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"For over 70 years, since the end of World War II, the United States has bombed dozens of nations, and in every case that I am aware of U.S. officials have labeled a targeted individual “Hitler.” ...

Without presenting us with any evidence, the U.S. government has accused Russia of shooting down an airplane, of exposing the corruption within the Democratic National Committee (shouldn’t we be grateful?), and of somehow sabotaging the upcoming U.S. election. Every atrocity committed by Russia or Syria in Syria is big news. Every U.S. atrocity there is a yawn. ...

We should protect human rights through leadership by example and consistent application of the rule of law. Doing so would then open the United States up to the possibility of opposing human rights abuses by some of the nasty governments that it props up and sells or gives weapons to, beginning perhaps with Saudi Arabia, a monarchy that makes Vladimir Putin look like Mohandas Gandhi."

-- David Swanson

News and Opinion

The US is systematically undermining the global justice system and negating the work of generations of Americans that dared to dream of (and build the institutions of) a more peaceful world.

US Impunity Erodes World Justice

In the past week, Burundi and South Africa have joined Namibia in declaring their intention to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). They are likely to be followed by a parade of other African countries, jeopardizing the future of an international court that has prosecuted 39 officials from eight African countries but has failed to indict a single person who is not African.

Ironically, African countries were among the first to embrace the ICC, so it is a striking turnaround that they are now the first to give up on it.

But it is the United States that has played the leading role in preventing the ICC from fulfilling the universal mandate for which it was formed, to hold officials of all countries accountable for the worst crimes in the world: genocide; crimes against humanity; and war crimes – not least the crime of international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg defined as “the supreme international crime” from which all other war crimes follow.

As the ICC’s founding father, former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, lamented in 2011, “You don’t have to be a criminologist to realize that if you want to deter a crime, you must persuade potential criminals that, if they commit crimes, they will be hauled into court and be held accountable. It is the policy of the United States to do just the opposite as far as the crime of aggression is concerned. Our government has gone to great pains to be sure that no American will be tried by any international criminal court for the supreme crime of illegal war-making.”

The U.S. has not only refused to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC over its own citizens. It has gone further, pressuring other countries to sign Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIA), in which they renounce the right to refer U.S. citizens to the ICC for war crimes committed on their territory.

The U.S. has also threatened to cut off U.S. aid to countries that refuse to sign them. The BIAs violate those countries’ own commitments under the ICC statute, and the U.S. pressure to sign them has been rightly condemned as an outrageous effort to ensure impunity for U.S. war crimes.

US Army Chief Talks Up War With Russia, Insists US Will Win

With some Obama Administration officials openly advocating starting a war with Russia over Syria, it is noteworthy that a lot of top Pentagon officials are treating the conflict as all but inevitable. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley hyped Russian modernization efforts, but declared that they “will lose to the American Army.”

Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Joe Dunford also complained about recent modernization efforts within the Russian military, claiming that they are threatening American interests with their capabilities, while Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work referred to them as America’s “competitor.”

Of course, the United States spends many, many times what Russia does on its military, but the fact that Russia has a proper military capable of defending the nation at all puts it in a total different category from most of America’s recent wars, and Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal makes it clear this is one war which, if the US launches it, they won’t be able to win outright.

An excellent article, worth a full read:

Clinton’s Slog Deeper into the Big Muddy

Attentive viewers may have noticed something curious about last week’s presidential debate. Asked if she would send troops to help stabilize Iraq once ISIS has been expelled from of the northern city of Mosul, Hillary Clinton replied that U.S. intervention would only make matters worse by providing Islamic State with a rallying point.

But then she said: “The goal here is to take back Mosul. It’s going to be a hard fight. I’ve got no illusions about that. And then [we should] continue to press into Syria to begin to take back and move on Raqqa, which is the ISIS headquarters. I am hopeful that the hard work that American military advisers have done will pay off and that we will see a really successful military operation.”

Move on Raqqah? What did that mean – that Clinton wants to follow up victory in Mosul with a push into Syria? That she envisions a coordinated military thrust into Syria from Iraq? The answer is not quite, although the results could hardly be more dangerous than if she did.

While the press focuses on the latest Donald Trump groping scandal, few reporters have noticed the explosion of violence from Mosul all the way to Afrin, a Syrian Kurdish stronghold some 380 miles to the west. What Clinton sees as a simple two-pronged assault – first the U.S. and its allies wrest back Mosul, then they take Raqqah, and then they mop up whatever remains of ISIS in between – is already turning into something far messier, i.e., a multi-sided power struggle among Kurds, Turks, Shi‘ites, and Sunni Salafists. All are terrified that they will be shut out of the new post-ISIS order, and all are scrambling to gain an edge on their rivals. ...

The search for stability, in other words, leads to less rather than more. Yet Clinton forges ahead regardless.

“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria,” she vowed during last week’s debate with Donald Trump, “not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to frankly gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”

Cooler heads may well prevail by the time she gets into office, not only because of the 70,000-plus military personnel who would be needed to institute such a “no-fly” policy, but because the advanced anti-aircraft systems that Russia has recently installed in Syria would raise the stakes immeasurably.

But that doesn’t mean that conflict will have been averted. To the contrary, closing one door merely assures that conflict will enter via another. The United States would have to engage in an immense effort merely to begin undoing the damage it has done since 2003. But if Obama has not been up to the task, a deep-dyed American exceptionalist like Clinton will be even less so. If she is elected, the chaos can only intensify.

Iraq: what are the different armed groups fighting the Islamic State organization in Mosul?

UN: All Sides to Blame for Lack of Aleppo Evacuations

While Western officials have been uniformly blaming Russia for everything that goes wrong in Aleppo, the UN was a bit more even-handed today in comments about the lack of evacuations during last week’s Russian ceasefire, saying all sides shared responsibility for the failure.

Russia initially declared an eight hour ceasefire, and then made it 11 hours. They then extended it to several days of 11 hours per day, with the UN eyeing the second day for a medical evacuation. They didn’t get the authorization from the Aleppo rebels in time, however.

Or at all, Ultimately, the ceasefire expired and fighting resumed with only a handful of people choosing to evacuate. The rebels never authorized any UN operations to evacuate wounded people, nor to bring any humanitarian aid into the area.

Iraq MP Urges Inquiry Into Airstrike Against Shi’ite Funeral in Daquq

Iraqi MP Hanan Fatlawi is calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the Friday airstrike against the Shi’ite mosque in the town of Daquq, an attack which killed an estimated 20 civilians involved in a funeral procession. She says the probe is needed to discover who is responsible, suggesting it was either the US or Turkey.

The US has denied being responsible for the attack, though their initial denial claimed only that they were confident any airstrikes in Daquq did not result in civilian casualties. This is noteworthy because this was the only strike reported in Daquq, and that ISIS was not believed to be anywhere near that town.

Turkey has launched unilateral strikes into Iraq, but only in the northernmost parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. It would be unlikely they’d launch an attack so far south, let alone against a Shi’ite town, as their attacks tend to focus exclusively on Kurds.

Iran: Turkey Mustn’t Violate Iraqi Sovereignty Over Mosul

Adding its two cents into the increasingly tense exchanges between Iraq and Turkey over the later’s involvement in invasion of Mosul, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has issued a statement warning Turkey not to violate Iraqi sovereignty over the matter. ...

Turkish FM Mevlut Cavusoglu ... claimed today that Turkey is already participating despite objections, and claimed Turkish troops had killed 17 ISIS fighters around the city. They also reported four Turkish warplanes involved in airstrikes against ISIS.

Iraq had been complaining about the Turkish troops for over a year now, and this added to their objections to Turkish involvement in the invasion itself. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has argued that because Mosul used to be Turkish, they have a unique interest in the fight, and don’t need permission.

ISIS Launches Growing Counterattacks as Offensive Nears Mosul

As Iraqi and Kurdish forces overrun empty villages on the outskirts of Mosul, drawing ever closer to ISIS’ largest city, the Islamists look to be launching a growing number of counterattacks against different areas around the country, trying to force some of the invading force to redeploy for defensive operations.

The counterattacks began Friday with surprising moves by ISIS forces against the area around Kirkuk. Since then, attacks have also been reported in Rutba, along the key highway from Baghdad leading east into Jordan and Syria, and in Sinjar, the Yazidi city west of Mosul.

This has been ISIS’ reaction to attacks in the past, trying to force the other side to divide its forces and engage in more advantageous fights from their perspective.

Islamic State atrocities reported around Mosul, says UN

Fresh evidence of atrocities and human rights abuses by Islamic State have emerged as a coalition of troops converges on Mosul, the militants’ last major stronghold in Iraq.

Preliminary reports of the massacres of scores of people around the city, announced by the UN on Monday, are the latest in a long line of crimes against humanity, including the attempted genocide of religious minorities and dissidents and wide-scale sexual enslavement, that have come to characterise the Isis’s reign in Syria and Iraq.

Isis militants reportedly killed 50 former police officers held in a building outside Mosul on Sunday, and last Thursday Iraqi security forces had discovered the bodies of 70 civilians in houses in the village of Tuloul Naser, which lies south of the city, the UN’s human rights spokesperson said. ...

Human rights officials believe Isis is moving residents into the city to use them as human shields as the noose tightens around Mosul, and the killings are designed to discourage locals from rising up against the group.

Fleeing Mosul

About 500 people have been arriving each day at the Dibaga refugee camp in northern Iraq, with aid organizations bracing for an influx as the Mosul offensive proceeds. Some 11,000 refugees arrived at the camp in September alone, with a major surge in the past week since coalition forces advanced on the IS stronghold.

Most bring little other than the clothes on their backs. They’ve walked for hours – if not days – to flee IS-held territory and reach the safety of this dusty camp. ... There are already about 30,000 displaced Iraqis living in Dibaga.

The advance on the IS stronghold of Mosul, now in its second week, has been slowed down by IS snipers and suicide bombers, with Iraqi and Kurdish forces carefully picking their way through villages surrounding the city. It could be weeks or even months before they’re able to move into Mosul.

Once they do, aid organizations expect the trickle of people fleeing the violence to turn into a flood – with some estimating up to 1 million people could be displaced by the offensive.

France: Crews start dismantling Calais 'Jungle' as migrant camp empties

France is now dismantling migrant camps known as the Calais “jungle”

The French government began the process of dismantling the migrant camps known as the Calais “Jungle” on Monday morning. French officials aim to relocate roughly 7,500 refugees and migrants to accommodation centers set up across the country. After earlier attempts, the government hopes this will be the time it finally clears the sprawling camp, which has tested the country’s top politicians and human rights advocates alike over the past two years.

Over 1,200 officials and police in Calais began the process of relocating refugees and migrants from war-torn countries like Syria, Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. ...

The process of leaving the camp began quietly and peacefully on Monday, according to the charity Care4Calais. “We are delighted the refugees are showing such calm in the face of what is great uncertainty and are trusting in the French government to look after them,” Care4Calais activists told VICE News. ...

While the vast majority are willing to leave peacefully, a number have said they are not going anywhere, and will continue to try to reach the U.K. One Afghan migrant at the camp, Karhazi, told the AFP news agency: “They’ll have to force us to leave. We want to go to Britain.”

Torture in Turkey

Officer who shot Samuel DuBose faces murder trial as city braces for protests

The former University of Cincinnati police officer who fatally shot Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop for a missing license plate will face murder charges this week, as city officials and activists brace themselves for revived protests.

Ray Tensing shot and killed DuBose, an unarmed African American man, after pulling him over near the campus in July 2015.

An independent report found the shooting occurred as a result of “poor police tactics”, while the Hamilton county prosecutor said the officer’s actions were “senseless” and “asinine”.

Jury selection starts Tuesday in Tensing’s trial, with a rigorous process to whittle down a pool of 234 men and women to a few unbiased jurors. But Tensing’s lawyer, Stewart Mathews, says he is still waiting for the judge to rule on his motion to move the trial out of the city, where he doesn’t believe Tensing can get an unbiased trial.

Last summer, after the incident, residents protested for several days, with some arrests. And activists have mobilized to prepare to protest the trial.

Adnan Syed asks for release from prison while he awaits retrial in Serial case

Adnan Syed, whose story was the center of the Serial podcast, is asking to be released from prison while he awaits his retrial in the murder of his high school girlfriend.

Justin Brown, a lawyer representing Syed, wrote in a motion filed on Monday that Syed should be released while awaiting retrial because he poses “no danger to the community”. Brown also noted that his client had already served 17 years in prison “based on an unconstitutional conviction for a crime he did not commit”.

Syed was convicted in 2000 of strangling 17-year-old Hae Min Lee. His story became the centerpiece for the first season of the Serial podcast. In June, a judge granted Syed a new trial because his attorney failed to cross-examine an expert witness about cell tower data linking Syed to the crime scene. ...

Brown also wrote that Syed is not a flight risk because of his strong ties to the community, and because he enjoys so much support from the public after Serial, which attracted millions of listeners and inspired an army of armchair investigators to help hunt down evidence to bolster his defense.

Pennsylvania's ex-attorney general sentenced to jail for grand jury leak

The first Democrat and first woman to serve as Pennsylvania attorney general was sentenced to jail on Monday, completing a catastrophic fall from grace for a rising political star.

Former Pennsylvania attorney general Kathleen Kane, once seen as a potential future governor, was convicted in August of two felony counts and seven misdemeanors in her perjury trial. She resigned from her position two days later, having served since 2013.

Kane was sentenced to 10 to 23 months in jail and eight years of probation by a Montgomery County judge who said Kane’s ego drove her to take down enemies and break the law. If Kane posts bond of $75,000 cash bail, she will remain free while she appeals her conviction.

The jury at her criminal trial in August found her guilty of illegally leaking grand jury findings to the press to embarrass a political enemy. She then plotted a cover-up and lied about it under oath.

Bill Clinton Era SEC Chair Tells Elizabeth Warren to Muzzle Herself

Yesterday, former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt penned an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, effectively telling Senator Elizabeth Warren to stop criticizing Mary Jo White in public. White is the current Chair of the SEC that Senator Warren publicly asked President Obama to fire this month for her bad leadership.

Senator Warren is a genuine champion of the investing public and understands how the SEC has become a lapdog to Wall Street under White’s inept leadership. Levitt is part of the Bill Clinton machine that de-regulated Wall Street and turned it into a massive looting racket in the 1990s through today. It’s important to take note of Levitt’s effort to muzzle Warren in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Expect to see more of this coming from a lot more of Wall Street’s cronies.

Arthur Levitt was appointed as SEC Chair by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Levitt served until 2001, making him the longest serving SEC Chair. Levitt had previously been Sandy Weill’s business partner in a Wall Street brokerage firm. In 1998, when Weill wanted to create Citigroup by merging his Travelers Group, which owned an insurance company, brokerage firm and investment bank, with Citibank, an insured depository bank – an illegal merger at the time under the Glass-Steagall Act — Levitt and his other cronies in the Bill Clinton administration eagerly got the ball rolling.

During his long tenure, Levitt presided over the serial looting of the public by Wall Street. Levitt was in charge when two university professors discovered that the Nasdaq stock market had been fleecing investors for more than a decade in an illegal price-fixing scheme. Levitt was in charge when Wall Street’s fraudulent research and IPO pump and dump schemes led to the great tech bubble crash, wiping away $4 trillion in market value. Levitt was there when JPMorgan and Citigroup helped Enron cook its books.

Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party takeover

The party that could be on the cusp of winning Iceland’s national elections on Saturday didn’t exist four years ago.

Its members are a collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians and Web geeks. It sets policy through online polls — and thinks the government should do the same. It wants to make Iceland “a Switzerland of bits,” free of digital snooping. It has offered Edward Snowden a new place to call home.

And then there’s the name: In this land of Vikings, the Pirate Party may soon be king.

The rise of the Pirates — from radical fringe to focal point of Icelandic politics — has astonished even the party’s founder, a poet, Web programmer and former WikiLeaks activist.

“No way,” said 49-year-old Birgitta Jónsdóttir when asked whether she could have envisioned her party governing the country so soon after its launch. ...

The Pirates, part of an international movement of the same name, are not the only ones seizing on the country’s discontented political spirit. Several new parties have surged and could well set Iceland’s direction for the next four years. Meanwhile, parties that have traded power in Iceland for decades are bumping along in polls at historic lows.

Outsiders may regard the idea of a government run by Pirates as a joke. But “the voters think a joke is better than what we have now,” said Benedikt Jóhannesson, leader of another insurgent party that is even younger than the Pirates and has also earned substantial support.

Fear Laundering: an Elaborate Psychological Diversion and Bid for Power

Fear is the key word for this presidential election. There is the fear of the Republican candidate Donald Trump as we all know. But I also think there is another fear. It’s the fear of accepting what this country has become. ...

The country of freedom, equality and liberty is number one in mass incarceration, police killings, and mass surveillance. Perhaps this might be the worst time to wake up and realize that what the government has been doing is the complete opposite of what it’s been saying.

According to Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, such a shift in one’s world view causes fragmentation of the self, which leads to an extreme expression of anger and desperate efforts in protecting and defending the crumbling “reality”.

For some people this momentum of anger and fear seems to merge directly with anger against Donald Trump together with unconditional support for the de facto power of establishment: Hillary Clinton. They can divert the overflowing anger toward Trump while rebuilding their crumbling world by standing with Clinton, dutifully demonizing the good old cold war enemy Russia, erroneously calling the WikiLeaks founder a rapist, affirming American exceptionalism with conviction, and so on. It is truly surreal to witness people turning into Russia-hating-angry-Americans who believe that American style democracy is exceptional and the nation should be led by a trusted imperialist with a proven record of spreading “democracy” with undemocratic means.

The War business is very concerned about Trump, who may not be as reliably hawkish as Hillary.

Donald Trump Is ‘Naive’ about Nukes, Says Head of Missile Defense Group

In past elections the Republican Party has carried the banner of missile defense — systems for intercepting nuclear warheads before they can strike their targets. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who spent $200 billion on the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.” Bill Clinton, on the other hand, slashed funding for the program and put off deploying a planned national missile defense system.

But, somewhat like the states of Nebraska and North Carolina, the true believers of missile defense now seem to be tilting toward the Democratic Party. At least that was the vibe last Friday at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey, where the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance bunkered down at its annual awards lunch. Officially, MDAA is nonpartisan and nonprofit, seeking only to spread the good word about missile defense. Most of the luncheon’s non-MDAA guests came from the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, or Lockheed Martin subcontractors.

Riki Ellison, the former NFL linebacker who founded the MDAA, praised Hillary Clinton’s knowledge of missile defense, diplomatic work with NATO, and help with putting Lockheed Martin’s Aegis systems into Eastern Europe and its THAAD system into Guam. An Aegis anti-missile installation is now online in Romania; another Aegis system, in Poland, is scheduled to go online in 2018. “I think Don[ald] Trump is naive on the issue still,” Ellison told me. “He needs to be educated, if he comes in … we don’t know what Donald Trump, how, you know, on any issue.”

Republicans appear to be giving up on Trump as Democrats shift to down-ballot races

Over the weekend, prominent Republicans began acknowledging that their nominee will likely lose on Nov. 8, while confident Democrats shifted their focus from the White House to congressional and state legislature races.

The early-voting data shows that Hillary Clinton is on course for a “very big and historic win,” said her running mate, Tim Kaine, at a Florida rally Sunday evening. Clinton had breezily dismissed Trump’s latest attacks the day before, saying, “I don’t even think about responding to him anymore.” And at a Nevada rally Sunday evening, President Obama summed up Trump’s candidacy this way: “He’s losing.”

As Democrats expressed confidence, Republicans grimaced. “We are behind,” Trump’s campaign manager and pollster Kellyanne Conway conceded on Sunday to NBC. “[Clinton] has some advantages.” Those advantages include $150 million on hand for the final month of campaigning; Trump has just $75 million.

“I don’t see it happening,” veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News on Sunday of a Trump victory. And former Trump adviser and Republican operative Jim Dornan told Politico that “Trump is done” unless Clinton is “involved in a murder” or some similar scandal.

Keiser Report: Clinton 2.0

Podesta doesn't deny calling Sanders a 'doofus' in hacked email

Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman on Wednesday did not deny calling Sen. Bernie Sanders a "doofus" in an email sent last year.

John Podesta evaded the question during a CNN interview but noted he was "frustrated" with Sanders at the time for criticizing December's Paris climate deal, which Clinton and President Obama supported. 

"I have great respect for Bernie Sanders," Podesta said when asked whether the email was legitimate. ...

“Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it?” Podesta wrote to Neera Tanden, president of Center for American Progress. The message is dated Dec. 13, 2015, when Sanders and Clinton were competing for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Saturday saw the largest number of arrests since the Dakota pipeline protests began in August

Protests at Standing Rock over the weekend resulted in 127 arrests amid clashes with police in the ongoing standoff over a proposed oil pipeline that would run through the area. Saturday saw the largest number of arrests in a single day since protests began near the reservation on Aug. 10, the local sheriff’s department confirmed to VICE News. Police accused 200 protesters of cutting a fence and entering an area near the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline’s right of way.

But the mostly Native American protesters, who call themselves “water protectors,” say they were there to pay their respects to sacred sites, and that they did not provoke police. ...

Police used pepper spray on some demonstrators during what local law enforcement termed an “illegal protest.” Tribal chairman Dave Archambault II of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe took issue with that characterization and denounced the arrests. Archambault said the protest was “peaceful” and accused police of “needlessly escalating violence” and “unlawful arrests.”

ND cops strip-searching water protectors for misdemeanors. Patently clear they hope to provoke violence. https://t.co/9ofh9VS71N #NoDAPL

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 23, 2016

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's Statement in Response to Treatment of Protesters

[From Chairman Dave Archambault II]:

The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcements agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protestors are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement.

Thousands of water protectors have joined the Tribe in solidarity against DAPL, without incident or serious injury. Yet, North Dakota law enforcement have proceeded with a disproportionate response to their nonviolent exercise of their First Amendment rights, even going as far as labeling them rioters and calling their every action illegal.

We are disappointed to see that our state and congressional delegations and Gov. Jack Dalrymple have failed to ensure the safety and rights of the citizens engaged in peaceful protests who were arrested on Saturday. Their lack of leadership and commitment to creating a dialogue towards a peaceful solution reflects not only the unjust historical narrative against Native Americans, but a dangerous trend in law enforcement tactics across America.

For these reasons, we believe the situation at Standing Rock deserves the immediate and full attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, the DOJ should impose an injunction to all developments at the pipeline site to keep ALL citizens – law enforcement and protestors – safe. The DOJ should be enlisted and expected to investigate the overwhelming reports and videos demonstrating clear strong-arm tactics, abuses and unlawful arrests by law enforcement.

Preventing government agencies from stripping protestors and tribal members of their constitutional rights to organize and protect our sacred places and water is paramount to both U.S. citizens and tribal sovereignty.

There are a couple of sound drop outs in this video, the problem is not in your set, so to speak.

Tribes Reclaim Unceded Territories to Block Dakota Access Pipeline

'They Always Break!' Latest Pipeline Leak Underscores Dangers of DAPL

A major crude oil pipeline in Oklahoma sprung a leak late Sunday night; the company has yet to provide an estimate of volume spilled

Enterprise Products Partners said Monday it had shut its Seaway Crude Pipeline, a 400,000-barrel per day conduit that transports crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to Gulf coast refineries. The leak occurred Sunday night in an industrial area of Cushing. The company did not provide an estimate of the volume spilled, but said there was no danger to the public.

"Seaway personnel continue to make progress in cleaning up the spill, substantially all of which has been contained in a retention pond at Enbridge's facility," the company said in a news release (pdf), explaining that the pipeline is a "50/50 joint venture" between Enterprise and Enbridge Inc. "Vacuum trucks are being used to recover the crude oil and return it to storage tanks on-site." ...

The incident comes after another pipeline rupture in Pennsylvania early on Friday, where 55,000 gallons of gasoline poured into the Susquehanna River, and about one month after a major gasoline pipeline run by Colonial Pipeline Co. had to halt pumping for a couple of weeks due to a spill in Alabama.

Meanwhile, UPI reports that "[t]he release from the Seaway pipeline is the second associated with the Cushing storage hub in less than a month. Plains All American Pipeline reported problems with infrastructure from Colorado City [Texas] to Cushing earlier this month."

Environmentalists, Indigenous people, and energy companies are in the midst of a heated debate over pipeline safety. Water protectors and their allies along the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) have been saying for months that the project threatens their right to safe drinking water.

"Oil pipelines break, spill, and leak—it's not a question of if, it's a question of where and when," 13-year-old Anna Lee Rain YellowHammer, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a recent appeal.

Renewables made up half of net electricity capacity added last year

Green energy accounted for more than half of net electricity generation capacity added around the world last year for the first time, leading energy experts have found.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said the milestone was evidence of a rapid transformation in energy taking place, and predicted capacity from renewable sources will grow faster than oil, gas, coal or nuclear power in the next five years.

But the analysts said the outlook in the UK has deteriorated since the Conservative government took power last year and cut support for wind and solar power. The agency’s chief said Britain had huge renewable energy potential and ministers needed to design stronger policies to exploit it.

“What I see is we are witnessing the transformation of energy system markets led by renewables and this is happening very quickly,” said Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “This transformation and the growth of renewables is led by the emerging countries in the years to come, rather than the industrialised countries.”

Also of Interest

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

‘The Darkness Comes’: CIA Torture Victims Describe How the Mental Scars Never Go Away

The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism

How Russia Saw America’s Third Debate

Halloween Is Coming, Vladimir Putin Isn’t

Five Stupendous Lies Told By Buglers for Military Intervention in Syria

Khadaffi's Murder

Open Data Projects Are Fueling the Fight Against Police Misconduct

Debt Derangement Syndrome – Saving Our Grandkids from Wall Street

Could a third party with actual power be Donald Trump's next political move?

The banana as we know it is in imminent danger

A Little Night Music

Roosevelt Sykes - Date Bait

Roosevelt Sykes - Rock It

Roosevelt Sykes - Highway 61 Blues

Roosevelt Sykes - Ice Cream Freezer

Roosevelt Sykes - Satellite Baby

Roosevelt Sykes - Sweet Old Chicago

Roosevelt Sykes - Persimmon Pie

Roosevelt Sykes - Miss Ida B.

Roosevelt Sykes - Hot nuts