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The important consequences to the American States from this Declaration of Independence, considered as the ground and foundation of a future government, naturally suggest the propriety of proclaiming it in such a manner as that the people may be universally informed of it."

-- John Hancock

News and Opinion

Spain has announced it is taking control of Catalonia

Spain will move to impose direct rule on Catalonia this weekend, after the region’s leader refused to drop his bid for independence. A statement from the Prime Minister’s office Thursday said the government would invoke Article 155 of the constitution, giving it the power to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy and take over the running of its institutions.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said the move would be taken at a special cabinet meeting at which lawmakers would decide on measures to “restore the constitutional order” in Catalonia.

The move to scrap Catalonia’s autonomy – considered Madrid’s “nuclear option” in the standoff – came after Catalan president Carles Puigdemont ignored the 10 a.m. deadline by which to abandon his campaign to secede. Rather than backing down, Puigdemont said the region could formally declare independence if Madrid did not engage in talks – something the Spanish government has repeatedly refused to entertain.

“Despite all our efforts and our will for dialogue, the fact that your only answer is canceling our autonomy indicates that that you do not understand the problem and do not wish to talk,” he wrote. Puigdemont also accused Madrid of the “repression” of separatist leaders, after two were taken into custody earlier this week.

Catalonia Referendum: Spain calls extraordinary Cabinet meeting after Catalan leader’s threat

Catalonia to formally declare independence if Spain suspends regional autonomy: source

Catalonia’s regional president told a meeting of his party he would formally declare independence if Spain starts the process of suspending the region’s autonomy on Thursday, a Catalan government source said on Wednesday.

Iraq takes disputed areas as Kurds 'withdraw to 2014 lines'

Iraq's military says it has completed an operation to retake disputed areas held by Kurdish forces since 2014. On Monday and Tuesday troops retook the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk and its oilfields, as well as parts of Nineveh and Diyala provinces. Peshmerga fighters had seized the areas while battling so-called Islamic State.

The military operation came three weeks after the Kurds held an independence referendum, which Iraq's prime minister said was now a "thing of the past". Mr Abadi called for dialogue with the Kurdistan Regional Government on Tuesday night, saying he wanted a "national partnership" based on Iraq's constitution.

People living in the Kurdistan Region and the disputed areas overwhelmingly backed secession in the referendum, but Mr Abadi declared it illegal and rejected calls from Kurdish leaders for negotiations.

Iran Doesn’t Have a Nuclear Weapons Program. Why Do Media Keep Saying It Does?

When it comes to Iran, do basic facts matter? Evidently not, since dozens and dozens of journalists keep casually reporting that Iran has a “nuclear weapons program” when it does not—a problem FAIR has reported on over the years (e.g., 9/9/15). Let’s take a look at some of the outlets spreading this falsehood in just the past five days:

• Business Insider (10/13/17): “The deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), aims to incentivize Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program by lifting crippling international economic sanctions.”
• New Yorker (10/16/17): “One afternoon in late September, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called a meeting of the six countries that came together in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
• Washington Post (10/16/17): “The administration is also considering changing or scrapping an international agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
• CNN (10/17/17): “In reopening the nuclear agreement, [Trump] risks having Iran advance its nuclear weapons program at a time when he confronts a far worse nuclear challenge from North Korea that he can’t resolve.”

The problem with all of these excerpts: Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. It has a civilian nuclear energy program, but not one designed to build weapons. Over 30 countries have civilian nuclear programs; only a handful—including, of course, the US and Israel—have nuclear weapons programs. One is used to power cities, one is used to level them. ...

The distinction between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is, of course, non-trivial. Every time the media mindlessly report Iran has a “nuclear weapons program” rather than a “nuclear program” (or, better, a “nuclear energy” or “nuclear power program”), they further advance the myth that Iran’s intentions or “ambitions” are to build a nuclear bomb, which is something we have no evidence it is doing or plans to do—at least since the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against building nuclear weapons in 2003 (Foreign Policy, 10/16/14).

Diplomats really don’t want Trump in range of North Korean soldiers

Officials in Washington and Seoul are desperate to stop Donald Trump visiting the DMZ next month — in case he starts a war.

White House staff have already scouted locations inside the demilitarized zone on the North Korean border, according to the Yonhap news agency, with Trump scheduled to visit the Peninsula as part of his 12-day, five-country tour of Asia next month.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Tillerson scolds China for not playing by international rules

Rex Tillerson blasted China for challenging “rules-based order” during a Wednesday speech in Washington, accusing Beijing of undermining the sovereignty of its neighbors.

The secretary of state’s remarks came a day after President Xi Jinping boasted China was ready to take “center stage in the world,” and three weeks before Donald Trump visits the Middle Kingdom.

“China, while rising alongside India, has done so less responsibly, at times undermining the international, rules-based order,” Tillerson’s said during an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the capital.

The top U.S. diplomat, who will visit India next week, also praised the sub-continent as a vital U.S. “partner.” “We’ll never have the same relationship with China, a non-democratic society,” he said.

'A huge deal' for China as the era of Xi Jinping Thought begins

China’s communist leader, Xi Jinping, looks to have further strengthened his rule over the world’s second largest economy with the apparent confirmation that a new body of political theory bearing his name will be written into the party’s constitution. On day two of a week-long political summit in Beijing marking the end of Xi’s first term, state media announced the creation of what it called Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. ...

Experts say the decision to grant Xi his own eponymous school of thought, while arcane-sounding, represents a momentous and highly symbolic occasion in the politics and history of the world’s most populous nation. Only two previous leaders – Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping – have been honoured in such a way, with theories called Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory. The names of Xi’s immediate predecessors – Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin – were not attached to the political philosophies they bequeathed to the party. ...

“It is a huge deal,” said Orville Schell, a veteran China expert who has been studying Chinese politics since the late 1950s. “It is sort of like party skywriting. If you get your big think in the constitution it becomes immortal and Xi is seeking a certain kind of immortality.”

However, Schell, the head of the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, said the decision to honour Xi was not only noteworthy “because it makes Xi Jinping look like a thought leader comparable to Chairman Mao. It also suggests that [China’s political system] Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is a viable counter-model to the presumption of western liberal democracy and capitalism. In a sense, what Xi is setting up here is not only a clash of civilisation and values, but one of political and economic systems.”

An interesting article, here's a taste to get you started:

How Bill Clinton Accidentally Started Another Cold War

Who bears responsibility for the current tensions between America and Russia? There are many answers to that question but blame is overdue to President Bill Clinton who in 1994 sealed the fate of any potential U.S.-Russia partnership when he made the decision to expand the NATO alliance into Moscow’s former sphere of influence. That set the stage for a renewed great power struggle in Europe against a revanchist Russia, just as legendary diplomat George F. Kennan repeatedly warned the Clinton administration that it would.

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” Kennan wrote on February 5, 1997 in a New York Times op-ed. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Kennan’s sage advice was ignored, and the exact scenario he warned about has today come to pass. More than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, relations between Moscow and Washington are at their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, some have suggested that the United States and Russia are entering into a new cold war of sorts.

As a liberal internationalist, Clinton was dedicated to the goal of spreading democracy and promoting free-market reforms in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc. The idea was rooted in the Kantian democratic peace theory that was popularized at the time by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay “The End of History” in The National Interest. The problem ultimately was in the idea’s execution and perhaps a certain level of naiveté on Clinton’s part.

As nuclear threat mushrooms, experts group says situation worse than Cold War

Dozens of experts and former senior officials from around the world met in the French capital last week to discuss the threat of nuclear proliferation, something they believe is ignored despite the dire situation and — according to some — worse than it was during the Cold War. The Iran deal, the risk posed by North Korea and the ever-present potential that the two atomic powers India and Pakistan will go to war were deemed the most pressing threats at the 10th anniversary conference of the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe.

But they were not seen as the most dangerous. That distinction belonged to the deteriorating ties between United States and Russia, which possess more nuclear weapons than every other country combined, several times over. (The US and Russia each have approximately 7,000 warheads. France, with the next largest stockpile, has about 300, according to the Federation of American Scientists.)

Blaming Russia for the Internet ‘Sewer’

With the U.S. government offering tens of millions of dollars to combat Russian “propaganda and disinformation,” it’s perhaps not surprising that we see “researchers” such as Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University making the absurd accusation that the Russians have “basically turned [the Internet] into a sewer.”

I’ve been operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can assure you that the Internet has always been “a sewer” — in that it has been home to crazy conspiracy theories, ugly personal insults, click-bait tabloid “news,” and pretty much every vile prejudice you can think of. Whatever some Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to its $27 billion in annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out of Twitter’s 328 million monthly users), the Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing through the Internet.

Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and pretty much every other segment of the world’s population didn’t need Russian help to turn the Internet into an informational “sewer.” But, of course, fairness and proportionality have no place in today’s Russia-gate frenzy. After all, your “non-governmental organization” or your scholarly “think tank” is not likely to get a piece of the $160 million that the U.S. government authorized last December to counter primarily Russian “propaganda and disinformation” if you explain that the Russians are at most responsible for a tiny trickle of “sewage” compared to the vast rivers of “sewage” coming from many other sources. If you put the Russia-gate controversy in context, you also are not likely to have your “research” cited by The Washington Post as Albright did on Thursday because he supposedly found some links at the home-décor/fashion site Pinterest to a few articles that derived from a few of the 470 Facebook accounts and pages that Facebook suspects of having a link to Russia and shut them down. (To put that 470 number into perspective, Facebook has about two billion monthly users.)

Albright’s full quote about the Russians allegedly exploiting various social media platforms on the Internet was: “They’ve gone to every possible medium and basically turned it into a sewer.” ...

Even former Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has acknowledged the absurdity of thinking that such piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4 billion presidential campaign, plus all the billions of dollars worth of free-media attention to the conventions, debates, etc. Based on what’s known about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that “the actual electioneering [in battleground states] amounts to about $6,500.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, “I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate.”

Jacinda Ardern to be New Zealand's next PM after Labour coalition deal

Jacinda Ardern has said she is “privileged and humbled” to become New Zealand’s next prime minister 26 days after the country’s electorate cast their votes.

At an eagerly awaited press conference on Thursday, the kingmaker Winston Peters announced that his New Zealand First party would throw its support behind Ardern’s Labour party.

This will allow Labour to form a coalition government with NZ First, along with the backing of the Green party, which means Ardern, 37, becomes New Zealand’s third female prime minister. ...

After an agonising day of waiting Peters announced he would support Labour because the global environment was undergoing rapid and seismic change, and he believed a Labour government was best-placed to handle the social and economic welfare of New Zealanders.

“For too many New Zealanders capitalism has not been their friend but their foe, ” Peters said, claiming vulnerable New Zealanders had been left behind while the political elite got richer. “We believe capitalism must regain its human face, and that conviction deeply influenced our decision.”

Despite Puerto Rico Disaster, Vulture Firms Relentlessly Seeking Billions in Debt Payments

As Puerto Rico continues its struggle to manage $95 billion in Hurricane Maria-related damage stacked atop its $74 billion of pre-existing debt, investigative journalists have revealed the 10 biggest financial firms that "are still fighting to get billions out of the bankrupt island as it tries to rebuild."

After a months-long investigation by In These Times and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI), the team published their exposé on Tuesday.

"The popular narrative of Puerto Rico's debt holders is that they are 'small' individual bondholders—rookie investors who trusted their savings to financial firms," they write.

"But our investigation reveals that some of the most aggressive players demanding debt repayment in Puerto Rico's bankruptcy court are so-called 'vulture firms,'" the report continues. "These hedge funds specialize in high-risk 'troubled assets' near default or bankruptcy and cater to millionaire and billionaire investors."

Sent to Destroy Sanders' Case for Democratic Socialism, Danish Right-Winger From Peterson Institute Bolsters It

In a televised debate with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on CNN Thursday night that quickly became a social media sensation, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tore into the "fraud" that is the Trump-GOP tax plan, slammed America's corrupt campaign finance system that allows the wealthiest Americans to buy policies and politicians, and "dunked on" a Danish representative of a right-wing think tank who challenged Sanders on his support for Scandinavian social democratic policies.

Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, charged late in the debate that Sanders wants to spend like a Scandinavian nation, but not tax like one.

Sanders responded by highlighting the benefits citizens of Denmark, Sweden, and other Scandinavian nations reap as a result of paying more in taxes and concluded that these benefits far outweigh the costs.

White nationalist to control which journalists cover Florida 'free speech' event

A white nationalist has been given full control over which journalists will be permitted to cover his “freedom of speech” event at the University of Florida on Thursday, a university spokeswoman said, a situation one expert called “ironic”.

“They’ve rented the facility. It’s their event. It’s not our event,” university spokeswoman Janine Sikes said on Wednesday. “It’s their event, so that’s why they can have whomever they want.”

White nationalist Richard Spencer, who is headlining the event, has the authority to handpick which journalists can cover his speech or deny access to any journalists at all, first amendment experts at the University of Florida said.

Spencer’s group has also been given complete control over who will receive audience tickets. The group announced they will hand out tickets in person about an hour before the speech starts, a plan one student organizer called “volatile” and “a huge danger”.

Jeff Sessions shifts ground on Russia contacts under Senate questioning

The US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has given a new account of his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 election, conceding it was possible that they had discussed Donald Trump’s policy positions.

Under intense questioning by the Senate judiciary committee, Sessions departed from his previous blanket denials about contacts with Russian officials, saying he did “not recall” elements of the conversations in three meetings in 2016 with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and conceded for the first time that substantive issues may have been discussed.

In a series of testy exchanges with Democratic senators, the attorney general also amended his previous insistence that he had no Russian contacts. This time, he said: “I did not have a continuing exchange of information” with Russians.

Sessions said he was not aware of any collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in efforts to influence the election, the subject of a special counsel investigation and several congressional inquiries. However, he said he had not been informed about a meeting on 9 June 2016, between the president’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager with a Russian lawyer offering damaging material about Hillary Clinton. The attorney general said he had only read about it “in the papers” and not paid much attention. ...

Sessions, who had helped run Trump’s campaign, declared at his Senate confirmation hearing in January: “I didn’t have communications with the Russians.” It later emerged that he had met Kislyak at a campaign event at a Washington hotel in April 2016, then at the Republican national convention in July and in his Senate office in September last year.

Sessions Faces Russia Questions, But Are Democrats Next?

Warning of 'ecological Armageddon' after dramatic plunge in insect numbers

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said. The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected.

“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

World's deepest lake crippled by putrid algae, poaching and pollution

Lake Baikal is undergoing its gravest crisis in recent history, experts say, as the government bans the catching of a signature fish that has lived in the world’s deepest lake for centuries but is now under threat. Holding one-fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, Baikal in Russia’s Siberia is a natural wonder of “exceptional value to evolutionary science” meriting its listing as a world heritage site by Unesco.

Baikal’s high biodiversity includes over 3,600 plant and animal species, most of which are endemic to the lake. Over the past several years, however, the lake, a major international tourist attraction, has been crippled by a series of detrimental phenomena, some of which remain a mystery to scientists. They include the disappearance of the omul fish, rapid growth of putrid algae and the death of endemic species of sponges across its vast 3.2m-hectare (7.9m-acre) area.

Starting in October, the government introduced a ban on all commercial fishing of omul, a species of the salmon family only found in Baikal, fearing “irreversible consequences for its population”, the Russian fisheries agency said. “The total biomass of omul in Baikal has more than halved since 15 years ago” from 25m tonnes to just 10m, the agency said.

Local fishery biologist Anatoly Mamontov said the decrease is likely caused by uncontrollable fish poaching, with extra pressure coming from the climate. “Baikal water stock is tied to climate,” he said. “Now there is a drought, rivers grow shallow, there are less nutrients. Baikal’s surface heats up and omul does not like warm water.”

Also of Interest

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

No, US Didn’t ‘Stand By’ Indonesian Genocide—It Actively Participated

The Indonesia Massacre’s Historic Message

The Experiment in Freedom is Failing

A Family’s Long Search for Answers After Israel’s Killing of a Palestinian-American Teen

Iraq’s Kurds have overplayed their hand. Now both sides must talk

The Power Players Behind Silencing Wall Street Reformers

Corporate America's latest trick: The reverse Public Records Act

The “Copper” (Catastrophic) Health Insurance Plans in the Alexander-Murray Bill

Fossil Fuel Misinformation Helps Quash Community Effort to Ban Fracking in Youngstown, Ohio

A Little Night Music

Roy Brown - Shake 'Em Up Baby

Roy Brown - Fannie Brown Got Married

Roy Brown - She's gone too long

Roy Brown - Diddy-Y-Diddy-O

Roy Brown - Let The Four Winds Blow

Roy Brown - It's Alright

Roy Brown - The Tick Of The Clock

Roy Brown & Group - Sugar Baby

Roy Brown - Up Jumped The Devil

Roy Brown - Slow Down Little Eva

Roy Brown - Saturday Night