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This evening's music features blues guitarist Ronnie Earl. Enjoy!

"You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle."

-- Groucho Marx

News and Opinion

U.S. intelligence officials warn agents could quit en masse if Trump keeps mocking them

Cyber Command Chief Admiral Mike Rogers testified to Congress Thursday that he is worried the intelligence community might resign en masse if officials feel they don’t have the confidence of President-elect Donald Trump. Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing on Russia’s interference in the presidential election, Rogers and National Intelligence Director James Clapper both obliquely warned the president-elect about consequences from his critiques of the intelligence community.

The motivation to serve in U.S. intelligence is “driven in no small part by confidence from our leaders,” Rogers said. Without that, Rogers cautioned, there could be “a situation where our workforce decides to walk.” Clapper added there is an “important distinction” between “healthy skepticism” of intelligence assessments and “disparagement.” Neither mentioned Trump’s name, but there’s little doubt they were referring to him and his recent tweets. ...

Meanwhile Democrats used the hearing to repeatedly praise the American intelligence community and criticize the president-elect. There would be “howls” from the Republicans if a Democrat were “trashing” the intelligence community like Trump is, Senator Claire McCaskill said.

Joe Biden attacks Trump for 'mindless' dismissal of agencies' intelligence

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, has said it is “absolutely mindless” for Donald Trump not to have confidence in the intelligence community, as the heads of the US agencies prepared to present their findings on Russian election interference to the president-elect.

The unprecedented dispute between Trump and the intelligence services he will soon control broke into the open at a congressional hearing on Thursday as the head of US intelligence publicly defended his analysts, who he said “stand more resolutely” than ever behind their conclusion of “Russian interference in our electoral process”.

Biden said it would be legitimate to question intelligence and ask for more detail or disagree but “dangerous” to publicly criticise the agencies and claim to know more than them.

“For a president not to have confidence in, not to be prepared to listen to, the myriad intelligence agencies, from defence intelligence to the CIA, is absolutely mindless,” he said in an interview with PBS.

James Clapper, the departing director of national intelligence, and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI will brief Trump on Russian election interference in Trump Tower on Friday.

Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Intel Chiefs Alleging Russian Threat Have History of Deceiving the Public

Heh, if the Russians are happy, it's solid proof that they have been up to something devious.

U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win

Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks. ...

The classified document, which officials said is over 50 pages, was delivered to President Obama on Thursday, and it is expected to be presented to Trump in New York on Friday by the nation’s top spy officials, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director John Brennan.

Given the president-elect’s skepticism about the intelligence community — particularly its conclusions about Russia — the Trump Tower briefing has taken on the tenor of a showdown between the president-elect and the intelligence agencies he has disparaged.

What Impact Will Trump Presidency Have on Freedom of Edward Snowden & Julian Assange?

Rob Urie delivers an excellent, well-worth-reading essay, that will completely satisfy your daily required dose of irony. Here's a taste:

Resistance

In 1929 Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and creator of the term ‘propaganda,’ paid a group of young and fashionable women to smoke cigarettes in a suffragette march as an act of ‘resistance.’ Mr. Bernays’ goal was to convince women who had hitherto found cigarettes repulsive that smoking was an act of rebellion against male-determined conventions. What he accomplished was to consign several generations of women to poor health and diminished lives for the benefit of cynical (male) tobacco company executives.

Mr. Bernays’ ploy was spectacularly successful if exploiting social vulnerabilities for profit and social control can be termed ‘success.’ The women who were convinced to take up smoking were neither stupid nor more vulnerable to implausible suggestions than anyone else. And the paradox at work, selling psychological manipulation as self-determination, calls into question the very idea of self-determination. These women may well have felt liberated even as they ceded power over their lives to the forces they were nominally rebelling against.

In retrospect this paradox loses more ground still for the suffragettes because Mr. Bernays’ joined psychology to politics in order to take away the capacity for self-determination in any meaningful political sense. By framing the freedom to choose in terms of one’s ‘local’ choice of products, in this case cigarettes, but say Democrats or Republicans, the broader political-economy in intended to be legitimated through the provision of choice. But defining the realm of choice as what is put in front of us is fundamentally authoritarian. ...

In this interminable political season cries of ‘resistance’ are being put forward by political operatives who want to return the Democrats to power as well as by people who perceive irreconcilable contradictions in the existing social order. Chatter to ‘resist Trump’ implies that he alone is ‘the problem.’ Toward this end national Democrats have cited those bastions of social resistance and known truth-tellers (not) the CIA, FBI and the corporate-state press to assert that the public’s choice of products was corrupted by ‘outside’ actors.

For those with less mercenary concerns, the question of timing is important here. The Democrat Party is known as the ‘graveyard of social movements’ because it is the graveyard of social movements. Barack Obama was the ‘deporter-in-chief’ who rescued Wall Street while leaving the socially vulnerable to their own devices that set in motion the election of Donald Trump. Bill Clinton ‘freed’ Wall Street to abscond with several generations of Black wealth while launching his racist dog-whistle ‘war on crime’ at the Confederate war memorial that was home to a regional KKK revival. [Read all about that here: Bill Clinton’s Stone Mountain Moment - js] These seem good targets for ‘resistance.’ So where was it?

Alleged Target of Drone Strike That Killed American Teenager Is Alive, According to State Department

The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. ... Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. ...

Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. ... The younger Awlaki, who was living with his grandparents in Sanaa, had not seen his father in years at the time of his death and has never been linked to any terrorism.

The designation of al Banna [as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist] by the State Department — and the confirmation he is indeed alive — once again raises an important question of the Obama administration: Why was this 16-year-old U.S. citizen killed in a drone strike authorized by the president of the United States?

Russia begins military withdrawal from Syria

Vladimir Putin has signalled “mission semi-accomplished” in Syria as Russia announced the start of a withdrawal of forces, beginning with the departure from the Mediterranean of a naval group led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.

“In accordance with the decision of the supreme commander of the Russian armed forces, [President] Vladimir Putin, the Russian defence ministry is beginning the reduction of the armed deployment to Syria,” the military chief, Valery Gerasimov, said.

Putin ordered a reduction in his forces in Syria on 29 December, as he announced a ceasefire between government and rebel forces that excludes Islamic State and the al-Qaida-linked Fateh al-Sham group. Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, is pushing for peace talks to be held this month in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan.

Expert opinion is divided over whether the Kuznetsov’s journey to the Mediterranean in October added anything militarily beyond a symbolic show of naval force.

US Officials ‘Baffled’ as Turkey Accepts Russian Help in al-Bab, Declines US Support

With reports that the Turkish government is considering expelling US forces from the Incirlik Airbase over the lack of military support from the US in the Turkish invasion of al-Bab, US officials say they are “baffled,” and that Turkey has actually turned down US air support. ...

Turkey has instead gotten military support from Russia, who US official say has conducted “multiple” airstrikes against ISIS forces around al-Bab. Russia’s actual air support appears to dramatically undercut the US presentation of overflights as support.

Turkey questions US coalition presence at Incirlik Air Base amid ‘confidence crisis’

U.S., European weapons used to commit war crimes in Iraq: Amnesty

Militias fighting alongside Iraqi troops against Islamic State are committing war crimes using weapons provided to the Iraqi military by the United States, Europe, Russia and Iran, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

The rights group said that the predominantly Shi'ite Muslim militias, known collective as the Hashid Shaabi, were using weapons from Iraqi military stockpiles to commit war crimes including enforced disappearances, torture and summary killings. ...

"International arms suppliers, including the USA, European countries, Russia and Iran, must wake up to the fact that all arms transfers to Iraq carry a real risk of ending up in the hands of militia groups with long histories of human rights violations," Amnesty researcher Patrick Wilcken said.

States wishing to sell arms to Iraq should ensure strict measures to ensure weapons will not be used by militias to violate human rights, he added in a statement.

Philippine President Duterte is cozying up with Russia as he cuts US ties

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte visited a Russian warship docked in Manila on Friday, signalling his desire to strengthen the country’s relationship with Russia.

“We welcome our Russian friends. Anytime you want to dock here for anything, for play, for replenish supplies or maybe our ally to protect us,” Duterte said, as he greeted Rear Admiral Eduard Mikhailov, head of the Flotilla of the Russian Navy Pacific Fleet.

This is the first time the Russian and Philippines navies have officially come into contact, but for Duterte it is just the latest posturing as Philippines relations with the U.S. continue to weaken.

Scapegoating BLM

Tension is mounting online in response to the brutal torture of a white, mentally disabled man by four black suspects in Chicago Tuesday. One of the suspects broadcast the incident live on Facebook, and reactions to the shocking footage have laid bare, once again, how starkly divided, both racially and politically, the United States is, with many social media users saying Black Lives Matter should shoulder the blame.

The video shows the 18-year-old assailants, who were arrested Wednesday, shouting “Fuck Donald Trump! Fuck white people!” But there’s no evidence they were affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, nor is there any evidence that the victim was a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump. ... But as of Thursday, #BLMKidnapping — using the acronym for the decentralized activist movement — was one of the top trending topics on Twitter. A version of that hashtag was first used early Wednesday evening.

Some social media users were calling on BLM activists (technically there are no “leaders” due to its decentralized structure) to disavow the violent act. Others suggested that the rhetoric used by some Black Lives Matter activists has fostered a climate of racial violence. Some even called for Black Lives Matter to be labeled as a hate group.

Others, meanwhile, used to hashtag to argue that black people and racial justice activists were being unfairly maligned by the incident. One social media user who describes himself as a anti-racism strategist argued that white violence is often framed in terms of mental health, whereas individual acts of black violence are seen as symptomatic of an entire race.

No Conflict Here: 150 Wall Street Firms Own Over $1.5 Billion of Trump's Debt

As many suspected, President-elect Donald Trump's web of business conflicts is much more complicated than he has let on.

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal published Thursday found that the incoming president owes at least $1.85 billion in debt to as many as 150 Wall Street firms and other financial institutions.

According to the examination of legal and property documents, "Hundreds of millions of dollars of debt attached to Mr. Trump's properties, some of them backed by Mr. Trump's personal guarantee, were packaged into securities and sold to investors over the past five years," thus "broadening the tangle of interests that pose potential conflicts for the incoming president's administration."

In May, Trump filed documents with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that disclosed $315 million owed to 10 companies—but that only included debts for companies that Trump completely controls, "excluding more than $1.5 billion lent to partnerships that are 30 percent owned by him," WSJ reported.

"As a result," wrote WSJ reporters Jean Eaglesham and Lisa Schwartz, "a broader array of financial institutions now are in a potentially powerful position over the incoming president."

Put more directly, as Think Progress's Judd Legum did: "As president, Trump will be responsible for regulating entities that he also owes money to."

Bernie Sanders Supporters Launch Glass-Steagall Drive

Northwest Ohio supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’ in his run for President have launched a nationwide push to enlist other organizations to send it letters and take to social media to endorse a demand that President-elect Donald Trump fulfill a campaign pledge. Trump made the pledge on October 26 of this year in a speech he delivered in Charlotte, North Carolina, promising to enact a 21^st Century Glass-Steagall Act to reform Wall Street. Such legislation has been sitting dormant in both the House and Senate for years. If enacted, it would separate the deposit-taking, taxpayer-insured commercial banks from the globe-trotting, high-risk trading casinos known as investment banks on Wall Street.

During Trump’s speech in Charlotte on October 26, he delivered the following remarks:

“I will also pursue financial reforms to make it easier for young African-Americans to get credit to pursue their dreams in business and create jobs in their communities…Dodd-Frank has been a disaster, making it harder for small businesses to get the credit they need. You folks know that. The policies of the Clintons brought us the financial recession – through lifting Glass-Steagall, pushing subprime lending, and blocking reforms to Fannie and Freddie. Two friendly names but they’re not so friendly. It’s time for a 21st century Glass Steagall and, as part of that, a priority on helping African-American businesses get the credit they need.”

... The 849-page Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, enacted over six years ago in 2010, has indeed been a failure as Trump correctly notes. Dodd-Frank mandated 398 new rules, none of which have been successful in curtailing fraud by Wall Street banks. What has happened instead is that the biggest banks on Wall Street are signing deferred prosecution agreements with the Justice Department for prior felonies as they invent ingenious new ways to loot the investing public. Instead of these so-called “universal” banks functioning as one-stop financial supermarkets as they promised Congress prior to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, they have become sprawling criminal enterprises, frequently operating as cartels to rig various markets or engaging in ever more brazen frauds, as we saw in the recent two million fake accounts at Wells Fargo or the London Whale scandal at JPMorgan Chase where it gambled with hundreds of billions of dollars of its depositors’ money, not its own capital, and lost over $6.2 billion in high-risk derivatives trading in London.

Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.

“It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

Mnuchin is Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury Department, and served as CEO of OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by his bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands more.

But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.

Anti-GOP Uprising Grows as 'Indivisible Guide' to Resisting Trump Goes Viral

Former congressional staffers are publicizing their newly released "Indivisible Guide," a manual for people, groups, and organizations who want to resist the incoming rightwing administration through grassroots action.

President-elect Donald Trump rose to power while losing the popular vote by a historic margin, and his lack of a mandate means a vocal and organized resistance can weaken Republican resolve and "[stiffen] Democratic spines," the guide states.

"We know this because we've seen it before," write the authors, former staffers who witnessed the Tea Party surge in President Barack Obama's first term. "We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress." ...

The guide, which began as a Google doc last month and whose full title is Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, outlines a step-by-step process of grassroots organizing and advocacy targeting Members of Congress (MoCs), from coordinated calls to sit-ins and photo op disruption.

It also encourages people to form localized activist groups to pressure their congressional representatives to resist Trump's agenda.

Democrats embracing Tea Party tactics? That won't work without a new ideology>

A 23-page Google document titled Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda has been spreading around Washington faster than John Podesta’s risotto recipe. ... Operating on a local level, acting defensively and waging constituent phone call campaigns are all ideas that can easily be appropriated. Considering the razor-thin margins by which Republicans won in many states, it should not be hard to frighten Republican representatives with the prospect of getting voted out.

Activists can also empower (or pressure, as the case may be) Democratic lawmakers to stand up for progressive principles, and this means tugging the political spectrum back to the left. Republicans have long known it’s foolish to start negotiations in the middle. They stake out extreme positions – a six-week abortion ban, a complete gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics – so they can bargain down to what they actually want – a 20-week abortion ban, a “bipartisan” gutting of the OCE.

In contrast, Democrats said they were open to replacing Obamacare before Congress was even in session, voted to authorize the Iraq War and competed throughout the 1990s to show they could put black people in prison and dismantle the welfare state with the best of them. They let the ACA’s public option fall to the threat of a filibuster from Joe Lieberman, which they could have easily withstood if they had wanted to. Even now, they deride the Tea Party’s tactics as childish and crass, when the truly crass thing is that 45 million people are living in poverty in the richest country in the world.
Of course, what the Google doc and the president fail to mention is that this only works if the Democrats are progressive in the first place; there can be no left-Tea Party without an organizing ideology. Which brings me to another Tea Party tactic: the purge.

While some Democrats ( Elizabeth Warren and the logical left-Tea Party choice for DNC chair, Keith Ellison) are already reasonably progressive and more can potentially be dragged left by political expediency, many are simply too committed to neoliberal ideology and/or beholden to monied interests to be rehabilitated. Which means some pink-slipping and primary-challenging is in order.

PBS interview: Biden talks Trump

More tales from the 140 character limited bully pulpit.

We contribute billions to US economy, Toyota politely tells Trump

Japanese officials have defended Toyota’s contribution to the US economy after Donald Trump threatened to impose a “big border tax” on the carmaker if it went ahead with plans to open a new plant in Mexico.

Trump’s tweet was followed by Toyota shares dropping more than 3% in morning trade in Tokyo on Friday. Shares in Nissan and Honda also fell as unease in Japan grows over the effects Trump’s “America first” economic policy could have on cross-Pacific trade. ...

The automaker did not directly address Trump’s reference to the Mexico plant, but pointed to its contribution to the health of the US economy. “With more than $21.9bn direct investment in the US, 10 manufacturing facilities, 1,500 dealerships and 136,000 employees, Toyota looks forward to collaborating with the Trump administration to serve in the best interests of consumers and the automotive industry,” Toyota said in a statement. ...

Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2017

Weeks after Trump dismayed Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, with a vow to rip up the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement as soon as he is inaugurated on 20 January, Trump tweeted that Toyota would face high tariffs if it builds its Corolla cars at a new $1bn plant in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

"Hello Mexico, it's Trump. I'm ready for you to pay for that wall... Remember the wall we discussed. Hello? Hello?"https://t.co/DJ0prutQVg

— W. Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) January 6, 2017

Paul Ryan vows to stop funding Planned Parenthood's health services

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that Republicans will seek to defund Planned Parenthood as part of their effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

“With this bill, we are standing for life,” Ryan said at his first news conference of the year.

Republicans, of course, have been trying to strip federal funding for Planned Parenthood for years because the organization provides abortions, in addition to routine low-cost reproductive health services. Republicans shut down the government for more than two weeks in 2013 over the issue.

But there is already a law on the books that prevents federal funds from paying for abortions, known as the Hyde Amendment. Planned Parenthood only uses federal dollars to pay for routine health services, like cancer screenings, STI/HIV testings, and patient counseling. In other words, defunding Planned Parenthood would simply mean taking money away from providing low-cost pap smears, not abortions.

The GOP's Brilliant Plan to Distract from Critical Confirmation Hearings

The Republican party appears to be employing a strategy wherein the public—and even lawmakers—will be too distracted to place much needed scrutiny on President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet nominees.

Not only are six major confirmation hearings now scheduled for the same day (see below)—"preventing any one nominee from dominating a news cycle," as the Washington Post put it—but Trump himself rescheduled a long-awaited press conference for that very day: January 11. And that same Wednesday also happens to be when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to begin a so-called vote-o-rama, "in which senators take dozens and dozens of votes on amendments with no clear end," Politico explains. 

Indeed, as Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told NPR of secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson's hearing in particular: "It may well happen on a day where we are literally voting continuously for 24 hours. I don't think that's the right day to hold a hearing where the members of the Foreign Relations Committee who have real concerns—both Republicans and Democrats—want to hear his full answers, not just race in and out."

But that could be just what some Republicans are hoping for.

"The GOP leadership's approach will minimize unflattering process stories and prevent Trump's nominees from receiving the kind of full airing and scrutiny that they would otherwise," James Hohmann wrote for the Post.

Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs

The official line from U.S.-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!)

But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.

The Intercept’s examination of dozens of earnings calls and investor conference talks since Trump won the presidential election finds that many executives are telling analysts at large banks that they are eager to take the money to increase dividends and stock buybacks as well as snap up competitors. They demonstrate considerably less if any enthusiasm for going on a domestic hiring spree. ...

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened the last time the U.S. had a corporate tax holiday in 2004, cutting the rate on repatriated profits to 5 percent. Companies lobbying for the so-called “Homeland Investment Act” claimed it would help them hire Americans and invest in research and development. Instead they used the money for stock buybacks and increased executive compensation, while the prime beneficiaries actually cut their U.S. payroll. (According to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush was “so mad that he signed the 5.75 percent repatriation bill [and] none of it was reinvested.”)

But wait, America is number 1! Ooops, I guess our ruling elites and captains of industry goofed again.

China cementing global dominance of renewable energy and technology

It now owns five of the world’s six largest solar-module manufacturing firms and the largest wind-turbine manufacturer

China is cementing its global dominance of renewable energy and supporting technologies, aggressively investing in them both at home and around the globe, leaving countries including the US, UK and Australia at risk of missing the growing market.

A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa) found China’s dominance in renewables is rapidly spreading overseas, with the country accelerating its foreign investment in renewable energy and supporting technologies. ...

China was already widely recognised as the largest investor in domestic renewable energy, investing $102bn in 2015, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance – more than twice that invested domestically by the US and about five times that of the UK. ...

Tim Buckley, director of Ieefa and author of the report, said the election of Donald Trump in the US and lack of supportive policy in Australia left those countries at risk of missing a huge opportunity.

“At the moment China is leaving everyone behind and has a real first-mover and scale advantage, which will be exacerbated if countries such as the US, UK and Australia continue to apply the brakes to clean energy,” he said.

From Keystone XL Pipeline to #DAPL: Jasilyn Charger, Water Protector from Cheyenne River Reservation

Giant iceberg poised to break off from Antarctic shelf

A giant iceberg, with an area equivalent to Trinidad and Tobago, is poised to break off from the Antarctic shelf.

A thread of just 20km of ice is now preventing the 5,000 sq km mass from floating away, following the sudden expansion last month of a rift that has been steadily growing for more than a decade.

The iceberg, which is positioned on the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica, known as Larsen C, is predicted to be one of the largest 10 break-offs ever recorded.

Professor Adrian Luckman, a scientist at Swansea University and leader of the UK’s Midas project, said in a statement: “After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18km during the second half of December 2016. Only a final 20km of ice now connects an iceberg one quarter the size of Wales to its parent ice shelf.”

The separation of the iceberg “will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula” and could trigger a wider break-up of the Larsen C ice shelf, he added.

GOP Advancing "Extreme Bills," Handing Reins to Corporations at Public's Expense

Launching what one group called "a coming massive attack on federal protections," the U.S. House on Wednesday night passed the GOP-backed Midnight Rule Relief Act—making it easier for Congress to overturn Obama-era regulations—and appeared poised to follow that vote with passage on Thursday of another bill aimed at dismantling key health and safety laws. ...

"These dangerous pieces of legislation are one of the most egregious displays of political kowtowing to big polluter industries ever seen—and when considering previous efforts by many House Republicans over the years to kiss the ring of fossil fuel interests, that's really saying something," said Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce ahead of Wednesday's vote. ...

According to the Associated Press, "GOP leaders said their top regulatory targets will be [President Barack] Obama's rules to reduce methane emissions and lessen the environmental impact of coal mining on nearby streams." The Senate will soon consider companion legislation, though Reuters notes it could face a harder time in that chamber.

Also of Interest

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

William Binney, Ray McGovern: Emails were leaked, not hacked

Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever

Threatened by Civil Rights Lawsuit, Park Service Expedites Protest Permits

Algorithm and Blues: Why Hillary’s Moneyball Strategy Failed

The Oil Supply Glut Is Here To Stay In 2017

Want to be part of the next wave of activism? Move to rural America

hat tip divineorder:

Top Ten Weather Events of 2016: #1 is No Surprise; #2 Will Surprise You

A Little Night Music

Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters - As The Years Go Passing By

Ronnie Earl And The Broadcasters - Moanin'

Roomful of Blues - 3 Hours Past Midnight

Ronnie Earl w/Darrell Nulisch + Jerry Portnoy - She's Dynamite, Ridin' In the Moonlight

Ronnie Earl - Blues For The West Side

Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters - The Big Train

Ronnie Earl - Live in Germany 1996