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“The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.

While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.”

-- Julian Assange

News and Opinion

Congress showed it's willing to fight the FBI on encryption. Finally

Members of Congress did something almost unheard of at Tuesday’s hearing on the brewing battle over encryption between Apple and the FBI: their job. Both Democrats and Republicans grilled FBI director Jim Comey about his agency’s unprecedented demand that Apple weaken the iPhone’s security protections to facilitate surveillance. This would have dire implications for smartphone users around the globe. ...

One judiciary member questioned how the FBI managed to mess up so badly during the San Bernardino investigation and reset the shooter’s password, which is what kicked this whole controversy and court case in motion in the first place. And if the case was such an emergency, why did they wait 50 days to go to court? Another member questioned what happens when China inevitably asks for the same extraordinary powers the FBI is demanding now. Others questioned whether the FBI had really used all the resources available to break into the phone without Apple’s help. For example, why hasn’t the FBI attempted to get the NSA’s help to get into the phone, since hacking is their job? ...

More than anything, though, the members of Congress expressed anger that the FBI director didn’t follow through earlier on his stated intention to engage in a debate in Congress and the public about the proper role for encryption in society. Instead, he decided to circumvent that debate altogether and quietly go to court to get a judge to do what the legislative branch has so far refused to do. ...

The court hearing in the San Bernardino case is in two weeks, and there is no doubt that this is really only the beginning of the debate. But, for the first time, it seems like Congress has finally opened its eyes to the long-term effects of designing vulnerabilities into our communications systems and forcing tech companies to becomes investigative arms of the government.

US defense chief tells Silicon Valley: 'encryption is essential'

The escalating encryption fight between Apple and the FBI has a prominent dissenter inside the government: US defense secretary Ashton Carter.

The powerful Pentagon chief has not publicly undercut the FBI’s demands for Apple to write software undermining security features on its iPhone, which the bureau says is necessary to investigate the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

Yet Carter, according to people familiar with his thinking, has grown concerned that the increasingly bitter showdown between Apple and the bureau is jeopardizing his own efforts to forge closer ties with Silicon Valley – a major priority of his tenure at the Pentagon. As Comey fights encryption, Carter is bear-hugging it. ...

Carter declined to comment specifically on the Apple case other than to say one incident shouldn’t determine the final outcome of the privacy fight. But he is understood to think the FBI is not unreasonable in its demand in the Apple case. The defense chief is concerned that the fight is leaving the tech industry confused about how the government views encryption, and the acrimony surrounding it is deepening the post-Edward Snowden rift between the government and Silicon Valley.

Still, the defense secretary in conversation with the venture capitalist Ted Schlein, who is himself close to Washington, urged technology companies to look for ways to compromise with the government. If they don’t, the pair warned, both the industry and the government will have to deal with legislation written by Congress “who don’t have the technical knowledge”, Carter said. “It may be written in an atmosphere of anger and grief.”

Syria: Amnesty blames Russia and Assad's troops for directly targeting hospitals

Syrian Kurds: Over 200 Killed in Fighting With ISIS Over Tel Abyad

ISIS attacked the town of Tel Abyad, on the Syria-Turkey border, over the weekend and fighting raged for several days. The Kurdish YPG is claiming victory, but a costly one, claiming over 200 people were killed in the fighting there.

YPG official Redur Xelil reported 140 ISIS fighters were killed in the battle, along with 43 YPG fighters. 23 civilian bystanders were also slain in the course of the fighting over the key border crossing.

Initial reports were that some of the ISIS fighters who attacked Tel Abyad crossed in from the Turkish side of the border.

Europe migrants crisis: Greece tries to house migrants as other gates close

Iraq’s Interior Minister on Why His Country Is Impotent Against Isis

When Mohammed al-Ghabban became Interior Minister of Iraq in 2014, he found that he was employing 230 brigadier generals and 660,000 policemen.

The vastly bloated size of the Iraqi security forces, most of whose members hold their jobs through political patronage, goes a long way to explaining why they cannot stop Isis bombers murdering people in the streets and markets of Baghdad. ...

The Iraqi bureaucracy is like a beached whale that does little except employ seven million people whose salaries cost $4bn a month. With Iraqi oil revenues running at half that figure because of the fall in the oil price, there is deep apprehension in Baghdad about what happens when the money begins to run out in April. One woman said that “even when things were at their worst in Baghdad in 2006-07, when there were the mass sectarian killings, people were still being paid their salaries.”

Iraq has an all-embracing client or patronage system whereby ordinary people get a cut of the oil revenues by holding a job for which they are paid, though they may do little or no work and a sizable proportion of job-holders may not even exist. The interior ministry employs everybody from traffic policemen to paramilitary assault troops, most of them untrained but so numerous that almost all its money has to go on salaries.

Where police have been trained for free abroad by foreign police forces, as happened in Italy, few of those returning to Iraq take up a post in which their expertise is of any use.

Another senior government official, who did not want his name published, said in a separate interview: “We have nearly one million fighters [army and police] but we would be much more effective if we had only 200,000.” ...

Iraqi ministries fulfil some useful functions, albeit slowly, inefficiently and corruptly; but even this may be impossible if falling oil revenues are insufficient to pay state employees who make up so much of the Iraqi workforce. Asked what would happen then, the senior government official replied: “Then we all go to hell.”

US Pacific Chief Urges Naval Coalition to Target China

Amid plans for a new naval exercise in the Philippine Sea, US Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris Jr. talked up the notion of reviving an effort to establish a naval coalition, including the US, India, Japan, and Australia, to confront China. ...

The US has been keen to pick a fight with China over its South China Sea territorial claims, backing everyone else in the region so long as their claims conflict with China’s. The US seems keen to get other significant regional navies to help with the cost of hassling China about these disputes.

Mexican Government Slammed by New Report on Torture and Illegal Killings

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has slammed the Mexican government for making the country's "very serious" human rights crisis worse by not doing enough to tackle impunity. ...

The report, released on Wednesday and based on a visit to Mexico carried out by members of the Commission in September, places its critique firmly within the context of the country's drug wars that, according to estimated figures from the United Nations, had killed over 150,000 people by mid-2015.

It blames the military-led offensive launched by former President Felipe Calderón in December 2006 for both failing to contain criminal violence and encouraging human rights violations. It says that these have continued unabated during the current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The report highlights disappearances — both those carried out by criminal groups and forced disappearances involving members of the security forces. It also underlines evidence of extrajudicial murders, and torture, and stresses the particular vulnerability of women, children, migrants, human rights defenders, and journalists. At multiple points it lambasts the authorities for failing to properly investigate or prosecute crimes.

A Dark Legacy: Hillary Clinton’s Role in the Mexican Drug War

Mexico, John M. Ackerman wrote recently for Foreign Policy, “is not a functional democracy.” Instead, it’s a “repressive and corrupt” oligarchy propped up by a “blank check” from Washington.

Since 2008, that blank check has come to over $2.5 billion appropriated in security aid through the Mérida Initiative, a drug war security assistance program funded by Washington. Negotiated behind closed doors in the last years of the Bush administration, the plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.

Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites. ...

U.S. laws explicitly prohibit the delivery of aid to foreign individuals and units implicated in systematic human rights violations. But files released by WikiLeaks revealed that Clinton’s State Department regularly received information on widespread “official corruption“ in Mexico, even as they were bolstering the flow of equipment, assistance, and training that ended up in the hands of abusive and compromised security forces.

Indeed, in 2009 and 2010 — the middle years of Clinton’s tenure at State — U.S. embassy cables boasted that intelligence and military cooperation between the two countries had never been better. Such cables, and the full archival orbit of declassified and leaked U.S. and Mexican records, demonstrate that Clinton’s State Department repeatedly cleared the delivery of U.S. assistance training and equipment to security forces implicated in corruption or abuse.

German Lawyers Seek to Criminally Charge Facebook's Zuckerberg Over Hate Speech

Activist German attorneys who have faced resistance in their quest to hold Facebook accountable to Germany's hate speech laws are now accusing Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's founder and chief executive, of facilitating the posting of anti-Semitic and other inflammatory content online.

It is illegal to incite hatred and to distribute or publicly display Nazi symbols in Germany, but they can still be found on Facebook's platform. The lawyers are therefore pushing for criminal charges against Zuckerberg and want him to pay a €150 million fine (around $163 million) for the violations.

"I think Facebook has changed German society — not for the good," said Chan-jo Jun, a Bavaria-based lawyer who launched the challenge last week along with Cologne attorney Christian Solmecke, in an interview with VICE News. "I wanted to find out if the German legal system would prevail against an American company."

Jun has a list of more than 300 Facebook pages and posts that contain swastikas and other Nazi-related images as well as calls for violence against the Middle Eastern and North African migrants who have flooded Germany over the past year. ...

Jun and Solmecke recently filed the lawsuit against Zuckerberg because German prosecutors refused to take action on another lawsuit that they filed against the company's German executives last year. Those prosecutors claimed that the executives were marketers who couldn't be held responsible for the Silicon Valley company's behavior, according to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Oregon governor signs landmark tiered minimum wage increase into law

The three-tiered system will raise minimum wage in Portland to $14.75, smaller cities to $13.50 and rural areas to $12.50 over a six-year period

Oregon’s governor on Wednesday signed trailblazing legislation that will raise the minimum wage to nearly $15 in six years, and do so through a three-tiered system that has not been tried anywhere else in the country. ...

Oregon’s plan follows moves in states such as Massachusetts, California and Vermont that recently boosted statewide minimums above $10.

The Oregon increases over six years surpass those adopted by any other state so far. Oregon’s current minimum wage is $9.25 an hour.

What makes the Oregon plan especially different is that the minimums will be based on where workers are employed. The approach aims to balance the needs of the rapidly growing urban powerhouse of Portland with the state’s struggling farming communities, which have long been deeply divided by their economic, cultural and political differences.

What Needs to Change: A Conversation on Policing and Race with Michelle Alexander

A Third of the People Who Got Shot Last Year by LAPD Officers Were Mentally Ill

More than a third of the people who were shot last year by Los Angeles cops were mentally ill, according to a new study in which the city's police department examined its own record on the use of force over the past four years. ...

The LAPD claims that the numbers are forcing it to reconsider some of its own procedures. The department is relying more on tasers and bean-bag guns, and will retrain its officers on use of force best practices. But the LAPD's own report showed that nearly a quarter of the 1,900 non-firearm uses of force — including the use of a Taser or bean-bag shotgun — last year involved a suspect that officers thought to be mentally ill.

Police Chief Charlie Beck promised on Tuesday that 1,100 LAPD officers will be trained over the next year in how to more effectively approach people who are mentally ill.

The LAPD's report also provides details on the department's overall record on shootings going back to 2011. In 2015, the police shot 48 people — up 60 percent from the previous year. Of those 48 shootings, 21 suspects were killed. Overall, between 2011 and 2015, LAPD officers fired their weapons at 223 people, killing 97.

Texas trooper indicted in Sandra Bland traffic stop and arrest is formally fired

A Texas trooper indicted over his arrest of a black woman who was later found dead in jail has been formally fired, three months after his bosses first announced they would do so, state officials said Wednesday.

Brian Encinia can still appeal the decision to fire him, which came after a grand jury indicted him on a perjury charge in December. He was accused of lying about his July 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland and their confrontational traffic stop that was caught on dashcam video.

Encinia had been on paid desk duty since Bland’s arrest and remained on the payroll after McCraw announced in December that the agency would begin the process of firing him. He is now no longer a paid employee and will remain that way even if he appeals his dismissal to the state’s public safety commission, department of public safety spokesman Tom Vinger said.

Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan Blast Texas Anti-Choice Law, But Will Their Male Colleagues Follow Suit?

Scalia's Absence Looms Large as Supreme Court Hears Biggest Abortion Case in Decades

All eyes were on Justice Anthony Kennedy on Wednesday as the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the biggest abortion case to come before the nation's top judicial body in two decades. The eight justices who remain on the bench after the recent death of Antonin Scalia are largely divided along ideological lines — except for Kennedy, who has a mixed record when it comes to abortion cases. That means the future of US abortion law will likely hinge on his swing vote. ...

Three years ago, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry vowed to make abortion "a thing of a past." He proceeded to sign House Bill 2 (HB2), enacting what is widely regarded to be the toughest law on abortion in the country. The current Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has maintained support for HB2, arguing that it is designed to "improve the standard of care" and protect women's health.

HB2's opponents, such as pro-choice organization NARAL, insist that lawmakers are using concern for women's health as means to disguise efforts to "ban abortion by chipping away at access and undermining a woman's autonomy."

Stiglitz: Anger Over 'Failed Economy' is Shaping US Election

Inequality is shaping the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as voters disillusioned by the financial crisis and Wall Street greed increasingly turn to populist candidates like Bernie Sanders, who has made economic inequality a central platform of his campaign, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Wednesday. ...

"Americans have seen lots of injustices—people were thrown out of their houses that didn’t owe money, and none of the bankers were held accountable" for their roles in the financial crisis, Stiglitz said. "I think that really has motivated the anger across the spectrum." ...

On Wednesday, Stiglitz pointed out that 91 percent of economic gains made since the 2008 recession went to the top one percent of earners, while the minimum wage has failed to keep up with the pace of inflation by more than 60 years.

"The American economy is a failed economy," he said. "We have to once again rewrite the rules of the economy for the 21st century.

Mrs. Clinton, This Is How We Previously Handled Classified Material

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. ... While Hillary Clinton has said that none of the emails were classified at the time they were sent, the Post notes that “I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general of the intelligence community, has indicated that some of the material intelligence officials have reviewed contained information that was classified at the time it was sent.” ...

The idea that a Yale Law School graduate and two-term Senator like Hillary Clinton would not understand the gross negligence involved in transmitting tens of thousands of, at the very least, highly sensitive government communications from a household server raises a host of concerns about what was really going on. These are the same concerns that have dogged Hillary and Bill Clinton throughout their government careers: that there is one set of rules for the little people and effectively no rules for the Clintons. From the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to deregulating derivatives to destabilizing Libya, they break a lot of stuff then walk away, leaving the U.S. taxpayer to clean up the mess. And in the process, they become worth over $100 million – a significant part of which comes from speaking fees from the very Wall Street firms that benefited from Bill Clinton’s mass financial deregulation.

Hillary Clinton’s current lead in the Democratic primary is just as deeply a crisis as Donald Trump’s lead is in the Republican primary. This is what years of tolerating voting for the lesser evil has delivered voters in the United States. The leader in the Democratic primary for U.S. President is under a criminal investigation while the Republican leader is being called a fraud and a con man by his own party.

No one should view Hillary Clinton as the lesser evil. At this point we don’t know the full range of the FBI’s criminal investigation. Should Hillary become the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in July and then be charged by the FBI before the November election, potentially throwing the election to Trump, that could well render her the greater evil.

Justice Dept. grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server

The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.

The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.

As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents are likely to want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said. ...

So far, there is no indication that prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the email investigation to subpoena testimony or documents, which would require the participation of a U.S. attorney’s office.

James Comey, FBI director, says he’s ‘very close personally’ to overseeing Clinton email probe

FBI Director James Comey told a House panel Tuesday that he is personally reviewing the probe of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server while she ran the State Department.

Responding to a question from Rep. Steve Chabot, Ohio Republican, Mr. Comey said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing that he's overseeing aspects of the federal probe.

"I can assure you is that I am very close personally to that investigation to ensure that we have the resources we need, including people and technology, and that it's done the way the FBI tries to do all of it's work: independently, competently and promptly. That's our goal, and I'm confident that it's being done that way, but I can't give you any more details beyond that," Mr. Comey testified.

Col. Wilkerson: The Foreign Policy of Clinton, Trump, Cruz & Rubio "Frighten Me"

Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury Department

BlackRock is far from a household name, but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company.

Fink has made clear his desire to become Treasury Secretary someday. The Obama administration had him on the short list to replace Timothy Geithner. When that didn’t materialize, he pulled several members of prior Treasury Departments into high-level positions at the firm, which may improve the prospects of realizing his dream in a future Clinton administration.

And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda. ...

Fink’s most telling hire, however, is Cheryl Mills, arguably Clinton’s most trusted confidante. Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was deputy White House counsel in the Bill Clinton administration, and is on the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. Fink hired Mills for the BlackRock board of directors in October 2013, in what observers mused was a ploy to insinuate himself into the Clinton inner circle.

[The article contains a striking, detailed comparison of Fink's and Clinton's stated positions on financial issues, worth taking a peek at. And then there's the following... - js]

Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter. Fink owes his initial backing at BlackRock to Pete Peterson, the former commerce secretary who has been at the forefront of the campaign to cut or privatize Social Security. He sat on the steering committee of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a stalking horse for Peterson’s ideas.

[Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism has a great companion commentary to Dayen's above article which I'm appending a piece of here. - js]

Social Security Privatizer Larry Fink of Giant Asset Manager BlackRock is a Clinton Treasury Secretary in Waiting

The big cause for pause is Fink’s devotion to the idea that Social Security should be privatized. ...

Privatizing Social Security is another big business looting opportunity. Social Security is extraordinarily efficient from an administrative standpoint, even before you get to the fact that a retirement plan ultimately depends on the future earning power of the economy. But rather than focus on things that support that, like wage growth and productive investment, our elites promote the barmy logic of trying to starve the economy by limiting or even more insanely, eliminating Federal government debt.

Private accounts will always be worse due to the much greater costs of running them. And that’s why Wall Street salivates over the idea of privatizing Social Security: retail investment is the highest fee part of the market, so the more they can do to get policymakers to drive assets in that direction, the more big financiers will make.

And there’s every reason to doubt Clinton’s claim that she won’t cut or privatize Social Security. Bill was ready to privatize Social Security, but l’affaire Monica intervened. Ordinary Americans need to thank her for her service, in both senses of the word.

Measures that lower Social Security payouts in real terms, like chained CPI, have been given the Orwellian label of “strengthening Social Security.” As Lambert said in a 2015 post, Hillary Clinton on Social Security Expansion: Words are Wind. A Cold Wind.:

In summary:

• Clinton will not commit to Social Security expanson
• Clinton would like to turn Social Security into a welfare program, destroying it
• Clinton would like a Social Security Commission, and past such commissions have produced unconscionable results.

In other words, if Clinton wins the Presidency and announces Larry Fink as her Treasury Secretary nominee, NC readers will recognize this as a Timothy Geithner moment, that electioneering promises have just been repudiated. Be warned.

The Libya Gamble: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Push for War & the Making of a Failed State

Why Let Red States Choose the Democratic Nominee?

The establishment media is declaring Hillary Clinton the Democratic Party nominee. Since when do red states choose the nominee? Will Hillary Clinton win South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Iowa, or Texas in November? She might win Virginia, Arkansas, Nevada – and probably would win Massachusetts.

So Hillary Clinton has won one blue state and it’s game over? Not so fast.

Massachusetts was essentially a dead heat. Minnesota went to Sanders, and of course Vermont, another blue state, went to Bernie.

Oklahoma will go red in November. Colorado and New Hampshire are purple and Hillary’s Nevada and Virginia could go either way.

Can we put the brakes on here and have some primaries in the blue states before we decide who the Democratic nominee is?

Hillary Clinton’s margins in the South were impressive and have helped her to build a substantial lead in the all-important pledged delegates. But let’s put it into perspective: it was the South. It was Republican country. The Dixiecrats are Republicans now.

Let’s face it, the Democratic Leadership Council’s goal has been achieved again. By front-loading the nomination process with southern states they have given the momentum to a moderate candidate. It is a system rigged against a progressive insurgent candidate.

Why It Matters That Hillary Clinton Championed Welfare Reform

Hot on the campaign trail in South Carolina last week, Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her role in pushing to overhaul the welfare system in 1996. “I spoke out against so-called welfare reform because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable. Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform—strongly supported it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage.” A day later, former President Bill Clinton swiped back. “There’s no question that [welfare reform] did far more good than harm,” he said, but added that “subsequent events showed it needs some improvement.”

The Clintons have championed welfare reform for over 20 years—even as study after study has shown that it has severely harmed poor families, and driven a historic number of black and Latino children into deep poverty. In the early 1990s, they designed a strategy to lure white voters back to the Democratic Party: capitalize on white disgust toward “dependent” black and Latina mothers on welfare within a liberal veneer that promised them a “hand-up, rather than a handout.” As first lady, she not only cheered her husband’s goal to “end welfare as we know it,” but she also helped whip up support for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the legislation that remade the welfare system: “I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage,” she recounted in her 2003 memoir Living History. Later, as senator, she continued to applaud it, referring in one 2002 interview to people who had left welfare as “no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive.” Even as recently as her 2008 run for president, she defended the welfare-to-work legislation as “enormously successful,” while lamenting that “people who are more vulnerable” would suffer more during the recession. ...

But in her current campaign for president, Clinton, who is running as a “pragmatic progressive,” has publicly avoided the issue. At a time when many Americans are outraged over economic and racial injustice, she is quiet on the subject of welfare reform, because it tells a story of how she betrayed poor people of color and undermines her image as a feminist candidate who has been a lifelong champion for women and children.

Yet, nearly two decades after the Clintons helped make PRWORA the law of the land, welfare reform remains a defining “antipoverty” policy—one that urgently needs to be discussed. Its legacy still ripples through the country, where families remain as poor as—or, in many cases, poorer than—before, but with one crucial difference: Today, the “reformed” welfare system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitative, poverty-wage jobs and dangerous personal situations, deters them from college, and contributes to the growing trend of poor mothers who can neither find a job nor access public assistance. It is our failed social policy—not simply the recession—that is responsible for crisis-level poverty in the United States.

One Woman Climate Killer: "How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World"

One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the "best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people." But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania's parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment's lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania's parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria's eased its moratorium.

The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton's diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel.

Oil and gas industry has pumped millions into Republican campaigns

Fossil fuel millionaires collectively pumped more than $100m into Republican presidential contenders’ efforts last year – in an unprecedented investment by the oil and gas industry in the party’s future.

About one in three dollars donated to Republican hopefuls from mega-rich individuals came from people who owe their fortunes to fossil fuels – and who stand to lose the most in the fight against climate change.

The scale of investment by fossil fuel interests in presidential Super Pacs reached about $107m last year – before any votes were cast in the Republican primary season.

Campaign groups said the funds raised questions about what kind of leverage the fossil fuel industry might enjoy if the Republicans were to take the White House.

Ted Cruz, the Texas senator seen as having the best chance of stopping Donald Trump from clinching the Republican nomination, was among the biggest beneficiaries of fossil fuel support to his Super Pac.

Cruz, who more than any other Republican candidate openly rejects mainstream science on climate change, banked some 57% of the funds to his Super Pac, or about $25m, from fossil fuel interests, according to campaign filings compiled by Greenpeace and reviewed by the Guardian. ...

However, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, appears to have made inroads into the ranks of the favoured. Mega-rich fossil fuel donors pumped about 7% of the funds into Clinton’s Super Pac last year, according to the filings. Clinton was criticised by Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, her erstwhile rival, for taking funds from fossil fuel lobbyists.

US agency says it has beaten Elon Musk and Gates to holy grail of battery storage

Breakthrough in next generation of storage batteries could transform the US electrical grid within five to 10 years, says research agency, Arpa-E

A US government agency says it has attained the “holy grail” of energy – the next-generation system of battery storage, that has has been hotly pursued by the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E) – a branch of the Department of Energy – says it achieved its breakthrough technology in seven years.

Ellen Williams, Arpa-E’s director, said: “I think we have reached some holy grails in batteries – just in the sense of demonstrating that we can create a totally new approach to battery technology, make it work, make it commercially viable, and get it out there to let it do its thing,” ...

The most promising developments are in the realm of large-scale energy storage systems, which electricity companies need to put in place to bring more solar and wind power on to the grid.

She said projects funded by Arpa-E had the potential to transform utility-scale storage, and expand the use of micro-grids by the military and for disaster relief. Projects were also developing faster and more efficient super conductors, and relying on new materials beyond current lithium-ion batteries.

The companies incubated at Arpa-E have developed new designs for batteries, and new chemistries, which are rapidly bringing down the costs of energy storage, she said.

“Our battery teams have developed new approaches to grid-scale batteries and moved them out,” Williams said. Three companies now have batteries on the market, selling grid-scale and back-up batteries. Half a dozen other companies are developing new batteries, she added.

Has Flint's Smoking Gun Finally Emerged?

As evidence against the state government continues to accrue, Michigan House Democratic leader Tim Greimel on Wednesday became the first member of the state legislature to join a growing call for Gov. Rick Snyder's resignation over Flint's water contamination crisis.

"It's now clear that for over a year the governor's top aides and advisers wrote thousands of emails relating to the Flint situation, and that they held many meetings and had many conversations about Flint," said Greimel. "It is inconceivable that the governor wasn't aware of what was going on. In fact, the governor's own chief of staff came out last week and indicated that he had been keeping the governor informed all along the way."

Meanwhile, an email contained in ongoing data dumps shows that Snyder planned to discuss "Flint water" with top staffers in February 2015—nearly nine months before the governor has said he knew about a water crisis in Flint.

Progress Michigan said Wednesday:

The message was sent on February 17, 2015 to the Rick for Michigan campaign email account — rather than the official state email account — of Allison Scott, the executive director to the governor, and shows that Rick Snyder wanted to personally discuss the “Flint water” situation with top officials in his administration, among other issues. The email seems to be proof that Gov. Snyder lied each and every time he claimed that his staff never brought the crisis to him and that it was not on his radar.

"Gov. Snyder wants us to believe that he knew nothing of the problems in Flint and that he was poorly served by his staffers. This email shows that Snyder was not only aware of the Flint Water Crisis but was concerned enough to discuss it with high-ranking staff in February of 2015," said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan.

WWF accused of facilitating human rights abuses of tribal people in Cameroon

Conservation organisation funds and logistically aids anti-poaching eco-guards who are victimising pygmy groups, claims tribal defence group

WWF, the world’s largest conservation organisation, has been accused by leading tribal defence group Survival International of inadvertently facilitating serious human rights abuses against pygmy groups living in Cameroonian rainforests.

In a 228-page formal complaint to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD), Survival alleges that anti-poaching eco-guards who were part-funded and logistically helped by WWF, victimised the hunter gatherer Baka people, razed to the ground their camps, destroyed or confiscated their property, forced them to relocate and have regularly used physical force and threats of violence against them.

The complaint, which covers several years and is the first to be taken against a conservation group, alleges that WWF broke both OECD guidelines for the conduct of multinational companies and the UN declaration on human rights.

The complaint contains eye-witness accounts of alleged brutality, video testimonies, and reports from the Cameroonian press accusing the eco guards guards of violent actions against the pygmy groups. The complaint has not yet been heard.

The Baka, who have traditionally lived in what are now Cameroonian national parks, have been forbidden to enter many of their traditional hunting areas, even though their hunting is said to have minimal impact on the environment. Meanwhile, the forests have been overrun by militarised groups and large-scale poachers with buffer zones rented to safari companies. The net result, says the complaint, is that life has become impossible for the Baka. ...

WWF has responded saying it provides human rights training for the eco-guards.

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