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This evening's music features blues shouter and saxophone player Eddie Cleanhead Vinson. Enjoy!

“[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.”

-- Harry Truman

News and Opinion

Jill Stein Defies Senate Intelligence Document Request, Calling It “Overbroad” and Unconstitutional

The Jill Stein campaign is refusing to comply fully with a Senate intelligence committee request for documents and other correspondence, made as part of the committee’s probe into Russian activities in the 2016 election, according to a letter to be delivered Thursday to the panel by an attorney for the campaign. The Green Party campaign will agree to turn over some documents, but raised constitutional objections to the breadth of the inquiry, which was first made in November 2017, arguing that elements of it infringe on basic political rights enshrined in the First Amendment. ...

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, of the Washington-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, authored the letter and responded to each of the six requests from the committee, saying the campaign would comply with some and not others. For instance, the committee asked for all communications between the campaign and “Russian media organizations, their employees, or associates” between February 6, 2015, and the present. Stein’s campaign is willingly providing these.

The committee also asked for communications from the “campaign’s policy discussions regarding Russia” during the same time frame. Verheyden-Hilliard wrote that the campaign will decline to produce these materials “on the basis of constitutional privilege arising from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” She also wrote that internal campaign communications of this nature are “not pertinent to the subject of Russian interference” in the elections.

The committee also asked for communications related to any trips to Russia, including any discussion with Russian government officials, and the Stein campaign is willing to provide those. The request also calls for “all communications with Russian persons, or representatives of Russian government, media, or business interests, including but not limited to any communications, discussions, or offers related to opposition research, from February 6, 2015 to the present.” Stein’s campaign told The Intercept that they have already provided to the committee all communications with people affiliated with the Russian government and Russian media, but not with all people of Russian descent. In the view of the Stein campaign, this is a request that unfairly puts all people of Russian descent under suspicion.

The campaign is adamant that it will “not be disclosing names of persons with whom they have ever communicated, including American political supporters, targeted because they happen to be Russian immigrants or of Russian descent. We reiterate here that the responding parties will not participate in a hunt for identification of persons based on nationality or descent.”

CNN Reporter Sniffs "Poison" On Air

The west closes its ears to Douma testimony

The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month – the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states. The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk – a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of the alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.

The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event an “obscene masquerade” and “theatre”. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria. ...

The second is that the media are echoing this misplaced scorn for evidence. ... The third and biggest problem, however, is that neither the trio of western states nor the western media are actually contesting the claim that these “supposed witnesses” were present in Douma, and that some of them were shown in the video. Rather, the line taken by the Guardian and others is that: “The veracity [of] the statements by the Russian-selected witnesses at The Hague will be challenged, since their ability to speak truthfully is limited.” ... But that leaves us with another difficulty. No one, for example, appears to be doubting that Hassan Diab, a boy who testified at the hearing, is also the boy shown in the video who was supposedly gassed with a nerve agent three weeks ago. How then do we explain that he is now looking a picture of health? It is not as though the US, UK and French governments and the western media have had no time to investigate his case. He and his father have been saying for at least a week on Russian TV that there was no chemical attack.

Instead, we are getting yet more revisions to a story that was originally presented as so cut-and-dried that it justified an act of military aggression by the US, UK and France against Syria, without authorisation from the UN Security Council – in short, a war crime of the highest order.

Why Did the U.S. and Its Allies Bomb Libya? Corruption Case Against Sarkozy Sheds New Light on Ousting of Gaddafi.

Seven years after the popular uprising against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and the NATO intervention that removed him from power, Libya is extremely fractured and a source of regional instability. But while Congress has heavily scrutinized the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi a year after Gaddafi’s overthrow and death, there has been no U.S. investigation into the broader question of what led the U.S. and its allies to intervene so disastrously in Libya. However, a corruption investigation into former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is opening a new window into little-known motivations in the NATO alliance that may have accelerated the rush to oust the Libyan dictator.

Last month, French police detained and questioned Sarkozy about illicit payments Gaddafi is said to have made to Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign. A few days after Sarkozy was released from detention, he was ordered to stand trial for corruption and influence-peddling in a related case, in which he had sought information on the Gaddafi inquiry from an appeals court judge. The scandal has highlighted a little-appreciated bind that Sarkozy faced in the run-up to the Libyan intervention: The French president, who took the lead among Europeans in the military campaign against Gaddafi, was eager to compensate for diplomatic blunders in Tunisia and Egypt and most likely angry about an arms deal with Gaddafi that went awry. Sarkozy, it now appears, was eager to shift the narrative to put himself at the forefront of a pro-democracy, anti-Gaddafi intervention. ...

Revelations about the Libyan payments to Sarkozy surfaced in March 2011, when the specter of an imminent NATO intervention loomed large. Gaddafi first asserted that he paid Sarkozy’s campaign in an interview two days before the first NATO bombs were dropped. His son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi made similar claims shortly thereafter. In 2012, the French investigative news website Mediapart published a Libyan document signed by Moammar Gaddafi’s spy chief, Moussa Koussa, arranging for 50 million euros to support Sarkozy’s campaign, which French authorities later found to be authentic. ...

Sarkozy’s zeal for military action stemmed from more than humanitarian concerns for rebellious Libyans in Benghazi who were endangered by Gaddafi’s wrath. Sarkozy’s reasoning included a mix of domestic, international, and personal reasons. Sarkozy had found his administration out of step when the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia. He had a strong relationship with Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and when security forces fired on massive street protests in January, instead of condemning the violence, Sarkozy’s foreign minister offered to share the “savoir-faire” of France’s security forces “in order to settle security situations of this type.” ... The Libyan war allowed him “to forget his serious political mistakes during the Tunisian revolution of January 2011.” ...

[Fabrice Arfi, one of two Mediapart journalists who has covered the affair since 2011,] cautioned against treating Sarkozy’s involvement in the war as strictly personal, though it’s also a vital element. “I don’t believe that Sarkozy brought France and other countries to war in Libya exclusively to whitewash himself,” said Arfi, who co-authored a book, “Avec les compliments du Guide,” which details the Gaddafi-Libya investigation. But, Arfi said, “It’s difficult to imagine that there wasn’t some kind of personal or private dimension to Sarkozy’s pro-war activism in 2011.” The personal dimension that Arfi refers to would be Sarkozy’s interest in shifting the narrative that he had initially cultivated — as close to Gaddafi — to one that distanced him from the regime and any questions about his former proximity to Gaddafi, once he realized just how seriously the U.S. and Arab states wanted to get rid of the Libyan leader. “Once the war was triggered, [Sarkozy’s] attitude is deeply impacted by the scandal that he is the only one aware of at the time [...]," [Jalel] Harchaoui[, Libya scholar at Paris 8 University] said.

The Democratic Party’s War History and the AUMF of 2018

The proposed Authority for the Use of Military Force of 2018 (AUMF) of 2018 would replace AUMF 2001 and repeal AUMF 2002 while it will codify an “uninterrupted authority to use all necessary and appropriate force in armed conflict” against the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS and as yet unidentified “designated associated forces” who might “pose a grave threat to the US” in whatever country they occupy. ... The AUMF 2018 offers no restriction on military ops and no expiration or sunshine date while it abdicates all Congressional statutory war making authority as defined in the Constitution to the executive branch with no meaningful oversight or accountability.

In other words, the AUMF 2018 represents a complete capitulation to the MIC in a permanent continuation of almost two decades of “forever war” ostensibly in the Middle East for future generations of American troops as the country is driven deeper into an indisputable ditch of financial insolvency and a wicked, amoral quagmire at home ...

It may come as a shock to loyalist Democrats that the majority of every major war in the 20th Century was initiated and/or conducted under a Democratic president. WW I aficionados can thank Woodrow Wilson, the revered FDR took the US into WWII, the unprepared Truman allowed the use of atomic weapons on the civilian population of Nagasaki and Hiroshima before initiating the Korean War in 1950 and LBJ’s escalation in Vietnam became a metaphor for his Great Society. In the early 1990’s, with NATO acting as its proxy, the Clinton Administration initiated a military effort to break up the non-aligned socialist Yugoslavia ending the decade with ‘humanitarian bombing’ that devastated the civilian population while disintegrating the once-prosperous country. ...

Most recently, is Barack Obama, who campaigned as a Constitutional scholar and whose fraudulent 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded prior to a bombing spree on seven Islamic countries. During his eight years in office, Obama dropped over 26,000 bombs in his last year in office including a multitude of drone strikes, established a Tuesday morning assassination list and began war in four countries living in peace when he took office in 2008. There is something more than a cosmic coincidence going on here as all those aforementioned Democratic Presidents are today considered by party loyalists to be ‘liberal’ on the ideological spectrum.

Introduced by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), retiring Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, AUMF 2018 is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (VA), Chris Coons (DE) and Bill Nelson (FL).

Proving Eager to 'Get the War Started,' Pompeo Ramps Up Anti-Iran Rhetoric in Israel and Saudi Arabia

Wasting no time confirming fears that he would would bring his disdain for diplomacy and zeal for war to the world stage if confirmed as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo used his first official visits to Saudi Arabia and Israel this weekend to escalate the Trump administration's anti-Iran rhetoric while ignoring the horrific atrocities currently being committed by America's key Middle East allies.

Speaking alongside Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir in Riyadh on Sunday, Pompeo claimed Iran is "the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world" and said the Trump administration is "determined to make sure it never possesses a nuclear weapon." "The Iran deal in its current form does not provide that assurance," Pompeo asserted, contradicting the testimony of international inspectors who say the agreement has been strong and effective. "We will continue to work with our European allies to fix that deal, but if a deal cannot be reached, the president has said that he will leave that deal."

While Pompeo may insist that he is determined to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes, foreign policy experts have noted that by attacking the nuclear accord, the Trump administration is actively working to undermine "the very agreement that prevents a nuclear-armed Iran" and dangerously heightening the possibility of war. Piling on the belligerent rhetoric during a visit to Israel on Sunday, Pompeo—who embarked on his Middle East trip before even holding meetings with his diminished, and reportedly demoralized, staff at the State Department—said he is "deeply concerned about Iran's dangerous escalation of threats to Israel and the region, and Iran's ambition to dominate the Middle East remains. The United States is with Israel in this fight." ...

Emboldened by the Trump administration's anti-Iran rhetoric, Netanyahu—who has been issuing hysterical and fact-free warnings about Iran's nuclear ambitious for over a decade—is planning to deliver a speech on Sunday to "expose new intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program."

Nuclear deal: Netanyahu accuses Iran of cheating on agreement

Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of hiding a nuclear armaments programme that continued to operate despite 2015 agreement with global powers, presenting what he said was “new and conclusive proof”.

In a televised prime-time speech on Monday, the country’s prime minister said Israel had tens of thousands of documents from what he called Iran’s “Atomic Archives” which he said had been shared with the US. “Iran lied, big time,” he said, speaking from Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Iran is brazenly lying when it said it never had a nuclear weapons programme.” ...

Netanyahu, who is known for theatrical presentations, pulled black sheets from a cabinet filled with folders that he said were copies of 55,000 pages of “incriminating” evidence. He revealed a screen to which close to 200 CDs had been affixed, saying they held videos and photos of clandestine Iranian nuclear research and development.

“Even after the deal, Iran continued to preserve and expand its nuclear weapons programme for future use,” he said, speaking in English. “The Iran deal, the nuclear deal, is based on lies,” he said, adding that he was sure, Trump would “do the right thing” when deciding on whether to pull out of the Iran deal.

Ahead of Netanyahu’s announcement, [Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif] tweeted that the Israeli prime minister was “the boy who can’t stop crying wolf”.

'Mossad, CIA Agree Iran Has Yet to Decide to Build Nuclear Weapon'

Israel’s intelligence services agree with American intelligence assessments that there is not enough proof to determine whether Iran is building a nuclear bomb, according to a report published Sunday in the New York Times.

The newspaper said that senior American officials believe there is little disagreement between the Mossad and U.S. intelligence agencies over Iran’s nuclear program, despite the fact that Israeli political leaders have been pushing for quick action to block Iran from becoming what they describe as an existential threat.

The report further quoted one former senior American intelligence official who states that the Mossad “does not disagree with the U.S. on the weapons program,” adding that there is “not a lot of dispute between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities on the facts.” ...

The United States and Israel share intelligence on Iran, American officials said. For its spying efforts, Israel relies in part on an Iranian exile group that is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or M.E.K., which is based in Iraq, says the report. ...

According to the New York Times, American intelligence officials are wary of relying on information from an opposition group like the M.E.K., especially after their experience in Iraq where they relied on flawed information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group run by Ahmad Chalabi.

Tim Shorrock on North Korea Nuclear Deal: Will the U.S. Drop Sanctions & Economic Embargo?

For Donald Trump to Succeed With North Korea, He’ll Need a Pragmatic Definition of “Denuclearization”

The Summit on Friday between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un was about far, far more than North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The “Panmunjom Declaration” they released at the meeting’s conclusion has 21 paragraphs; just one of them addresses the nuclear issue.

Most importantly, Moon and Kim affirmed their intention to finally end the Korean War – which began in 1950 and, formally speaking, was only suspended by an armistice in 1953 — and “establish a permanent and solid peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” Their statement laid out steps they plan to take to heal the scars inflicted by Korea’s bitterly tragic history. All of this will be done based on “the principle of determining the destiny of the Korean nation on their own accord” – something that would manage to simultaneously perturb the United States, Japan, and China, each of which has brutalized the Koreas for their own ends. ...

So with a historic summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump imminent, the question now is what “denuclearization” means, most importantly to Trump himself. At one end of the spectrum is Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, who before his appointment said the only thing for the U.S. to discuss with Kim was “what ports should American freighters sail into and what air bases should American cargo planes land at so that we can dismantle your nuclear weapons program, put it in those planes and boats and sail it back to America to put it at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” ...

On April 23, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that the word means “that North Korea doesn’t have or isn’t testing nuclear missiles,” something which is a fairly practical goal in the near-term. When Sanders was pressed by reporters later the same day to endorse something like the Bolton perspective, she refused to do so, and left Trump maximum wiggle room for the summit. ... All this verbiage suggests the possibility – always subject to change at any moment with Trump – that the U.S. - North Korea summit could end with Trump stepping back from the brink, by accepting a deal that doesn’t fulfill the wishes of hard-liners, while simultaneously claiming victory. This is because a continuing freeze on North Korea’s nuclear and ICBM testing would be a genuine concession by Kim.

South Korea’s president thinks Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Peace Prize winner Donald Trump? It’s not that far-fetched, according to South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who said Monday he believed the U.S. president should get the award for helping to resolve the standoff with North Korea.

“President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace,” the South Korean leader told a meeting of senior staff, according to an official from the presidential Blue House.

There’s still weeks to go before Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are scheduled to meet in hopes of resolving the North Korean crisis. But that hasn’t stopped overblown reactions gaining airtime in the wake of Friday’s historic summit between the Koreas. Along with Moon, some U.S. Republicans have expressed their belief that the U.S. president could be a contender for the Nobel in recognition of his latest efforts to defuse the crisis. Even British bookmakers are giving Trump a fighting chance.

But for Moon, it may have been an expression of modesty. His remark was reportedly made in response to a message from Lee Hee-ho, a former South Korean first lady, congratulating him on the apparent breakthrough at a rare inter-Korean summit Friday, when Moon and the North Korean leader pledged to end hostilities and work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. After Lee, widow of late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, said Moon deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, Moon responded that Trump deserved it instead.

Mick Mulvaney’s Wells Fargo Settlement Lets the Bank Decide How Consumers Are Paid Back

The billion-dollar Wells Fargo settlement reached between the bank and the consumer agency now controlled by Trump adviser Mick Mulvaney has been heralded as evidence that the longtime critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau might not burn it to the ground after all. But a closer look at the details of that consent decree reveals that it is set up in such a way that will allow Wells Fargo to set the terms by which defrauded customers can be made whole.

Mulvaney, the CFPB acting director, is under fire for suggesting to bank executives that they need to donate to members of Congress to get heard. Sen. Sherrod Brown called for Mulvaney’s resignation on Wednesday for his explicit endorsement of “pay-to-play” politics. ... The senator was responding to comments Mulvaney made at the American Bankers Association conference on Tuesday. “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney said. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Mulvaney’s remarks are especially jarring considering his treatment of victims of abuse at financial institutions’ hands. Compared to past agency settlements, the new Wells Fargo agreement includes a number of hurdles that appear to make it harder for victims of the bank’s misconduct to get their money back.

Wells Fargo was accused of charging prospective mortgage borrowers fees for locking in interest rates for a sustained period, when the bank was responsible for the delays. It also automatically placed auto insurance on 2 million of its auto loan customers, when in many cases borrowers already had or did not need the coverage. In about 27,000 cases, the force-placed insurance premiums caused borrowers to default and have their cars repossessed, effectively stolen at the hands of Wells Fargo.

But according to the language in the settlement agreement, in order for homeowners and auto loan customers to receive restitution, they would have to identify an “economic or other cognizable harm” based mainly on a specific violation of federal law, under a standard created and judged by Wells Fargo. CFPB does get to audit the remediation plans, but there’s no mechanism for forcing the bank to change those plans outside of going to a court and claiming noncompliance with the settlement.

DOJ Quietly Removes References to Press Freedom and Gerrymandering From Policy Manual

Amid the handwringing of many in the corporate media over comedian Michelle Wolf's monologue at the White House Correspondents' Association over the weekend, few took notice of reports that the Justice Department took a step away from protecting journalists on Sunday, deleting language in its policy manual regarding press freedom as well as racial gerrymandering. As Buzzfeed reported, the U.S. Attorneys' Manual includes the DOJ's policy priorities, and has been updated in recent months under orders by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, after undergoing no major changes since 1997.

In the new update, a section titled "Need for Free Press and Public Trial" was removed. The deleted passage had stressed the need to maintain "the constitutional requirements of a free press and public trials as well as the right of the people in a constitutional democracy to have access to information about the conduct of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and courts, consistent with the individual rights of the accused."

Far from prioritizing the need to ensure government transparency, a brief section on the department's policy for contact with media notes that "the right of the public to have access to information" about the DOJ should be balanced with other factors as officials decide when to release information. Employees are also now required to report “any contact with a member of the media about a DOJ matter.”

The DOJ also removed all references to redrawing voting districts and gerrymandering along racial lines, and deleted a section that read, "The Voting Section defends from unjustified attack redistricting plans designed to provide minority voters fair opportunities to elect candidates of their choice and endeavors to achieve racially fair results where courts find...that redistricting plans constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Law Enforcement Groups Gave $420,000 to DA Deciding Whether to Bring Charges Against Cops Who Killed Stephon Clark

Sacramento, California, has een all over the news for the past month, since police shot and killed an unarmed black man, 22-year-old Stephon Clark, in the backyard of his own home on March 18. An independent autopsy conducted at the family’s request showed that Clark was shot six times in the back, according to the Los Angeles Times. As protests over the death raged, activists, both locally and around the country, called for the district attorney there, Anne Marie Schubert, to file charges, or even just make a strong statement on the case. Yet she remained silent.

All the while, Schubert’s political campaigns have benefitted from the largesse of law enforcement unions and associations. According to an analysis by The Intercept, about one-third of the contributions she received across her two campaigns to be Sacramento County’s district attorney — one of which is currently ongoing — came from law enforcement sources or those close to law enforcement. Just days after Clark was killed, Schubert came under fire for receiving two campaign donations from local law enforcement sources. The California Statewide Law Enforcement Association gave $10,000 to Schubert’s re-election campaign two days after the shooting. Three days later, the Sacramento County Alliance of Law Enforcement made a $3,000 contribution of their own.

Schubert has consistently declined to file charges of any kind in instances of police shooting and killing black men in Sacramento, according to NewsOne. ... The Sacramento News & Review, an alt weekly, outlined several cases in which Schubert has been unwilling to take on police when misconduct is suspected — noting that her office has “prosecuted more activists for civil disobedience than she has officers involved in misconduct.” Since 2015, when Schubert took office, the newspaper said, the district attorney’s office has declined to file charges in 21 shootings involving police and also in 13 cases of death of people in police custody. ...

As it turns out, the $13,000 that Schubert received from law enforcement groups after Clark’s death was just a drop in the bucket. The Intercept’s analysis of Schubert’s campaign contributions, based on public filings made available online, shows that she is backed by the law enforcement community lock, stock, and barrel. ... For the three campaigns she has raised money for — a short-lived California superior court judge race and two races for district attorney — Schubert has taken in well over $1 million in disclosed contributions, according to news reports and California campaign contribution databases. Of that money, about $420,000 came from law enforcement groups or people associated with law enforcement, including $200,000 in loans from a former official with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. A law enforcement association’s political action committee also independently spent more than $50,000 on her first campaign for district attorney. That brings the total amount of law enforcement cash spent on Schubert’s election efforts to around $470,000.

Comey Says FBI’s Surveillance of MLK Was “Shameful” — but Comey’s FBI Targeted Black Activists and Muslim Communities Anyway

In his new book, James Comey describes his deep admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. and decries the FBI’s treatment of him as “a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history.” ... Despite this professed appreciation for King and his aim to right the wrongs of the bureau’s past, Comey presided over many of the same racialized tactics and assumptions in his tenure as FBI director: broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, coercing informants, trafficking in racial profiling, surveilling Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock activists, and largely standing aside amid police violence and misconduct. As he hits the lecture circuit this week, feted by many across the political spectrum as the nation’s conscience, we would do well to move beyond his claims of “ethical leadership” to his actual actions as director of the FBI. ...

When Comey became head of the FBI, he condoned a similar set of racialized, rights-abusing practices, including widespread, warrantless surveillance of American citizens, despite warnings from top-level bureau officials. In particular, the harassment and targeting of Muslim Americans, particularly Muslims who express dissenting views, in post-9/11 America has paralleled the civil rights era, as the intimacies of Muslim life — from worship to family time to community organizations to student activities — came under persistent scrutiny. Comey maintained and at times amplified that tact. The FBI now has 15,000 informants, mostly tasked with surveilling the Muslim community — up from 1,500 when Congress began its hearings on COINTELPRO in 1974. ...

Comey continued the practice, up through 2016, of paying Sebastian Gorka to provide Islamophobic lectures and training materials to agents in its Joint Terrorism operations course. Gorka’s company received $103,000 between 2012 to 2016, when he was finally let go, though his anti-Islam beliefs had been flagged for years. (Gorka then went on to serve as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump in 2017.) Gorka reportedly taught agents that there is no such thing as a mainstream Muslim — only those radicalized and those soon to be radicalized — warranting suspicion of all Muslims.

The former FBI director also maintained the bureau’s practice of surveilling black and Native American activists. As a Black Lives Matter movement that highlighted police abuse gathered steam, the FBI did not focus on curbing police abuses, but on monitoring activists. Comey, in a 2015 speech at Georgetown University, claimed that, after the “Ferguson riots,” he sought data on police killings of African-Americans, but that the “data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.” Claiming that law enforcement needed to do better, he nonetheless explained that “police officers on patrol in our nation’s cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color.” He added, “After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.” In his book, Comey goes farther, finding the term “mass incarceration” to be “inaccurate and insulting to a lot of good people in law enforcement.”

What the bureau did, instead of broadly investigating police misconduct, was target growing protest movements around police brutality and Native American rights. Recent revelations attest to FBI monitoring of the Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock movements, and show how the bureau now claims “Black Identity Extremists” are a rising threat — a direct legacy of Comey’s leadership during that period.

Why MSNBC Is Only Focused On Trump w/Glenn Greenwald

The Democratic Party Is Paying Millions for Hillary Clinton’s Email List, FEC Documents Show

Heading into the 2018 midterms, with Democrats hoping to take back the House of Representatives and even make a run at the Senate, the party has spent more than $2 million worth of campaign resources on payments to Hillary Clinton’s new group, Onward Together, according to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with people familiar with the payments.

The Democratic National Committee is paying $1.65 million for access to the email list, voter data, and software produced by Hillary for America during the 2016 presidential campaign, Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokesperson for the DNC, told The Intercept. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has paid more than $700,000 to rent the same email list. ... The DNC agreement with the Clinton campaign calls on the debt-ridden organization to fork the money over to an entity of Clinton’s choosing, which wound up being Onward Together, the operation she formed after her campaign ceased to exist.

Senior Democrat Caught on Tape Pressuring Progressive Congressional Candidate to Drop Out of Race

Weedkiller found in granola and crackers, internal FDA emails show

US government scientists have detected a weedkiller linked to cancer in an array of commonly consumed foods, emails obtained through a freedom of information request show. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been testing food samples for residues of glyphosate, the active ingredient in hundreds of widely used herbicide products, for two years, but has not yet released any official results.

But the internal documents obtained by the Guardian show the FDA has had trouble finding any food that does not carry traces of the pesticide. “I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal and corn meal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them,” FDA chemist Richard Thompson wrote to colleagues in an email last year regarding glyphosate. Thompson, who is based in an FDA regional laboratory in Arkansas, wrote that broccoli was the only food he had “on hand” that he found to be glyphosate-free.

That internal FDA email, dated January 2017, is part of a string of FDA communications that detail agency efforts to ascertain how much of the popular weedkiller is showing up in American food. The tests mark the agency’s first-ever such examination.

“People care about what contaminants are in their food. If there is scientific information about these residues in the food, the FDA should release it,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor in the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “It helps people make informed decisions. Taxpayers paid for the government to do this work, they should get to see the information.”

In 'Huge Win for Pollinators, People, and the Planet,' EU Bans Bee-Killing Pesticides

Faced with mounting scientific evidence that bee-poisoning neonicotinoids, or neonics, could cause an "ecological armageddon," European regulators on Friday approved a "groundbreaking" and "historic" ban on the widely-used class of pesticides—an announcement met with immediate applause by campaigners. ...

Under the new rules, which build on existing restrictions and are expected to take effect by the end of the year, three main neonics—imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam—will only be allowed in permanent greenhouses "where no contact with bees is expected," according to a statement by the European Union (EU).

Vytenis Andriukaitis, European commissioner for health and food safety, welcomed the move, which follows a February assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that concluded "most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees." "Bee health remains of paramount importance for me since it concerns biodiversity, food production, and the environment," Andriukaitis told the Guardian.

British and US scientists are to examine the risk of the Thwaites glacier collapsing, which is already responsible for a 4% sea-level rise

The precarious state of a vast, remote Antarctic glacier will provide an inaugural mission for the British vessel once dubbed Boaty McBoatface, as scientists from the UK and US set up a new £20m research operation. Scientists from both countries are to collaborate on the five-year project to examine the Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica, a major structure that drains an area about the size of the UK.

Any firm indication that the glacier could be responding to a warmer climate with faster icemelt could presage disaster for coastal areas of the globe, with the potential for sea-level rises some scientists put as high as 1.5m by the century’s end. ...

Scott Borg, deputy assistant director of the US National Science Foundation, said the expedition was of global significance. “This is critically important to all of us, no matter where we live. What happens in the Antarctic does not stay in the Antarctic. We do not know how quickly [the glacier] will contribute to sea level rises, and whether we have decades or centuries to prepare for it.” He warned of possible changes to global ocean circulation, as well as sea-level rises, that could result from more rapid melting. Scientists have grown increasingly concerned over the effect of melting ice, from the polar ice caps and glaciers on land, on global ocean currents, with a recent study showing the Atlantic’s gulf stream at its weakest for 1,600 years.

Sea-level rises are a hotly contested area of climate science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast that average sea-level rises could be held to roughly 25cm to 40cm if governments take strong action on greenhouse gases. However, this does not take account of the potential for rapid melting or collapse of glaciers in Antarctica.

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