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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Barbara Lynn

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas r&b singer and guitarist Barbara Lynn. Enjoy!

^{Barbara Lynn - What'd I Say}

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

-- William Shakespeare

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News and Opinion

New WikiLeaks documents expose doctoring of chemical weapons report to justify 2018 US attack on Syria

A fourth round of leaked internal documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was published by WikiLeaks Friday, further exposing the official report on an alleged 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma—a suburb of Damascus then held by CIA-backed Islamist forces—as having been doctored to justify an attack by the United States, Britain and France against the Syrian government. The documents point to a systematic effort to suppress evidence uncovered by investigators that cast significant doubt on the official line pushed by Washington and its imperialist allies that the government of Bashar al-Assad had conclusively carried out a chemical weapons attack which killed as many as 49 people. ...

The series of leaks published by the media outlet founded by journalist Julian Assange, currently imprisoned by the British government while awaiting extradition to the US for exposing imperialist war crimes in the Middle East, have exposed the fact that key evidence along with dissent by investigators who were on the ground in Douma was omitted from the final report in order to give the impression that the OPCW had concluded that Assad had carried out a chlorine gas attack on April 7, 2018. The initial round of emails was verified as authentic by Reuters at the end of November.

Just as extraordinary as the leaks themselves is the fact that they have been completely blacked out by the mainstream media in the United States and Europe. Despite the explosive character of the documents that have been published so far, exposing the ostensibly objective and neutral OPCW as a tool of the US and its imperialist allies, there has been no significant coverage in the mainstream media nor any effort by the New York Times, Washington Post or any other major outlet to debunk the documents or their contents. Last month, Newsweek reporter Tareq Haddad resigned in protest after his editors forcefully rebuffed his efforts to report on the leaks. Given the apparently enforced silence about these now publicly available documents, the question must be asked if the equivalent of a British-style D-notice has been sent by the CIA and the State Department to editorial boards in the US, Europe and elsewhere in an effort to bury any exposure of the lies whipped up in the years-long effort to overthrow Assad.

The latest round of documents includes an email from the head of the OPCW, Sebastien Braha, sent on February 28, 2019, just ahead of the release of the final report on the investigation of the Douma incident, demanding the removal of any trace of the report produced by veteran OPCW inspector and ballistics expert Ian Henderson from the organization’s internal registry. Henderson’s investigation had concluded it was more likely that the cylinders which had been identified as the source of chlorine gas had been placed where they were found, rather than being dropped from the air. “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]... And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA,” Braha wrote, referring to Henderson’s report.

The final report omitted any reference to Henderson’s findings, which were not made public until they were leaked to the press, and did not include any other dissenting opinions from investigators who had examined evidence in Douma. An investigator from the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in Syria noted in an email from a previous tranche released by WikiLeaks that the final report had been so changed that it “no longer reflects the work of the team.” Other critical details uncovered by investigators, including that only trace amounts of chlorinated organic chemicals had been found by investigators, were omitted from the report, giving the impression that conclusive evidence was uncovered of a chlorine gas attack.

[More at the link. - js]

Media’s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal

This is getting really, really, really weird.

WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France. This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.

The drop also includes the minutes from an OPCW toxicology meeting with “three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist”, all four of whom are specialists in chemical weapons analysis. “With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” the document reads.

According to the leaked minutes from the toxicology meeting, the chief expert offered “the possibility of the event being a propaganda exercise” as one potential explanation for the Douma incident. The other OPCW experts agreed that the key “take-away message” from the meeting was “that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified”.

Like all the other many, many, many, many different leaks which have been hemorrhaging from the OPCW about the Douma incident, none of the important information contained in these publications was included in any of the OPCW’s public reports on the matter. ...

Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story.

As of this writing, a Google News search for this story brings up an article by RT, another by Al-Masdar News, and some entries by alternative outlets you’ve almost certainly never heard of like UrduPoint News and People’s Pundit Daily.

Make no mistake about it: this is insane. The fact that an extremely important news story of immense geopolitical consequence is not getting any mainstream news media coverage, at all, is absolutely stark raving insane. Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops always made mainstream news headlines. Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle was largely dominated by leaked Democratic Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even the relatively minor ICE agents publication by WikiLeaks last year, containing information that was already public, garnered headlines from top US outlets like The Washington Post , Newsweek, and USA Today. Now, on this exponentially more important story, zero coverage.

The mass media’s stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence?

Media Elites to Assange: Fight for Your Own Hide

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange languishes in a British prison awaiting probable extradition to the United States to stand trial for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Ironically, he is serving jail time for jumping bail on trumped-up sex crime charges in Sweden that even the Swedish government has now abandoned. Most Western, especially American, mainstream journalists, though, have expressed at most tepid opposition to the persecution of Assange, even as reports mount that his health has deteriorated to an alarming extent.

This is shameful and jeopardizes the news media’s own long-term interests. The worst thing about such conduct is that so many reporters have bought into the Justice Department’s insistence that Assange is not a “legitimate” journalist. John Demers, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for national security, bluntly stated the government’s thesis earlier this year. “Julian Assange,” Demers said, “is no journalist,” since he engaged in “explicit solicitation of classified information.” ...

Unfortunately, much of the U.S. press seems eager to exclude Assange from its ranks. A decision by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in early December underscored the mainstream media’s willingness to disown Assange. The CPJ refused to include him on its annual list of journalists jailed throughout the world. CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney’s attempt to explain the decision was an exercise in painful linguistic contortions. His December 11 blog post on the CPJ website used the unequivocal title, “For the sake of press freedom, Julian Assange must be defended.” Much of the substance of the post, though, pointed to the opposite conclusion. “WikiLeaks’s practice of dumping huge loads of data on the public without examining the motivations of the leakers can leave it open to manipulation,” Mahoney sniffed. He continued:

To some, Julian Assange is a warrior for truth and transparency. To others, he is an information bomb-thrower. The question with which CPJ has had to grapple is whether his actions make him a journalist. Each year, we compile a list of journalists imprisoned around the world, based on a set of criteria that have evolved as technology has upended publishing and the news business. After extensive research and consideration, CPJ chose not to list Assange as a journalist, in part because his role has just as often been as a source and because WikiLeaks does not generally perform as a news outlet with an editorial process.

By using an array of rhetorical gymnastics, Mahoney and the CPJ tacitly accepted the Justice Department “logic” for prosecuting Assange, even as the CPJ officially condemned the prosecution itself. The bottom line is that the CPJ legitimized the government’s campaign to put Assange outside the boundaries of legitimate journalism.

Where Is the Outrage Over the War in Afghanistan?

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, the Afghanistan Papers are not making a splash. Released during the week the Democrats were finalizing impeachment, the series barely registered as news. Adam Wunische, a fellow at the Quincy Institute who covers Afghanistan and the Middle East, told me, “When the Afghan Papers came out on Monday, I was checking social media for ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘Afghan war.’ None of that was trending at all. It’s very easy for the public to just not pay attention. It’s not a pressing issue, especially with all the other exciting news that’s going on in politics these days.”

Wunische did a tour of Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 in the American military. “For those of us who bore the costs of these conflicts,” he says, “it is extremely frustrating that something as substantial as the Afghan Papers barely registers as a major event.”

The Afghanistan Papers document a consistent pattern of deception, extending for nearly two decades across three administrations, that should be a major scandal. ...

The American public is insulated from the Afghan War in ways it wasn’t from the Vietnam War. Unlike Vietnam, there is no draft. The all-volunteer army means the soldiers who fight are a distinct social caste that exists apart from American society in way that wasn’t true in the age of conscription. Nor is the war being paid for by tax hikes or war bonds. Debt financing means the ultimate financial cost of war will not come due for many years.

The difference between the military and civilians can be overstated. Polls show that both veterans and the public are aligned in opposing the Afghan War. According to a recent Pew poll, 55 percent of veterans and 58 percent of adults think the Afghan War isn’t worth it. The difference might be in intensity of attitude. For military personnel, the war is still real. They could still be sent to fight. And for many veterans, the war lives on as a trauma.

But for the public at large, despite all the disturbing details found in reports like the Afghanistan Papers, the war is largely an abstraction. As Wunische notes, “Americans do not support the war, but it’s very easy for them to just not care.”

US ‘capitalizes’ on Iran’s civil unrest after ‘causing it’ in the first place

Pompeo hits out at Iran after deadly US strikes in Iraq and Syria

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has hit out at Iran after briefing Donald Trump about US strikes against a militia group in Iraq and Syria in which 25 fighters were reportedly killed. The Pentagon said the attacks were “defensive strikes” against the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia group, which US officials said was backed by Iran, two days after a US civilian contractor was killed in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base.

“We will not stand for the Islamic Republic of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy,” Pompeo told reporters after the briefing, which took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Mark Esper, the defence secretary who also attended the briefing, said the strikes had been successful and that officials discussed other options with Trump.

Iraqi security and militia sources said at least 25 militia fighters had been killed and at least 55 wounded following three US airstrikes in Iraq on Sunday. At least four local commanders from the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim group were among the dead, the sources said, adding that one of the strikes had targeted the militia group’s headquarters near the western al-Qa’im district on the border with Syria. The Pentagon said it also targeted two locations used by Kata’ib Hezbollah in Syria.

France, Egypt urge ‘restraint’ in Libya as Turkey weighs sending troops

Vladimir Putin thanks Donald Trump for tip that foiled terror plot

Russia said it had thwarted terror attacks reportedly planned in St Petersburg as the result of a tip from Washington, as President Vladimir Putin personally thanked his US counterpart Donald Trump.

Russian news agencies cited the Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying that as a result of the information, two Russians had been detained on 27 December on suspicion of plotting attacks during new year festivities in St Petersburg.

The Kremlin said Putin passed on his gratitude to Trump for the tip from US special services during a phone call on Sunday.

Evo Morales' potential successor speaks out after far-right Bolivia coup

George Galloway on Brexit and UK's political future

EU accused of seeking to cut funds for poor in post-Brexit cost savings

The European commission has been accused of seeking to cut EU funding for the continent’s poorest people by 50% to secure post-Brexit cost savings and extra funds for defence projects. Jacques Vandenschrik, the president of the European Food Banks Federation, said the EU executive’s proposed spending plans for the next seven years posed a risk not only to the most vulnerable but to the stability of wider society.

EU institutions are currently hammering out the details of the bloc’s long-term budget, known as the multiannual financial framework (MFF). The UK’s withdrawal will leave a large hole to plug. Senior EU officials have described the negotiations over the commission’s proposed €1,135bn (£970bn) in spending commitments as the most difficult ever undertaken.

The current budget ending in 2020 contained a €3.8bn fund for European aid to the most deprived (FEAD) to help EU member states provide people with food and basic supplies such as clothing, shoes, soap and shampoo. Under the proposed 2021-27 budget there would be no such dedicated fund but member states would be asked to devote a minimum of €2bn in total to food and basic material assistance. The commission has said it hopes member states will allocate twice that minimum amount – but there would not be any obligation. ...

Vandenschrik said the poorest people in eastern European member states would probably be hit hardest by the commission’s proposals. About 33.1 million people or 6.6% of the EU population are estimated to be living in severe material deprivation.

French government offers some concessions, but strike over pension reform continues

Macron forced to step in to defuse crisis over pension changes

Emmanuel Macron will be forced to speak out on France’s ongoing pensions strike in his televised new year address on Tuesday as transport stoppages look likely to continue into a fifth week, causing major disruption over the holiday period and into January.

The centrist French president, who made overhauling the country’s pensions system a key election pledge, has until now refrained from intervening personally, leaving his prime minister, Edouard Philippe, to deal with the day-to-day response to the crisis.

But, as slogans among leftwing demonstrators at a street protest in Paris this weekend read: “Macron, your silence is killing us,” Elysée officials told French media that Macron’s televised speech on 31 December would aim to calm tensions. He is likely to express sympathy for the many people whose travel plans have been disrupted, acknowledge the constitutional right to strike and call for dialogue. ...

Macron is unlikely, however, to enter into the complex technical details of the pension changes in his new year address, instead arguing that, after overhauling labour rules and the unemployment benefit system, changes to pensions are vital to his plans to deliver what he has called the biggest transformation of the French social model and welfare system since the second world war. ...

Macron is under pressure to make concessions to unions and strikers, but he has built his political identity on a promise never to cave in to street protests. Nor can he risk alienating his support base, which currently includes voters from the traditional right, by being seen to concede too much. He also faces a growing distrust of politicians in France. Polls have shown that many French voters want pension reform, but they do not trust the government to do it fairly.

French public on our side, says defiant union boss four weeks into strike

Intel probe puts CIA’s Haspel in a bind

The prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins of the Russia investigation is focusing much of his attention on the CIA, placing the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, at the center of a politically toxic tug-of-war between the Justice Department and the intelligence community. The prosecutor, John Durham, has reportedly asked the CIA for former director John Brennan’s communications as he examines the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the election specifically to help Donald Trump.

Barr has been skeptical of the agency’s conclusions about Putin’s motivations, despite corroboration by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee and an adversarial review by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

But intelligence community veterans say the Durham probe could force Haspel to choose between protecting her agency from Trump’s wrath and bowing to Barr’s wishes; they point to FBI chief Chris Wray, who has found himself at odds with the president in recent weeks over a watchdog report about the bureau’s conduct in the Russia probe. And they say the Barr-Durham probe represents overreach by an attorney general who seems to have already made up his mind and is bent on imposing his own skeptical view of the Russia investigation on the intelligence community. ...

Haspel’s plight, though, may depend on how deeply Durham investigates an uncorroborated theory pushed by Trump allies that a key player in the Russia probe, a Russia-linked professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved. Haspel was the CIA’s station chief in London in 2016 when the U.S. Embassy there was made aware of Mifsud’s contact with a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. Haspel was briefed on Downer’s outreach to the embassy, according to a person familiar with the matter, but it’s unclear whether she was then made aware of the FBI’s plans to interview him or knew about the bureau’s use of an informant — University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper — in London.

An inspector general report released earlier this month said the embassy’s deputy chief of mission at the time briefed the FBI’s legal attache and another official—whose title is redacted, but is Haspel, according to another person familiar with the matter—on Downer’s outreach. The attache told the inspector general that Haspel, upon being briefed, said the Downer information sounded “like an FBI matter.” One former intelligence official said it’s unlikely Haspel would have been read in to the FBI’s subsequent operation given how closely held it was within the bureau and the Justice Department. But Trump’s allies have been asking questions about what Haspel knew about the probe since before she was sworn in as director.

Trump claims homelessness 'so easy' to handle in attack on Democrats

Donald Trump has continued to use America’s homelessness crisis to attack his political opponents in California and New York, tweeting on Saturday that homelessness should be “easy” to handle and that the governors of the two liberal states should ask him for help. Workers and activists on the front lines of the crisis have repeatedly said that Trump’s “tough talk” on homelessness is concerning, and that some of his proposed policies will only make the situation worse.

As the number of homeless people has increased sharply in cities across California, some local politicians have already tried to try to penalize people for being homeless, rather than addressing root causes of the crisis, including unaffordable rents and evictions pushing people on to the streets. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to fuel anxiety by repeatedly suggesting he might try to implement some kind of police crackdown in California to clear the streets of encampments.

On Christmas Day, Trump attacked California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for his “bad job” on “taking care of the homeless population in California”.

“If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!” the president said.

On Thursday, Trump attacked Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who has lead the effort to impeach him, and told her to “clean up her filthy dirty District & help the homeless there”. On Saturday, Trump wrote that fixing the homeless crisis “would be so easy with competence!” The governors of California and New York “must do something”, Trump wrote, and if they “can’t handle the situation, which they should be able to do very easily, they must call and ‘politely’ ask for help.”

The Army National Guard Just Kicked Out 2 More Members for Ties to a White Supremacist Group

The Army National Guard has booted two members because they were members of a pagan religious group that’s been tied to white supremacists. Atlanta Antifascists originally published a report in April that tied the two men, identified as Brandon Trent East and Dalton Woodward, to a whites-only religious group that holds white supremacist beliefs.

East told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) that he was served a separation notice from the National Guard earlier this month. The Associated Press reported Thursday that Woodward is also no longer a member of the National Guard.

East and Woodward, who are longtime friends, were reported to be leaders in the Norse pagan group Ravensblood Kindred. That group is a part of Asatru Folk Assembly, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group. The “neo-Folkish” group has spun pagan beliefs into a religion that’s attracted neo-Nazis because it focuses on racial identity and reportedly only allows white people to join. ...

The recently booted National Guard members might not be an isolated problem - the military is apparently chock-full-of white supremacists. A Military Times poll from 2017 found that nearly one in four troops had seen evidence of white nationalism among their fellow service members. The problem is even worse, according to people of color who responded in the poll. Nearly 42 percent of non-white troops said they had personally experienced examples of white nationalism in the military.

Immigration Detention Is Part of Mass Incarceration: The Case for Abolishing ICE and Everything Else

Not many people besides immigration law wonks had probably heard of “Section 1325,” before Julián Castro called for repealing it during the first Democratic presidential primary debate this summer. The law in question makes it a federal crime to enter the U.S. without permission — turning an immigration offense into a criminal one. President Donald Trump used a policy of “zero tolerance” for breaking that law to justify separating families at the border, but under George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him, 1325, along with illegal reentry — coming back after being deported — was already being used to jail and deport more and more immigrants. In fact, immigration-related crimes now make up the majority of all federal criminal prosecutions.

Castro’s proposal to repeal 1325 might have seemed to come out of left field, but it’s the exercise of the law that is historically the outlier: While laws criminalizing entry have existed since 1929, they “were largely ignored for a century,” the lawyer and scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández reminds us in a new book, “Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants.” In 1975, he noted “a mere 575 people” were charged with an immigration crime; in 1993, only 2,487. Contrast that with fiscal year 2018, when prosecutors brought 105,692 federal immigration charges.

The criminalization of immigration, especially the scale at which it happens now, is a relatively recent trend, Hernández argues. And it ought to be reversed. His book joins a number of recent works that put contemporary immigration politics in the same light that scholars and activists have shone on mass incarceration — showing it to be a phenomenon inextricably linked to the history of land, race, and capitalism in the United States. “The immigration prison is a reminder that human bondage based on racial and economic markers of undesirability can’t be relegated to some distant past,” Hernández writes. “If we’re willing to lock people up, we’ll find a reason. Most of the time the targets will be people of color. We can call this coincidence, but we would be lying to ourselves.” ...

Daniel Denvir’s forthcoming book, “All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It,” complements Hernández’s by focusing on political history. He, too, traces the development of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies alongside anti-black ones, arguing that “resistance to desegregation, a white identity politics of racial grievance, mass incarceration, the war on terror: all were dedicated to a quixotic mission to keep dangerous others from crossing U.S. borders and to restrict the free movement of those inside them.” ...

Hernández ends his book with the case for abolishing immigration detention, while admitting that few people have a specific vision for how to do it. Denvir ends with an analysis of an electorate that might be willing to try. ... Hernández also decides to see Trump’s hostility to immigrants not just as horror but also as opportunity. Has the bipartisan consensus of “immigration is a ‘problem’ that needs fixing” finally broken? Will Trump’s nativist wish list of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee policies permanently shift Democrats away from their position that enforcement is always necessary? Decriminalization of entry and reentry is a start ...

Decriminalization of entry and reentry is a start, as Denvir and Hernández advocate (among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Andrew Yang have said they agree). Denvir also calls for downsizing the Border Patrol, destroying existing physical barriers, breaking up agreements between ICE and local law enforcement, and increasing opportunities for legal immigration, especially from Central America and Mexico. Hernández urges, on a personal and institutional level, divestment from private prison companies. Eliminating cash bail and giving every migrant the right to a lawyer would drastically increase their odds of success, as would case management — offering help with housing and legal assistance. ... The court cases challenging the most horrendous aspects of confinement in immigrant detention centers are important. But if radical changes come, Hernández writes, “it won’t be because the law demands it. It will be because people demand it.”

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Georgia does not have to put 100,000 voters back on rolls, judge rules

Georgia doesn’t have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The US district judge Steve C Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn’t proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.

However, Jones also ordered Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a south-west Georgia state House district where a 28 January special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.

Raffensperger in October released a list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being canceled. Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, had asked for the purge to be halted.

Ryan Grim: How Bernie must win a brokered convention

Because Bernie 'Constitutionally Incapable of Sucking Up,' Anti-Corruption Champion Zephyr Teachout Endorses Sanders

Legal scholar and political activist Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the text book on government and corporate corruption, endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president on Friday as she applauded him for building "the kind of movement that we need to fight the corruption that is killing us."

In her endorsement, Teachout said Sanders has emerged as the most trustworthy candidate when it comes to honesty, integrity, and having the fortitude to stand up to powerful interests.

"Bottom line: Bernie Sanders is constitutionally incapable of sucking up, and that's why people love him," Teachout said. "They know he'll always be on the side of the little guy against big agriculture, big banks, big pharma, big tech, hate, and fear." ...

I am thrilled to be endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders for President. #NotMeUS pic.twitter.com/9cEgWMevjs

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) December 27, 2019

Teachout, who ran for governor of New York in 2014 and teaches law at Fordham University, remains a key progressive voice in the U.S. when it comes to government corruption and corporate influence. As the Sanders campaign noted in its statement:

Teachout's book, Corruption in America, is generally recognized as essential reading in corruption scholarship and a major contribution to understanding the history of corruption law. Her work was cited in the House Judiciary Impeachment Report, as well as by Justice Stevens in his dissent in Citizens United. She was one of the countries' few experts on Emoluments prior to the Trump Presidency, and wrote the first New York Times article raising questions about Trump's pending constitutional violations. She is currently a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit attempting to overturn Citizens United.

For a series of "End Corporate Greed" rallies and events scheduled for New Hampshire over the weekend, Teachout will join Sanders and others to focus on corruption, getting big money out of politics, and how to fight back against the sinister revolving-door agenda of the Trump era.

Biden mocks Bernie, Sanders National Press Secretary responds

"Don't Tell Me We Can't Afford Medicare for All," Says Sanders, After NYT Details Insanely Higher Costs of US Healthcare

Sen. Bernie Sanders doubled down on his argument for establishing a universal, single-payer healthcare system Friday in response to a New York Times report which showed the cost differences of hospital care, outpatient procedures, and prescription drugs in the United States compared with other countries.

"Other major countries cover all their people and pay half of what we do. Don't tell me we can't afford Medicare for All," tweeted Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination who has campaigned on implementing a single-payer system.

An MRI scan costs $1,420 in America. It runs $450 in the UK.

A U.S. angioplasty costs $32,200. In the Netherlands, it's $6,400.

Other major countries cover all their people and pay half of what we do. Don't tell me we can't afford Medicare for All. https://t.co/A7Hl4JydP1

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 27, 2019

Sanders linked to the Times piece, which features graphs showing prices for common medical services around the world. The Times uses 2017 data from a report released this month by the International Federation of Health Plans, a group that represents chief executives of health insurers.

Rising: Bernie, Yang stunning expected fundraising numbers

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Water-guzzling demands of Trump's border wall threaten fish species

The survival of eight endangered and threatened species, including four kinds of endemic fish, is in doubt in Arizona, as massive quantities of groundwater are extracted to construct Donald Trump’s border wall. The 30ft-high barrier is under construction on the edge of the San Bernardino national wildlife refuge in south-eastern Arizona, where rare desert springs and crystalline streams provide the only US habitat for the endangered freshwater Río Yaqui fish.

The region’s water reserves are already depleted due to prolonged drought and record high temperatures linked to the climate crisis. The expansion of water-intensive crops such as alfalfa and pecan farms is also draining aquifers in the arid region. Now, experts fear that construction of this 20-mile stretch of Trump’s wall, which began in October, has reduced spring flow and groundwater levels in San Bernardino which provide scarce habitat for the Yaqui topminnow, chub, beautiful shiner and the most vulnerable, the Yaqui catfish.

“There’s good reason to believe that the Yaqui fish’s only US habitat is drying up as a result of tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of groundwater being pumped to build the border wall,” said Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity who recently visited the area. ... Despite the potential for far-reaching long-term consequences, details about the plans are sparse since the government suspended 28 federal laws mandating protections and oversight, relating to clean air and water, endangered species, public lands and the rights of Native Americans, in order to expedite construction.

The waiver includes the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), considered the cornerstone of environmental protection in the US, the Endangered Species Act, National Fish and Wildlife Act and Migratory Bird Conservation Act. These laws require robust scientific, environmental and costs analysis before projects can be sanctioned. ... Jordahl added: “The wall could not be built without the waiver. Nepa requires the government to choose the least invasive, best option for taxpayers … surveillance cameras could be installed every hundred metres at a fraction of the economic and environmental cost. This wall is an unjustifiable project.”

More than 100 miles of the new border wall have been slated for Arizona, costing roughly $14m a mile, according to the US army corps of engineers. Thirty-seven federally listed endangered and threatened species live around the Arizona-Mexico border. ... In addition to the Yaqui fish, water depletion also threatens federally protected Chiricahua leopard frogs, Huachuca water umbel, Mexican garter snakes and Aplomado falcon, as well as the San Bernardino springsnails which are confined to a couple of fragile springs.

US Court Upholds Ruling on Vast Marine Monument Established by Obama

Defenders of ocean habitats celebrated Friday after a federal court upheld a lower court ruling defending the right of the U.S. executive branch to set aside marine areas as national monuments.

Citing the authority found under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish marine national monuments, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia sided against a lawsuit brought by large fishing industry interests that challenged President Barack Obama's designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which encompases 4,913 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean off the nation's northeast coast, as a protected area.

Conservation groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF)—which had intervened in the case—applauded the court's ruling.

"Today's decision is a clear victory for our oceans and for the Atlantic's only marine national monument," said Peter Shelley, Senior Counsel at CLF. "This decision upholds protections for one of the most fragile and scientifically important areas in the North Atlantic from destructive activities like oil drilling and industrial fishing. Safeguarding the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts ensures that we are leaving a proud legacy for the people of New England."

Thousands flee as heatwave-fuelled bushfires reach Melbourne

Moscow resorts to fake snow in warmest December since 1886

Moscow has been so warm this December that the government has resorted to sending trucks filled with artificial snow to decorate a new year display in the city centre. Videos of the delivery for a snowboarding hill went viral as observers noted the irony of bringing snow to a city that spends millions each year on its removal. ...

The Moscow region is in the throes of one of its warmest winters since temperatures began to be systematically recorded 140 years ago. The temperature in the Russian capital rose to 5.4C on 18 December, topping the previous record for the month set in 1886. ...

Concerns are growing about the effects of global heating on Russia. Permafrost under the country’s northern towns is slowly melting, and receding Arctic ice is driving hungry polar bears to forage in urban areas. The thaw in the northern permafrost has even set off a “gold rush” for mammoth ivory by making the tusks previously buried in ice more accessible to prospectors. ...

Russia is a signatory to the Paris agreement to combat global heating, and Vladimir Putin said during a televised press conference last week that the crisis was a direct threat to Russia. The country was warming 2.5 times faster than the average for the planet, he noted.

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Also of Interest

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

Why Trump killed Santa and other stocking chillers

‘As the Clever Hopes Expire’: A Look Back at the Ending Decade

The Fed Has Made Jamie Dimon $250 Million Richer Through Its Repo Loans

Yanis Varoufakis: Imagining a World Without Capitalism

New York Times columnist accused of eugenics over piece on Jewish intelligence

Sept. 11 Trial Judge Faults Secrecy in Guantánamo Prison Commander’s Testimony

Narrative Managers Claim White Helmets Founder Was Driven To Suicide By Syria Skeptics

Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands

Thousands of Koalas Feared Dead in Australia Wildfires

Be wary of Elon Musk despoiling the ‘vault of heaven’

A Call to Action as Planet's Essential Groundwater is Being Rapidly Depleted

Washington's Newseum nears final deadline amid crisis in US journalism

Progressive Challenger to Rep. Steny Hoyer: I would not support Pelosi as House Speaker

Saagar and Ryan Grim: Biden's complete HYPOCRISY on impeachment

Saagar Enjeti demolishes Billionaire who FREAKS at Rising

Rising: Michael Moore's dire warning to Centrist Democrats

Democracy Now: Michael Moore on Trump, 2020 & Why “the Old, Angry White Guy” Doesn’t Represent the Working Class

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A Little Night Music

Barbara Lynn - You'll Lose A Good Thing

Barbara Lynn - It's Better To Have It

Barbara Lynn - Unfair

Barbara Lynn - You're Losing Me

Barbara Lynn - People Gonna Talk

Barbara Lynn - Maybe We Can Slip Away

Barbara Lynn - This is the thanks I get

Barbara Lynn - Nice & Easy

Barbara Lynn - I'm a Good Woman

Barbara Lynn - You Don't At Night

Barbara Lynn - You Don't Have To Go

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