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"The United States and Saudi Arabia have an extraordinary relationship that dates back to Franklin Roosevelt."

-- Barack Obama

News and Opinion

Senator Says Bombing Yemen Is Distracting Saudis From Fighting Terror

As President Obama meets with Gulf State leaders in Riyadh, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is questioning the Saudi commitment to fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS, warning that the war in Yemen is distracting Saudi Arabia from operations against extremists. ...

Murphy introduced a bill last week, along with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., that would block arms transfers to Saudi Arabia unless the State Department certifies that the kingdom is “taking all necessary measures” to target AQAP and ISIS, and is minimizing civilian casualties.

Saudi Arabia launched its U.S.-backed air campaign in Yemen last March after Houthi rebels threatened the rule of the Saudi-backed president. Throughout the campaign, the Saudi Air Force has largely refrained from engaging AQAP, who are also fighting the Houthis. ...

The New York Times noted last fall that most Saudi aircraft had shifted from the air war in Syria — where they were ostensibly bombing ISIS — to combat in Yemen. ... The Obama administration has steadily provided arms and support to the Saudi-led coalition as it waged war in Yemen, even as thousands of civilians have perished in the fighting.

Yemen peace talks: UN-sponsored negotiations begin in Kuwait

'True Cost of Covert Killings' Demanded as Drone Strike Victims Speak Out

Faisal bin ali Jaber, an environmental engineer from Sanaa, Yemen continued his lengthy battle for justice on Wednesday, filing a federal lawsuit (pdf) in Washington, D.C. demanding his "a legal right under FOIA" for the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of State, and Department of the Treasury to provide him with pertinent information about the strike that killed his brother-in-law Salem and his nephew Waleed in 2012.

Thus far, according to human rights organization Reprieve, which is representing Jaber, the agencies have not provided "substantive responses" to FOIA requests related to the killings.

Reprieve points to the contrast between the administration's treatment of Jaber with that of a 2015 drone strike that killed an American, Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto. As Common Dreams previously reported:

U.S. citizen Weinstein and Italian national Lo Porto were killed in a January 2015 drone strike in Pakistan. In a much-vaunted public apology in April, Obama declared: "Amid grief that is unimaginable, I pray that these two families will find some small measure of solace in knowing that Warren and Giovanni’s legacy will endure."

The administration has never acknowledged the killings of Jaber's family members—though he was given "a plastic bag containing $100,000 in sequentially-marked U.S. dollar bills as a condolence payment," according to Reprieve. In 2015, Jaber filed suit in 2015 seeking only public acknowledgement that the strike was unlawful, later offering to take merely an apology—as Weinstein and Lo Porto's family were given. The U.S. government declined the settlement offer and requested a court dismiss the suit.

It was dismissed — which led Reprieve to say in a statement: "The ruling would indicate that even the most heinous war crimes by the U.S. government are beyond the reach of the U.S. Courts."

Sen. Bob Graham: How our government has used deceit to withhold truth

On April 11, CBS's 60 Minutes led with an important segment about the tragedy of 9/11 and how a 28-page chapter of the final report of a congressional investigation has been withheld from the American people for almost 13 years.

This was not a coverup. It was the result of aggressive deception. Your government has purposely used deceit to withhold the truth. ...

Of the many unanswered questions of 9/11, the most significant, I believe, is whether the 19 hijackers operated alone or were aided by a support network. The official position of the U.S. government is that they acted alone. Like myself, the lead investigators of 9/11 find it implausible that these 19 poorly educated Arab men — most unable to speak English and with no prior experience in the U.S. — could have conducted such a complex plot without assistance from within our country. ...

The Saudis blatant attempts to avoid liability as co-conspirators in the crime of 9/11, and the U.S. government's acquiescence by refusing to release information (and opposition to reforming laws that would hold collaborators in murder to account) has been a clear signal to the Kingdom that it is immune from U.S. sanctions. With that impunity, it continues to finance terrorists and fund mosques and schools used to indoctrinate the next generation of terrorists in intolerance and jihad.

Obama says political progress needed before more Iraq aid

President Barack Obama strained to ease tension with Persian Gulf allies Thursday, pledging U.S. help in confronting Iran and other security threats. Yet he failed to win the commitments he sought to boost economic aid to Iraq.

Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia — the fourth and probably last of his presidency — did not result in any major breakthroughs. Obama said Gulf leaders attending the regional summit had agreed to step up the campaign against the Islamic State group, but did not lay out specifics. He described the talks as a chance to clear up misperceptions among allies, insisting the U.S. and Gulf partners had “tactical differences” but similar goals. ...

Obama, in meetings with Saudi King Salman, the ruling emirs of Qatar and Kuwait and others, appealed for more financial and political support to help Iraq. Yet the leaders appeared reluctant to invest until Iraq’s government overcomes a political crisis and better integrates Sunnis into the process.

In a shift in tone from just a day earlier, Obama said the U.S. and its Gulf partners should wait to see whether Iraq can resolve the crisis before committing more aid. He warned that the paralysis is impeding U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group and reconstruct war-damaged Iraq.

Obama Pledges to Defend Gulf States Against Iran

During his visit to Saudi Arabia to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit, President Obama provided the GCC member nations with a personal guarantee that the United States would defend their nations against “Iranian aggression.”

The offer is likely an empty one, since Obama’s comments do not constitute a treaty of defense, and with him out of office in just eight months, it would be up to future presidents to decide if they actually wanted to get involved in future wars in the region.

Conflicting Reports as Russian Jet Intercepts Israeli Warplanes Along Syria Border

In the days leading up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Moscow, Israeli media outlets are now reporting on an incident along the Syrian border in which a Russian jet intercepted one or more Israeli warplanes.

There are several conflicting accounts on the matter, with some saying the incident was on the Israel-Syria border and others suggesting it was on Syria’s coast, which would put the incident on the Lebanon border. Either way, the reports insist that the situation didn’t escalate into any sort of “confrontation.” ...

Israeli overflights of Syria aren’t unusual, and indeed Israeli attacks on Syria are fairly common, without Russian interference. If the incident happened on the coast, however, as some reports claim, it would put Israeli planes near the Russian naval base at Tartus, which Russia might interpret as provocative action.

An interesting interview, here's a taste:

Interview: Seymour Hersh Dishes on Saudi Oil Money Bribes and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden

Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private individuals or both?

Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.

KK: So you don’t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?

SH: The money was from the government … what the Saudis were doing, so I’ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven’t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That’s really a lot of money.

...

KK: You write that Obama authorized a ratline wherein CIA funneled arms from Libya into Syria and they ended up in jihadi hands. [According to Hersh, this operation was coordinated via the Benghazi consulate where U.S. ambassador Stevens was killed.] What was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in this given her significant role in Libya?

SH: The only thing we know is that she was very close to Petraeus who was the CIA director at the time ... she’s not out of the loop, she knows when there’s covert ops. ... That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

‘Long arm of Ankara’: Netherlands feeling ‘the pinch’ from Turkey

Ukraine’s New Speaker Of Parliament Is A Neo-Nazi

So much for plausible deniability. While apologists and propagandists for the government in Kiev have tried their best to dismiss concerns about the government’s connection to neo-fascist movements, the jig is undeniably up.

The new speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, is a longtime neo-Nazi activist who was a founder of the national socialist party of Ukraine. The party was recently renamed Svoboda which, along with many neofascists, has seen its political fortunes rise in the wake of the 2014 US-backed coup.

Parubiy played a significant role in the coup, serving as commandant of the Euromaidan, where he and other neo-fascists helped violently overthrow the democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych. ...

How long Parubiy will stay in his post is anyone’s guess. Post-coup Ukrainian politics is marked by intense political instability.

Venezuela announces daily, nationwide power cuts

Snowden to take Norway to court to secure free passage

Edward Snowden will take the Norwegian state to court in a bid to secure free passage there, a Norwegian law firm representing the former U.S. spy contractor said on Thursday.

Snowden has been invited to Norway to receive a freedom of speech award from the local branch of writers' group PEN International, but is worried that he would be handed over to the United States, his lawyers say. ...

"U.S. authorities have already asked that Snowden will be extradited to the U.S. if he was to arrive in Norway," Hallvard Helle, the lawyer representing Snowden, told Reuters.

"It is a case they (the Norwegian authorities) have not wished to comment on previously, so therefore we want a legal clarification of this," Helle said, when asked whether Norway had said it would extradite Snowden if he entered the country.

FBI Mass Child-Porn Hack Ruled Illegal on a Technicality

When the FBI hacked over 1,000 computers to ensnare consumers of child pornography early last year, its actions were illegal, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. ...

In this case, a magistrate judge approved a warrant allowing the FBI to deploy malware to infect every visitor to a child-porn website called Playpen. Because users of the site were using Tor, a popular anonymity tool, the FBI couldn’t figure out who they were or where they were coming from — until the malware revealed their IP addresses.

Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court in Boston ruled that the FBI’s search of Playpen visitor Alex Levin’s computer — located in Massachusetts — was unlawful because the magistrate judge who issued the warrant was in Virginia. According to Rule 41 of federal criminal procedure, magistrate judges can’t authorize a warrant outside their geographical jurisdiction.

Government lawyers two years ago began the multi-stage process of changing the rule to allow judges to grant warrants for remote searches of computers located outside their district or when the location is unknown. Despite angry protests from civil liberties advocates and technologists including the ACLU and Google, who described it as a power grab by the FBI to be able to conduct mass hacks with impunity, the rule change was approved by several judiciary panels, and is widely expected to be approved by the Supreme Court any day now. Congress has six months to modify or reject it, or else it will take effect.

'Worth it': FBI admits it paid $1.3m to hack into San Bernardino iPhone

The FBI paid about $1.3m for software to hack into the iPhone of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, director James Comey told a London audience on Thursday.

The staggering price illustrates the growth of the so-called “exploit market” for digital spy tools and cyber weapons as governments increasingly use hacker tricks for law enforcement and war. Prices for such software are rarely disclosed, although anything in the seven-figure range is extremely expensive.

Comey made the comments Thursday during an on-stage interview at the Aspen Security Forum in London. ...

Computer security experts have accused governments, including the US, UK, China and Russia, of creating a black market for malicious computer code that puts all consumers at risk.

Apple should pay more tax, says co-founder Steve Wozniak

Apple should pay more tax, according to Steve Wozniak, the company’s co-founder.

Speaking to the BBC, Wozniak expressed discomfort with reports that Apple avoids tax, saying that paying taxes was just “part of life” – something that “every company in the world” should do.

Apple has been criticised over its tax affairs and accused of using tax shelters in Luxembourg and Ireland to protect its revenues, allegations being investigated by the European commission.

Apple also faces pressure from US authorities to repatriate much of its enormous cash holdings, valued at more than $215bn in its end-of-year accounts. More than 90% of that money is held outside America, partially because Apple faces a 40% tax bill if it attempts to repatriate the cash hoard. “I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to do,” the company’s chief executive Tim Cook has said.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Wake Up to Money, Wozniak said: “I don’t like the idea that Apple might be unfair – not paying taxes the way I do as a person. I do a lot of work, I do a lot of travel and I pay over 50% of anything I make in taxes and I believe that’s part of life and you should do it.”

UK Issues Travel Warnings Against 'Anti-Gay' US States

The UK this week issued travel advice to tourists that warns of the dangers of visiting "anti-gay" U.S. states like North Carolina and Mississippi, both of which recently passed discriminatory legislation.

"The US is an extremely diverse society and attitudes towards LGBT people differ hugely across the country," the travel warning states. "LGBT travelers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi. Before traveling please read our general travel advice for the LGBT community. You can find more detail on LGBT issues in the US on the website of the Human Rights Campaign," referring to the national equal rights advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C. ...

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant earlier this month signed a controversial "religious freedom" law that critics say codifies LGBTQI discrimination, following a similar action by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who in March approved a law that mandates transgender people use the bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex, rather than their gender identity, among other requirements.

Uber Drivers Will Stay as Contractors Following $100M Settlement

Uber has agreed to pay up to $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with drivers in California and Massachusetts, avoiding a trial which could have forced the company to treat them as employees.

The settlement resolves, at least for now, a major challenge to its business model by allowing the ride-hailing service to carry on classifying its drivers as independent contractors. It must be approved by a judge before it is finalized.

The lawsuit had claimed that Uber drivers are employees and thus entitled to reimbursement of expenses and other employment rights and benefits.

The case against Uber had been closely watched in Silicon Valley, as other companies in the on-demand tech economy share Uber's reliance on independent contractors. The class action had been scheduled for a trial in San Francisco federal court in June. ...

Nothing about the settlement prevents a future court, or US labor authorities, from deeming Uber drivers as employees, Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney for drivers, said in a statement.

American Suicide Surge Parallels Era of Economic Woes

Coinciding with growing income inequality, widespread economic stagnation, and a continued lack of basic health services during the same time period, a new federal report reveals a surging suicide rate among the U.S. population over the last three decades.

Published Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the new report shows how—after a plateau in the 1980s and 90s—the suicide rate in the U.S. dramatically increased from 1999 to 2014, with the largest increase taking place after 2006. According to the CDC, suicide remains the 10th leading cause of death in the country.

"It’s a broad-based increase in suicide," Sally Curtin, a statistician with the CDC and one of the report’s main authors, told the PBS Newshour.

Among the key statistics contained in the report:

• From 1999 through 2014, the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased 24%, from 10.5 to 13.0 per 100,000 population, with the pace of increase greater after 2006.
• Suicide rates increased from 1999 through 2014 for both males and females and for all ages 10–74.
• The percent increase in suicide rates for females was greatest for those aged 10–14, and for males, those aged 45–64.
• The most frequent suicide method in 2014 for males involved the use of firearms (55.4%), while poisoning was the most frequent method for females (34.1%).

According to the Guardian, "This new suicide data underpins recent studies that showed a decline in life expectancy among middle-aged, white Americans – especially women. Such studies attributed the increasing death rate to drug and alcohol misuse, as well as suicide. However, the NCHS data did not analyze racial and ethnic differences in suicide."

This is an interesting article with a great deal of information, well worth a full read.

Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.

Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.

It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington. ...

Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.

No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen.

Hillary Clinton won New York, but her image is underwater

Hillary Clinton got what she needed in New York, a solid victory that stopped Bernie Sanders’s weeks-long winning streak. But any cause for celebration among her supporters probably will be tempered by the reality that her unexpectedly difficult nomination battle has taken a significant toll on her candidacy. ...

The damage to Clinton from her battle with Sanders is borne out in the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll. The longer this race has gone on, the more she has shown vulnerabilities. The top-line number that caught the eyes of so many analysts shows her now in a dead heat with Sanders nationally — ahead of him by just two percentage points, 50 to 48 percent. ...

Meanwhile, her negative ratings have been rising and now outweigh her positives by 24 points, according to the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. ... Clinton’s image is at or near record lows among major demographic groups. Among men, she is at minus 40. Among women, she is at minus nine. Among whites, she is at minus 39. Among white women, she is at minus 25. Among white men, she is 17 positive, 72 negative. Her favorability among whites at this point in the election cycle is worse than President Obama’s ever has been, according to Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

“By any conventional standard, this is a candidate who’s been disqualified to be president [by the voters],” McInturff said. “Her terrible numbers for months have been masked because we have the one candidate in modern history who has worse numbers. The spectacle of Donald Trump has gotten so much attention that she’s slipped under the radar for what ought to be a real story. .?.?. Her numbers have gone from terrible to historic and disqualifying.”

Hillary Clinton Delegate Will Oversee New York Primary Audit

Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller who ordered the audit of the New York City Board of Elections, is on the record as a Hillary Clinton delegate.

In a primary election fraught with voter suppression complaints, prompting an official investigation from New York’s Attorney General, a Hillary Clinton delegate in charge of overseeing the audit of New York City’s voting processes raises red flags. However, Stringer told BuzzFeed News that if he finds any issues that require him to recuse himself, he will. ...

Stringer’s name is found on page 9 of the State of New York’s official primary certification documents, listed as a Hillary Clinton delegate from New York’s 10th Congressional District, which covers parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Stringer, who previously served as borough president of Manhattan, got a higher percentage of the vote (10.3 percent) during Tuesday’s primaries than any other delegate in the district, according to BuzzFeed.

Tulsi Gabbard Stumps for Sanders and Attacks Clinton's Syria Policy

Backing Bernie's Bold Vision, Biden Knocks Hillary's "No We Can't" Mantra

"I don't think any Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big,'" the vice president said.

Although Vice President Joe Biden has promised to stay neutral on the Democratic presidential candidates this campaign season, he offered high praise for Bernie Sanders' message in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday: Biden will "take Mr. Sanders' aspirational approach over Mrs. Clinton's caution any day," the newspaper reports.

"I like the idea of saying, 'We can do much more,' because we can," Biden told the Times.

The vice president had harsh words for Clinton's call for slow, incremental change over political revolution. Biden said, "I don't think any Democrat's ever won saying, 'We can't think that big—we ought to really downsize here because it's not realistic," he said in a mocking tone, according to the newspaper. "C'mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I'm not part of the party that says, 'Well, we can't do it.'"

As Paris Deal Is Signed, Gulf Coast Residents Demand End to Drilling -- Entirely

Facebook, Google campuses at risk of being flooded due to sea level rise

Technology giants including Facebook and Google face the prospect of their prestigious Silicon Valley headquarters becoming swamped by water as rising sea levels threaten to submerge much of the property development boom gripping San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases. ...

“Facebook is very vulnerable,” said Lindy Lowe, a senior planner at California’s Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “They built on a very low site – I don’t know why they chose to build there. Facebook thinks they can pay enough to protect themselves. ...

The situation is a little better for Google, located in Mountain View and also unwilling to discuss sea level rise, and Cisco, headquartered in San Jose. But should the Antarctic ice sheet disintegrate, as outlined in a recent scientific paper, seas will be pushed up beyond 6ft and swamp both businesses.

Mitsubishi scandal deepens after US regulator demands test data

In Japan, Mitsubishi admitted this week that it manipulated test data to overstate the fuel efficiency of 625,000 cars and there are fears that more models may be involved. Government officials raided one of its offices on Thursday.

An official at the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Reuters that the regulator had asked Mitsubishi for information on vehicles sold in the US. ...

Japanese media reported that Mitsubishi had submitted misleading mileage data on its i-MiEV electric car, which is also sold overseas. The previously disclosed models whose fuel economy readings Mitsubishi has admitted to manipulating are only sold in Japan – four of its mini-cars, two of which it manufactured for Nissan.

Oil Drilling Underway Inside the Yasuni National Park of Amazonian Ecuador

Fracking Executive Says Rich Neighborhoods Safe from Drill Sites

At a closed-door seminar earlier this month, Range Resources official says drilling companies avoid 'big houses' of wealthy and influential people

An executive from a top shale drilling firm told attendees of a fossil fuels seminar in Pennsylvania earlier this month that fracking companies deliberately avoid setting up shop near the "big houses" of the wealthy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

Two environmental groups, the Sierra Club and the Center for Coalfield Justice, last week sent a letter to the state Office of Environmental Justice to review Range Resources' practices to see if it has indeed avoided rich neighborhoods and targeted low-income areas for shale gas development. Attorneys from both organizations were present at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute's Environmental Law Forum on April 7.

The comments were made by Terry Bossert, Range's vice president of legislative and regulatory affairs, and were reportedly made off-the-cuff as he was giving a PowerPoint presentation titled "Environmental Issues Facing the Oil and Gas Industry." ...

Joanne Kilgour, director of the Sierra Club's Pennsylvania chapter, said the remarks "pose significant environmental justice issues, and raise the question whether the companies coming into the communities are really operating in the best interests of those communities."

Also of Interest

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

New Yorkers Against Wall Street

GAO: JPMorgan Chase Customers Lost $5.4 Billion to Madoff

Why Haven’t Bankers Been Punished? Just Read These Insider SEC Emails

The (un)Democratic Primary: Why We Need a New Party of the 99%

Zero-waste bloggers: the millennials who can fit a year's worth of trash in a jar

Why Are Bankrupt Oil Companies Still Pumping?

Declassified: How Israel misled the U.S. about its nuclear program

The FBI’s dangerous Apple-hack rationalizations: How it’s now stealing a page from the CIA’s torture playbook

Listen to an FBI “Honeypot” on the Job

A Little Night Music

Robert Ward - Black Bottom

Robert Ward & Ry Cooder - Forgive Me Darling

Robert Ward - Potato Soup

Robert Ward - I Will Fear No Evil

Ohio Untouchables (Robert Ward) - Hot Stuff

Robert Ward - I'm Gonna Cry A River

Robert Ward - I Ain't Drunk

Robert Ward - Meat Off The Bone