Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features early jazz and blues singer Beulah "Sippie" Wallace. Enjoy!

“In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.”

-- John Grogan

News and Opinion

RIP Robert Parry. This is a huge loss for American journalism and anyone who appreciates good investigative journalism.

Here is part of the announcement posted Parry's Consortium News site, written by his son Nat Parry. The whole posting is well worth reading to come to a greater appreciation of Parry's life work to open a window for us onto what governments and leaders would rather keep hidden.

Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews

It is with a heavy heart that we inform Consortiumnews readers that Editor Robert Parry has passed away. As regular readers know, Robert (or Bob, as he was known to friends and family) suffered a stroke in December, which – despite his own speculation that it may have been brought on by the stress of covering Washington politics – was the result of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer that he had been unknowingly living with for the past 4-5 years. He unfortunately suffered two more debilitating strokes in recent weeks and after the last one, was moved to hospice care on Tuesday. He passed away peacefully Saturday evening. He was 68. ...

With my dad, professional work has always been deeply personal, and his career as a journalist was thoroughly intertwined with his family life. I can recall kitchen table conversations in my early childhood that focused on the U.S.-backed wars in Central America and complaints about how his editors at The Associated Press were too timid to run articles of his that – no matter how well-documented – cast the Reagan administration in a bad light.

One of my earliest memories in fact was of my dad about to leave on assignment in the early 1980s to the war zones of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, and the heartfelt good-bye that he wished to me and my siblings. He warned us that he was going to a very dangerous place and that there was a possibility that he might not come back. I remember asking him why he had to go, why he couldn’t just stay at home with us. He replied that it was important to go to these places and tell the truth about what was happening there. He mentioned that children my age were being killed in these wars and that somebody had to tell their stories. I remember asking, “Kids like me?” He replied, “Yes, kids just like you.”

Bob was deeply impacted by the dirty wars of Central America in the 1980s and in many ways these conflicts – and the U.S. involvement in them – came to define the rest of his life and career. With grisly stories emerging from Nicaragua (thanks partly to journalists like him), Congress passed the Boland Amendments from 1982 to 1984, which placed limits on U.S. military assistance to the contras who were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government through a variety of terrorist tactics.

“Unprecedented Level of Violence” in Heart of Kabul as Taliban Sends “Clear Message” to Trump

ISIS and the Taliban compete to kill the most people in Afghanistan

ISIS fighters killed 11 Afghan soldiers and wounded 15 more in an assault near a military academy in Kabul Monday, the fourth major militant attack in the country in nine days.

The raid on the army outpost came just two days after the Taliban carried out a massive bombing in the capital’s secure zone that killed more than 100 people, the country’s deadliest attack since May. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the slaughter was a response to an increasingly aggressive U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

“The Islamic Emirate has a clear message for Trump and his hand kissers, that if you go ahead with a policy of aggression and speak from the barrel of a gun, don’t expect Afghans to grow flowers in response,” he said in a statement claiming responsibility for the Jan. 27 bombing, using the term the group uses to describe itself.

Analysts say the latest spate of attacks – two of which were claimed by the Taliban, and two by ISIS’s Afghan branch – highlighted the enduring vulnerability of the Afghan capital, where more than 130 people have been killed in three attacks in the past nine days.

It also raised the prospect that the rival militant groups were competing to carry out high-profile attacks in order to attract recruits and support.

Turkey says U.S. needs to withdraw from Syria's Manbij region immediately

The United States needs to withdraw from northern Syria’s Manbij region immediately, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday. ...

Speaking to reporters, Cavusoglu also said Turkey wanted to see concrete steps by the United States to end its support for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.

Ankara said earlier it had been told by U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster that Washington would not provide the YPG with weapons anymore.

Good news! The empire has run aground in Syria and finds that it can't order the world to its liking by killing a lot of brown people. That's not necessarily the bias of this news outlet, though.

The U.S. has put itself in an impossible position in Syria

After years of battle, the U.S. is on the cusp of defeating ISIS in Syria, but the tactics it’s used to do so have left the military in a strategic hole of epic proportions. Case in point: the spiraling crisis in Northern Syria where the U.S. finds itself stuck in the middle of a turf war between two allies: Turkey and Syrian Kurds.

And as this new conflict unfolds, Washington risks losing the little leverage it has to realize other goals it’s talked about but done little to achieve, analysts told VICE News, such as removing the dictator Bashar al-Assad, rolling back Iranian influence, and stopping Assad’s regime from deploying chemical weapons.

“The only thing that has really mattered from a U.S. policy perspective was fighting ISIS,” said Charles Lister, Director of Counter-Extremism and Counter-Terrorism at the Middle East Institute. But as America turns to other long-neglected items on its Syria to-do list, “we simply do not have the means, or the will, to actually do what it takes to deal with those issues."

By reversing its policy in Syria the US is fuelling more wars in the Middle East

Seldom has an important new US foreign policy crashed in flames so quickly and so spectacularly, achieving the very opposite results to those intended. It was only ten days ago that the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson unexpectedly announced that American military forces would remain in Syria after the defeat of Isis. Their agenda was nothing if not ambitious: it included the stabilisation of the country, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, rolling back Iranian influence, preventing the resurgence of Isis and bringing an end to the seven-year Syrian war. Tillerson did not seem to care that this new departure was sure to offend a lot of powerful players in and around Syria and was quite contrary to past US pledges that it was only fighting in Syria to defeat Isis and had no other aims.

In effect, the US was reversing its old policy of trying to keep its distance from the Syrian quagmire and was blithely plunging into one of the messiest civil wars in history. ...

The fighting over the last five days has exposed as a dangerous fantasy the US hopes that its new interventionist policy would stabilise northern Syria. Instead of weakening President Bashar al-Assad and Iran, it will benefit them, showing the Kurds that they badly need a protector other than the US. The Kurds are now demanding that the Syrian Army go to Afrin to defend it against the Turks because it is an integral part of Syria. A military confrontation between Turkey and the US would be much in the interests of Tehran and Damascus. The Iranians, denounced by the US as the source of all evil, will be glad to see America in lots of trouble in Syria without them having to stir a finger. ...

The US may want to get rid of Assad and weaken Iran across the region but it is too late. Pro-Iranian governments in Iraq and Syria are in power and Hezbollah is the most powerful single force in Lebanon. This is not going to change any time soon and, if the Americans want to weaken Assad by keeping a low-level war going, then this will make him even more reliant on Iran. ... It was a bad moment for the US to stir the pot by saying it would stay in Syria and target Assad and Iran. ... Trump and his chaotic administration have not yet had to deal with a real Middle East crisis yet and the events of the last week suggest that they will not be able to do so.

Chris Hedges: The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump

The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.

Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, intelligence chiefs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.

Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.

The elites’ moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump. The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass. As Michael Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the president has “no scruples.” He lives “outside the rules” and is “contemptuous of them.” And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not,” Wolff writes.

George W. Bush Returns

White House looks at nationalizing entire phone network to block hackers

The White House is so worried about Chinese hackers tapping U.S. phone calls that it's considering nationalizing the entire next generation phone network. Fifth generation or 5G cell phone networks will come online in the next few years, but under a radical plan outlined in documents leaked to Axios government officials are mulling building a nationalized network to thwart Beijing.

“We want to build a (5G) network so the Chinese can’t listen to your calls," a senior administration official told Reuters, who confirmed the Axios report “We have to have a secure network that doesn’t allow bad actors to get in. We also have to ensure the Chinese don’t take over the market and put every non-5G network out of business.” ... As well as nationalization, the White House is also considering the less radical plan of having the system built by a consortium of wireless carriers. ...

The White House is taking an increasingly hardline position when it comes to China’s cyber espionage efforts — without providing any concrete examples of wrongdoing.

Jackpotting: hackers are making ATMs give away cash

Cybercriminals are hacking cash machines to force them to give out money in what is known as “jackpotting”, according to two of the world’s largest ATM makers and the US Secret Service.

Diebold Nixdorf and NCR sent out an alert to their customers over the weekend, but did not identify victims or specify how much money had been stolen. The US Secret Service started warning financial institutions that jackpotting was now a risk in the US last week, having started in Mexico last year, according to a confidental alert seen by Krebs on Security. ...

Jackpotting has been rising worldwide in recent years, though it is unclear how much cash has been stolen because victims and police often do not disclose details. Hackers require physical access to the cash machine using specialised electronics and malware to take control, including an endoscope.

Once taken over, the machines can be forced to dispense money at a rate of 40 notes every 23 seconds until it is empty, according to the Secret Service. The only way to stop the machine spitting out cash is to press the cancel button on the keypad.

Criminals have been targeting cash machines in pharmacies, retailers and drive-through ATMs, according to the Secret Service.

Brussels prepared for trade war with US if it restricts EU imports

Brussels has warned that it stands ready to retaliate and potentially open up a transatlantic trade war if the US delivers on apparent threats to restrict European imports.

The US president, Donald Trump, claimed in an interview with ITV broadcast on Sunday that the EU had been “very unfair” on American exporters, and that it would “morph into something very big” that would “turn out to be very much to [the EU’s] detriment”. Washington is currently examining the case for protecting US economic interests on national security grounds, including the imposition of import tariffs on aluminium and steel.

Responding to Trump’s comments, a spokesman for the European commission told reporters in Brussels that the EU was ready to hit back if its importers were made to suffer. The spokesman said: “For us trade policy is not a zero sum game. It is not about winners and losers. We here in the European Union believe that trade can and should be win-win.

Catalonia: Puigdemont cannot form government from abroad, Spain's top court rules

FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe steps down early

Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, stepped down on Monday in a widely anticipated move that nevertheless reflected a further deterioration in relations between the White House and authorities investigating Donald Trump’s Russia ties.

The move came after months of attacks on McCabe by the president, who implied that McCabe had been compromised by a political donation made in 2015 to McCabe’s wife. ...

McCabe’s plan to retire this March was widely known. His decision to step aside, however, came amid an escalation by the president in attacks on the FBI, as an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller appears to draw closer to the White House.

Transparency Advocates Win Release of NYPD “Predictive Policing” Documents

Late last month, a Manhattan judge ordered the New York City Police Department to release documentation about the department’s use of secretive and highly controversial “predictive policing” surveillance technology, scoring a win for advocates of transparency on police policy. The documents came to light as part of a lawsuit against the city filed by the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based policy institute. ...

The original request for documentation was filed by the Brennan Center in June 2016 under New York’s Freedom of Information Law. After the NYPD rejected the initial request and subsequent appeal, the Brennan Center filed suit on August 30, 2017. The NYPD is notorious for its intransigence on open records requests from the press and the public, particularly concerning documentation about the department’s extensive use of surveillance technology. In recent years, lawsuits have been filed to disclose information about the department’s network of surveillance cameras, its use of X-ray scanners in public, and the deployment of facial recognition technology. ...

The Brennan Center will also file a new freedom of information request to obtain the source data used by the NYPD companies to train the department’s current, in-house predictive policing algorithm. In other cities, researchers have used such information to re-engineer crime-forecasting programs, revealing that they disproportionately impact communities of color. Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a staff attorney at the Brennan Center who filed the original freedom of information request, said in an interview that the release of the documents, thanks to the court’s decision, will be the public’s first chance to learn about the NYPD’s application of the crime-forecasting program in day-to-day police work. ...

Through the litigation process, the Brennan Center has also learned that no privacy or use policy exists that governs the NYPD’s use of predictive policing.

Democrat Stuns CNN Host With Her Stupidity

Chile creates five national parks over 10m acres in historic act of conservation

Chile has created five sprawling national parks to preserve vast tracts of Patagonia – the culmination of more than two decades of land acquisition by the US philanthropists Doug Tompkins and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and the largest donation of private land to government in South America.

The five parks, spanning 10.3m acres, were signed into law on Monday by Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet, launching a new 17-park route that stretches down the southern spine of Chile to Cape Horn. ...

“This is not just an unprecedented act of preservation,” said Bachelet, who flew to this remote Patagonian valley on Monday to receive the donation. “It is an invitation to imagine other forms to use our land. To use natural resources in a way that does not destroy them. To have sustainable development – the only profitable economic development in the long term.”

The creation of the parks marks the latest in a flurry of environmental protection laws which have brought Chile to the forefront of worldwide conservation efforts.

Last month, Bachelet – who leaves office in March – completed a five-year negotiation with residents of Easter Island to form one of the world’s largest Marine Protected areas, which will protect some 720,000 sq km of the Pacific Ocean.

The oceans have never been hotter than they are now

2017 was only the second-warmest year on record, according to NASA. But when it comes to the ocean, temperatures have never been warmer.

New data from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics analyzing ocean data from the last half century shows a clear trend: The oceans are steadily getting warmer, with this year registering the hottest yet. And while the atmospheric temperature is more susceptible to year-to-year shifts, the data from the Earth’s waters shows the consistency with which our world is heating up.

“The ocean heat records are so impressive because they’re absolutely on a steady warming trend,” Robert Anderson, a geochemist at Columbia University, told VICE News. “People who point to pauses in global warming haven’t looked at the warming of the oceans.”

The new study, published Friday, analyzed data from the top 2,000 meters of ocean waters around the globe, concluding that ocean waters topped record temps in 2017.

Orange cave crocodiles may be mutating into new species

It sounds like something out of a children’s book: it’s orange, it dwells in a cave and it lives on bats and crickets. But this isn’t some fairy story about a lonely troll – it’s the much weirder tale of a group of African dwarf crocodiles that are adapting to life in pitch-darkness.

“We could say that we have a mutating species, because [the cave crocodile] already has a different [genetic] haplotype,” said Richard Oslisly, who first discovered the cave crocs in 2008. “Its diet is different and it is a species that has adapted to the underground world.”

An archeologist who has long studied Gabon’s pre-history, Oslisly entered the Abanda Caves in Gabon looking for signs of past humans, such as rock paintings or engravings. Instead, he found crocodilians in a “great room…filled with water.”

Two years later he returned with cave scientist, Olivier Testa, and crocodile specialist, Matthew Shirley. They caught the first cave crocodile then – and when they carried it outside discovered that its skin was not the grey (almost bluish grey) of normal African dwarf crocodiles, but orange.

To date, the team has discovered a population of around thirty cave crocodiles, ten of which are orange, though more may remain hidden. The researchers believe that the juvenile crocodiles are able to go in-and-out of the cave system through various openings, but once the crocs hit a certain size they may in fact spend the rest of their days beyond the reach of the sun.

“They are somehow in their own prison,” Oslisly said. “They eat bats that live in these caves by the tens-of-thousands and also crickets that swarm the walls.” Over time, these older crocodiles begin to turn orange. The researchers theorize that the colour change is due to the crocodiles spending so much time in an alkaline mix of water and bat guano, bleaching the croc’s skin.

Also of Interest

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

Blowback: How ISIS Was Created by the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

The Day the Music Died: the exhibition pairing Don McLean with Guantánamo Bay

Unpacking the Shadowy Outfit Behind 2017’s Biggest Fake News Story

A 4-Year-Old Girl Was the Sole Survivor of a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan. Then She Disappeared.

Revolutionary Musical Artist Seun Kuti Carries Fela’s Afrobeat Torch Into a New Era

Rotting cabins, closed trails: why we're shining a light on US national parks

Cleveland Indians to remove divisive Chief Wahoo logo

A Little Night Music

Sippie Wallace - Up The Country Blues

Sippie Wallace w/ Perry Bradford's Jazz Phools - Section Hand Blues

Sippie Wallace w/ Clarence Williams’ Blue Five - Baby, I Can't Use You No More

Sippie Wallace - Devil Dance Blues

Sippie Wallace w/ Albert Ammons and His Rhythm Kings - Buzz Me

Sippie Wallace w/ Albert Ammons and His Rhythm Kings - Bedroom Blues

Sippie Wallace - Dead Drunk Blues

Sippie Wallace - Murder Gonna Be My Crime

Sippie Wallace - You Got To Know How