publicly. ...

“The Vice President was unknowingly making false statements to the public,” is how Yates put it. In one of two meetings with McGahn, she told the White House that Flynn’s apparent deception made him vulnerable to blackmail. “We were giving them [the White House] this information so that they could take action,” Yates said in her testimony. The question of whether to fire Flynn was not her call to make, she added. ...

By comparing Yates’s testimony about Flynn’s departure to past statements made by the Trump administration, it appears that the resignation set off a fresh round of deception in the White House. On February 14, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, characterized Yates’s warning as “a heads-up.” “The White House counsel informed the president immediately,” Spicer said. “The president asked him to conduct a review of whether there was a legal situation there. That was immediately determined that there wasn’t.” Spicer’s words appear to contradict what Trump himself told reporters four days earlier when asked about reports that Flynn had misled the administration about contacts with Kislyak. “I don’t know about that,” Trump said. “I haven’t seen it.” ...

Yates made clear in her testimony that her concerns ran deeper than incomplete information. At one point, McGahn had asked Yates why it mattered to the Department of Justice if one White House official lied to another White House official. Yates told him that it wasn’t just Flynn’s fudging about the Russia calls that troubled her and the two senior national security officials who she consulted before taking up the issue with the White House. Something about the content of Flynn’s calls with Russian officials had prompted the department’s national security division to take a closer look.

Barack Obama warned newly elected President Donald Trump against hiring Michael Flynn, White House confirms

Mr Obama warned his successor less than 48 hours after the November election during a conversation in the Oval Office, former Obama officials said. ...

Mr Obama's warning to Mr Trump came before concerns emerged about Mr Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador, a former Obama official told NBC News.

The Democratic president reportedly thought Mr Flynn was not suited for such a high-level position.

Turning Gen. Flynn into Road Kill

Not to defend retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for his suspect judgment, but it should be noted that his case represents a disturbing example of how electronic surveillance and politicized law enforcement can destroy an American citizen’s life in today’s New McCarthyism. The testimony on Monday by former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper offered no evidence of Flynn’s wrongdoing – those facts were deemed “classified” – yet the pair thoroughly destroyed Flynn’s reputation, portraying him as both a liar and a potential traitor.

That Senate Democrats, in particular, saw nothing troubling about this smearing of the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and, briefly, President Trump’s national security adviser was itself troubling. Republicans were a bit more skeptical but no one, it seemed, wanted to be labeled as soft on Russia. So, there was no skepticism toward Yates’s curious assertion that Flynn’s supposed lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the details of a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak somehow opened Flynn to Russian blackmail – her core explanation for why she rushed to Trump’s White House with warnings of this allegedly grave danger.

Yates also talked ominously about “underlying” information that raised further questions about Flynn’s patriotism, but that evidence, too, couldn’t be shared with the American people; it was classified, leaving it to your imagination the depth of Flynn’s perfidy. Despite the thinness of Yates’s charges – and the echoes of Sen. Joe McCarthy with his secret lists of communists that he wouldn’t release – the mainstream U.S. news media has bestowed on Yates a hero status without any concern that she might be exaggerating the highly unlikely possibility that the Russians would have blackmailed Flynn.

Her supposition was that since Vice President Mike Pence’s account of the Kislyak-Flynn conversation deviated somewhat from the details of what was actually said, the Russians would seize on the discrepancy to coerce Flynn to do their bidding. But that really makes no sense, in part, because even if the Russians did pick up the discrepancy, they would assume correctly that U.S. intelligence had its own transcript of the conversation, so there would be no basis for blackmail.

Scott Pruitt is remaking the EPA’s scientific advisory board against staff recommendations, scientist says

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt rejected the advice of his EPA staff in deciding not to reappoint nine scientists to the agency’s Board of Scientific Counselors. The scientists were informed Friday that they will not be asked to return now that their three-year terms have ended. Four other board members also left because they’d already served two terms, which is the maximum allowed.

This means Pruitt will fill 13 of the board’s 18 seats, and he’s expected to fill them with representatives from the private sector industries the EPA regulates. His tenure as Oklahoma attorney general was marked by his close ties to the energy industry and lawsuits he brought against the EPA, and he has been explicit about his desire of make the EPA as friendly to business as possible. ...

The Board of Scientific Counselors was created in 1996 to evaluate the science behind EPA policy-making and serve as an independent advisory arm to the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. (Other federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, use similar advisory committees.) The positions, which are part-time and paid, are traditionally populated almost exclusively by academics and public officials; of the nine scientists whose terms were not renewed, four work in academia and five are in the public sector.

Slow-freezing Alaska soil driving surge in carbon dioxide emissions

Alaska’s soils are taking far longer to freeze over as winter approaches than in previous decades, resulting in a surge in carbon dioxide emissions that could portend a much faster rate of global warming than scientists had previously estimated, according to new research. Measurements of carbon dioxide levels taken from aircraft, satellites and on the ground show that the amount of CO2 emitted from Alaska’s frigid northern tundra increased by 70% between 1975 and 2015, in the period between October and December each year.

Researchers said warming temperatures and thawing soils were the likely cause of the increase in CO2 at a time of year when the upper layers of soil usually start freezing over as winter sets in. In the Arctic summer, the upper level of soil, which sits above a vast sheet of permafrost that covers much of Alaska, thaws out and decomposing organic matter starts to produce CO2. From October, colder temperatures help freeze the soil again, locking up the CO2.

Alaska’s warming autumns and winters are altering this process. Whereas soils 40 years ago took about a month to completely freeze over, the process can now take three months or longer. In some places in the state, the soil is not freezing until January, particularly if there is a layer of insulating snow. The result is a huge and continuing expulsion of CO2, a planet-warming gas, into the atmosphere. In 2013, a particularly warm year racked by wildfires in Alaska, around 40m more tons of CO2 was given out by soils than absorbed by vegetation – an amount four times larger than that emitted by the state’s use of fossil fuels.

Also of Interest

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

Report from Seoul: South Koreans Are Also Voting on Kim Jong-un—and Donald Trump

Syria is the Dam Against More Bloody Chaos

Police in Georgia Are Turning Traffic Stops Into the First Step Toward Deportation

Don't Let Democrats Drive You to Desperation

IMF Report: U.S. Corporate Debt Could Be Trump’s Waterloo

New haul of Homo naledi bones sheds surprising light on human evolution

A Little Night Music

Blind Willie Mctell - Atlanta Strut

Blind Willie McTell - Writing Paper Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Come On Around To My House Mama

Blind Willie McTell - Searching The Desert For The Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Kill It Kid

Blind Willie McTell - Little Delia

Blind Willie McTell - B And O Blues N°2

Blind Willie McTell - Hillbilly Willie's Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Georgia Rag