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This evening's music features blues guitarist and singer Freddie King. Enjoy!

"It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical."

-- John Cusack

News and Opinion

Canada Stops Trying to Jail Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Omar Khadr

While he fights to overturn his conviction in the United States, Omar Khadr's fight with the Canadian government is finally over.

The six-month-old Trudeau administration announced on Thursday that it would end its appeal to Khadr's bail conditions, ensuring his freedom — albeit with some conditions. ...

The court later relaxed Khadr's bail conditions, removing the monitoring of his school computer, allowing him to travel to visit family — only with his lawyer, and so long as he only spoke English — and ordered his monitoring bracelet to be removed.

The decision is an aggressive about-face in government policy. ...

His American conviction, which he is still appealing, was obtained in a military court at Guantanamo. Khadr says his confession — that he threw the grenade that killed Speer and wounded another American soldier — was obtained through torture.

If he wins that appeal, his bail conditions will be lifted and he will, for the first time in his adult life, be a free man.

The CIA torture report belongs to the public

The American public’s ability to read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s full, scathing report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program is in danger because David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, will not call the report what it is, a federal record. He is refusing to use his clear statutory authority to label the report a federal record, which would be subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure requirements, because the Justice Department has told the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) not to. The DOJ has a long history of breaking the law to avoid releasing information in response to FOIA requests. The NARA does not have such a legacy and should not allow itself to be bullied by the DOJ.

The DOJ instructed the NARA not to make any determination on the torture report’s status as a federal record, ostensibly because it would jeopardize the government’s position in a FOIA lawsuit seeking the report’s release. The DOJ, however, has no right to tell the NARA not to weigh in on the record’s status, and the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 gives the archivist of the United States the binding legal authority to make precisely that determination. ...

Not even officials with security clearances may read the document while its status as a congressional or federal record is debated.

There is a sad irony in the possibility of the Senate report remaining locked away in congressional vaults, never to be read. Feinstein initiated the report after learning that Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency’s defunct torture program, authorized the destruction of 92 video recordings of suspected Al-Qaeda leader Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded 83 times in one month at a black site prison in 2005.

Rodriguez justified the destruction by writing that “the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain.” The Senate’s torture report was an attempt to right his grievous wrong and preserve the lessons from the sordid program for posterity. But now agency politics may bury all the good and necessary work that the Senate Intelligence Committee did to present a history of our nation’s use of torture, its efficacy and its consequences.

French judge summons former Guantanamo chief in torture probe

A French judge has summoned retired US General Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantanamo Bay prison chief, to appear in court on March 1 over allegations of torture, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs told FRANCE 24 on Thursday.

William Bourdon, a lawyer for former Gitmo detainee Mourad Benchellali, said General Miller was due in court at 10am on March 1 to answer accusations that he oversaw Benchellali’s “illegal detention and torture”.

Bourdon said he did not expect the general to show up, noting that “top US civilian and military officials refuse to be held to account by [foreign] judges”.

Benchellali and fellow French citizen Nizar Sassi were detained at the notorious US prison from 2002 until 2004. For years they have been asking the French courts to launch legal proceedings against Miller, a now retired army general who was commander of Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2004.

Last April, the Paris Court of Appeal approved their request and demanded that Miller appear in court for questioning.

Libya: US air strikes target islamic state group militants, senior ISIS chief "likely killed"

Threat of Turkey-Russia Escalation as Wave of Fighters Cross into Syria

Tensions continued ratcheting up along the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowing retaliation in both Syria and Iraq for Wednesday's bombing in Ankara that killed dozens.

In a live televised speech, Davutoglu said Thursday—though he offered no evidence—that the perpetrator of the Ankara car bombing was a member of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, working with insurgents from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Indeed, Turkey responded to the Ankara blast with airstrikes in northern Iraq Wednesday night, CNN reported, targeting the PKK that it says is affiliated with the YPG.

And the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel has said that at least 500 Turkish fighters on Wednesday crossed the border and headed for the Syrian town of Azaz, in northern Aleppo province, where Sunni Arabs and the Syrian rebel groups Turkey views as "moderate" allies have suffered setbacks at the hands of Kurdish fighters.

MSF Didn’t Give Syrians GPS Data on Struck Clinic

Details of an airstrike against a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) clinic in the town of Maarat al-Numaan, which killed at least 25 civilians, are becoming more difficult today, as MSF revealed they’d never actually told either the Syrian or Russian government where the clinic was before the strike.

MSF had accused the Monday strike of “deliberately” targeting the facility, and leaving a large chunk of northern Idlib Province without access to medical care. While this all is true, it’s unclear if officials had any idea what the facility they were targeting was.

US Gives Russia Details on Special Forces in Syria to Avoid Strikes

Providing some of the first insight into coordination between US and Russian forces in Syria, the Pentagon has revealed it provides Russia with broad areas of operation in which US special forces are located, to avoid them being hit during Russian airstrikes.

Pentagon officials say that Russia has given them assurances that so long as the US continues to keep them appraised of where the troops are operating, Russia will refrain from striking them. Russia has also provided areas they want the US not to hit.

Post-war Iraq: 'Everybody is corrupt, from top to bottom'

Iraq’s anti-corruption chief sat in his office, waving his hands in exasperation. “There is no solution,” he said. “Everybody is corrupt, from the top of society to the bottom. Everyone. Including me.”

Coming at the start of a conversation about Iraq’s ailing governance, and what was being done to turn things around, Mishan al-Jabouri’s admission was jarring. “At least I am honest about it,” he shrugged. “I was offered $5m by someone to stop investigating him. I took it, and continued prosecuting him anyway.”

Jabouri heads one of two anti-graft agencies tasked with protecting public monies in post-war Iraq. Both have more work than they can ever hope to deal with – even if they wanted to.

Now, with plunging oil prices leaving Iraq’s revenues in more jeopardy than at any time since the US invasion, attention is shifting to what the custodians of public funds have done over more than a decade with tens of billions of dollars that could otherwise be a buffer from such a budget shock.

If, as projected, global oil prices remain at historic lows, Iraq will be unable to pay some of its civil servants, or honour pledges to build roads and power stations in the next financial year. The gravity of the crisis has created uncomfortable reckonings for Iraq’s political class, military leaders and some senior religious figures, who have led a staggering 13-year pillage that has left Iraq consistently rated as one of the top five least transparent and most corrupt countries in the world.

“Believe me, most of the senior names in the country have been responsible for stealing nearly all its wealth,” said Jabouri. “There are names at the top of the tree who would kill me if I went after them. When people here steal, they steal openly. They brag about it. There is a virus here, like Ebola. It is called corruption. There is no hope, I am sorry to say.”

US Tanks Pouring Into Norway Caves for ‘Russia War’

Echoing previous deployments during the Cold War, the Obama Administration is deploying a significant number of tanks and artillery forces into a series of secret caves near the Russian border in Norway. Officials say the caves have 6,500 pieces of equipment, and have in recent years been used to “support” the war in Iraq.

Nominally, the new deployment is aimed at a new round of military drills, but Pentagon officials are also talking up the notion that the new deployment of tanks will “reduce the cost” of a future conflict with Russia.

Trials halted for all Baltimore police officers charged in death of Freddie Gray

The trials of all the Baltimore officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray have been put on hold by Maryland’s highest court, in a delay that could set back the high-profile cases of alleged police brutality for months.

The six officers facing trials over the death of Gray after a spinal injury in the back of a police van were due in court this winter. But after a jury couldn’t reach a decision in the first case, that of officer William Porter, every other trial has been held up over whether Porter can be compelled to testify in each of these other cases without risking self-incrimination.

Prosecutors have appealed rulings on whether Porter must testify, and the Maryland court of appeals said late Thursday that it would hear all the appeals together on 3 March. After the hearing, the court could take months to issue a written decision.

LA settles lawsuit after officer arrests amid growing sex abuse scandal

The city of Los Angeles is moving quickly to try and snuff out a sexual abuse scandal following the arrests of two Los Angeles police officers, agreeing on Wednesday to settle a 2014 lawsuit filed by one of the four women accusing the officers of assault.

The woman, who said she had been forced into oral sex in the back of the unmarked car of officers Luis Valenzuela and James Nichols, also said that the department’s internal affairs investigators had “stonewalled” her for three years after she first reported the incident.

The two officers have now been charged with repeated assaults of the four women while on duty, but allegations of sexual abuse against the men go back to at least 2010, and questions linger about why it has taken this long to bring the men to justice.

“We’re glad they’ve finally been brought to justice,” her lawyer, Dan Miller, told the Guardian. “It took way too long, but better late than never.”

Senate Confirms First-Ever Native American Woman As Federal Judge

The Senate quietly made history on Wednesday night when it confirmed Diane Humetewa as a federal judge -- the first Native American woman to ever hold such a post.

Humetewa was confirmed 96-0 to serve on the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. She is a former U.S. attorney in Arizona and a member of the Hopi tribe. She is now the only Native American serving on the federal bench and just the third Native American in history to do so.

Employer-sponsored wellness programs put your health privacy on life support

It sounds outlandish that your employer-sponsored wellness program could learn if you stop birth control. Or know how susceptible you are to diabetes based on your credit card history, which reveals what you spend on everything from gym membership to where you eat. But a recent report in the Wall Street Journal says that they can do just that.

Most people think that the information collected in employer wellness programs is covered under health privacy laws, so they don’t worry about the personal information that gets collected. But they should worry, because most wellness program data doesn’t fall under federal health privacy laws, and programs have greatly expanded the scope of their data collections.

Today, employers and their wellness program consultants often request consent from employees for access to health records. They may also ask for consent to genetically test employees in wellness programs. For example, one employer wellness program asked employees to consent to genetic testing for three “susceptibility genes related to obesity”. Now, some also purchase personal data about employees from commercial data brokers, without employee’s knowledge.

Commercial data broker information can be quite detailed and personal. The data can range from purchase histories to hobbies to reading habits to charitable donations to locations frequented, all non-work related activities. When wellness companies analyze this data to predict health and behavior, some use the predictions to pressure specific employees to act in healthier ways. That is, healthier according to non-transparent and unverified analytics, and not according to published medical research

These activities dance around the edges of health and other laws meant to protect employee privacy, ensure fairness and provide due process. ... Not only do wellness programs sometimes collect and use personal data outside of regulatory environments, they also create new pools of sensitive personal data that lack privacy protections. For example, when wellness programs cull information from employee health claims (legal if it is done with “consent”) this is a new data pool – and it does not have privacy protections under the main federal health privacy rule.

What Can Rich Countries Afford?

The G.I. Bill, which created the White middle class, took up 15% of the federal budget. https://t.co/9LT2o25bOF pic.twitter.com/AJ5brB2fUC

— america. (@SeanMcElwee) February 16, 2016

When people talk about how much health care for all will cost, or any other program, you need simply remember the above, or that military spending makes up over 50 percent of all discretionary spending in America. ...

Basically, America can afford whatever America wants to afford, and the same is true of a variety of other countries like France, Germany, and Britain, and so on. The choice not to do something, in rich countries, is a choice, and reflects the goals of the people who run the country, and very little else.

Dirty little secret: Insurers actually are making a mint from Obamacare

For months now, headlines about the Affordable Care Act have focused on complaints from big insurers that they haven't been making money from individual insurance plans mandated by the act.

The big insurer UnitedHealth Group has even whined about losing so many millions it's thinking about withdrawing from the Obamacare marketplace as soon as next year. Others, including Anthem and Aetna, have mentioned that their exchange business isn't yet profitable, though they're not talking about pulling the plug.

Here's what they haven't been saying so loudly: They're making scads of money from Obamacare — so much that almost universally, they're expanding their participation.

... The big profits have come not from the insurance exchanges, but via the ACA's Medicaid expansion, in which the largest insurers have been playing a major role. The same insurance executives who go out of their way to badmouth the ACA's individual exchange plans talk as though they can't get enough of the Medicaid business, especially its managed care component.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupier seeks $666 billion in damages 'from works of devil'

Shawna Cox, one of the 25 people indicted on a federal conspiracy charge in the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, has filed her own complaint against federal employees, saying she was a victim of public corruption and government oppression.

The eight-page "counter criminal complaint'' filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Portland contends that state and federal employees attempted to kill her and "executed'' her "co-witness and co-informant'' Robert "LaVoy" Finicum on Jan. 26. ...

The refuge occupiers took what Cox calls "hostile adverse possession'' of the federal sanctuary outside Burns to challenge "clouded land titles.'' She maintains that she wasn't interfering with any refuge employees because it was winter. ...

Cox and the other defendants are accused of conspiring to impede federal officers from working at the sanctuary through intimidation, threats and force. ...

She seeks more than $666 billion in damages "from the works of the devil,'' the complaint says.

The US Economy Has Not Recovered and Will Not Recover

The US economy died when middle class jobs were offshored and when the financial system was deregulated. ...

In the 21st century US economic policy has destroyed the ability of real aggregate demand in the US to increase. Economists will deny this, because they are shills for globalism and jobs offshoring. They misrepresent jobs offshoring as free trade and, as in their ideology free trade benefits everyone, claim that America is benefitting from jobs offshoring. Yet, they cannot show any evidence whatsoever of these alleged benefits. ...

As an economist, it is a mystery to me how any economist can think that a population that does not produce the larger part of the goods that it consumes can afford to purchase the goods that it consumes. Where does the income come from to pay for imports when imports are swollen by the products of offshored production?

We were told that the income would come from better-paid replacement jobs provided by the “New Economy,” but neither the payroll jobs reports nor the US Labor Departments’s projections of future jobs show any sign of this mythical “New Economy.”

There is no “New Economy.” The “New Economy” is like the neoconservatives promise that the Iraq war would be a six-week “cake walk” paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, not a $3 trillion dollar expense to American taxpayers (according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and a war that has lasted the entirely of the 21st century to date, and is getting more dangerous.

The American “New Economy” is the American Third World economy in which the only jobs created are low productivity, low paid nontradable domestic service jobs incapable of producing export earnings with which to pay for the goods and services produced offshore for US consumption.

The massive debt arising from Washington’s endless wars for neoconservative hegemony now threaten Social Security and the entirety of the social safety net. The presstitute media are blaming not the policy that has devasted Americans, but, instead, the Americans who have been devasted by the policy.

Calling Clinton's Bluff, Sanders Reveals What His Paid Speeches Look Like

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said during a town hall on Thursday evening she will release transcripts of paid, closed-door speeches she gave to Wall Street firms "when everyone else does."

That may be sooner than she thinks.

On Friday morning, rival Bernie Sanders appeared to throw down the gauntlet by posting a video of one of the speeches he was paid to give in 2011—and how much he was paid for it.

This is what a paid @BernieSanders speech looks like:https://t.co/g0AaUEu4yn
Don't worry. The $500 payout was given to charity.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 19, 2016

The New York Times reported in May 2015 that in the year prior, Sanders had collected $1,867.42 for three appearances, "a grand sum that is chump change in presidential politicking but enough for the senator to respectably donate the money to charity."

Hillary's big donors appear to be even more clueless than she is, if that's possible.

Hillary Clinton Donors Hear Concerns About Nevada Outcome

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager briefed some of her most loyal and active fund-raisers this morning about the upcoming Nevada caucuses and responded to frustrations among some of her donors that the campaign needed to do a better job of demonstrating its successful mobilization of grassroots activists and small donors.

Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, sat at the head of a conference table in the New York office of Clinton donor and Wall Street investor Marc Lasry, according to accounts from people in the room. Joining them for the state-of-the-race conversation over coffee were members of the campaign’s finance steering committee, including Maureen White, the former Democratic National Committee finance chairwoman, Alan Patricof, Michael Kempner, Robert Zimmerman, Betsy Cohen, Jay Snyder and others. ...

The collected fundraisers, who for years have bundled checks for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, listened approvingly as Ms. White, who seemed especially frustrated, expressed bewilderment that the campaign’s mobilization of grassroots support had been eclipsed in the news media by Bernie Sanders’s criticism of Mrs. Clinton as the establishment candidate representing big money. ...

One donor also asked Mr. Mook to go after the youth vote. With a straight face, attendees said, the operative took the suggestion under advisement.

AFL-CIO withholding Clinton endorsement, report says

The AFL-CIO will not endorse Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, according to a report from The Huffington Post.

Many of the nation’s top unions have thrown their weight behind Clinton, but AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told members the federation is staying out of it.

The AFL-CIO is likely to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate in the general election, he said, but doesn’t want to pick sides yet. ...

The AFL-CIO’s decision to stay out of the Democratic race is viewed by some as a victory for the Sanders campaign, which has built its platform on labor issues and could ill afford to lose another major union endorsement.

Sanders' Campaign Could Split The Democratic Party

This is an excellent article worth reading in full:

Democrats and the Death of Politics

American politics relies heavily on the idea of a clear separation between politics and economics. This has facilitated a stealth politics where political speech is used to sell policies that are then partially or completely countermanded by economic policies. National Democrats can talk all they want to about economic and racial justice, but when they support Wall Street, the military and munitions industries, oil and gas, big pharma and big insurance while leaving the rest of us to the vagaries of ‘market’ outcomes it becomes clear that the fix is in. Political contributions by the wealthy and executives of large corporations make clear that they understand the political implications of economic policies even as political leaders pretend the relation doesn’t exist. ...

Calls for ‘universal’ pragmatism ignore the extent to which the economic policies of the radical right have reshaped Western political economy since the 1970s. Perpetual pleading for caution and patience have been inexorably tied to this resurgence. Here national Democrats haven’t been simple facilitators. Between deregulating and then bailing out predatory finance, proposing and getting passed misleadingly labeled ‘trade’ agreements and cutting social spending, there is nary a newly blighted inner city neighborhood that doesn’t have Democrat policies associated with its immiseration. National Democrats have accomplished through economic policies the very opposite of the economic and racial justice they proclaim with their political rhetoric. ...

Policies sold by liberals as of the Left need to be placed in historical context to make room for more plausible programs. The pseudo-‘trade’ deals like TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) currently being pushed by Barack Obama tie to three-hundred years of imperial history. Trade ‘benefits everyone’ in the same way that the spread of Christianity did in the views of Christian missionaries. The alleged ‘beneficiaries’ of imperial largesse were rarely asked if they wanted to be colonized and exploited. Likewise, the ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) mechanism present in liberal trade deals since NAFTA is designed to further consolidate corporate control over political economy. This state-corporatism also has roots in Italian and German fascism. ...

When prominent liberals argue that Hillary Clinton can ‘get things done’ they mean that she knows how to navigate court politics. But court politics are between, and in the interests of, courtiers and their plutocrat masters. One need only spend time in a growing number of American cities to see that the difference between economically bombing Chicago or St. Louis and militarily bombing Kabul or Baghdad is of degree, not type.

Hedge Fund Billionaires Fund Super PAC Ad Against Bernie Sanders and Minimum Wage Hike

A Super PAC called Future 45 started airing an ad this week saying Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would hurt small businesses and kill jobs by raising the minimum wage and increasing taxes.

Future 45 is run by Brian O. Walsh, a longtime Republican operative who has in the past served as political director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. Most recently, he was president of the American Action Network, a dark money group that was the second-largest outside spender in 2010.

Over the last year, Future 45 has been funded primarily by hedge fund managers. Two billionaire Rubio-backers — Paul Singer, who runs Elliott Management, and Ken Griffin, who runs Citadel — have each contributed $250,000.

During his career, Sanders has frequently called attention to the wealth amassed by hedge funds, noting that in 2013, “The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than $24 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 425,000 public school teachers. This level of inequality is neither moral or sustainable.”

Under new Oregon law, all eligible voters are registered unless they opt out

Americans are required to register if they want to vote; as of this week, Oregonians will have to register not to.

In front of a packed and cheering audience Monday, Gov. Kate Brown signed a first-in-the-nation bill to automatically register all eligible Oregonians to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license or state identification card.

Those who are registered through the new process will be notified by mail and will be given three weeks to take themselves off the voting rolls. If they do not opt out, the secretary of state’s office will mail them a ballot automatically 20 days before any election.

When Brown signed House Bill 2177 into law, she was building on the Beaver State’s history as a ballot-box innovator, which has led to high voter participation. Oregon was the first state in the country to switch to all-mail voting when Ballot Measure 60 was passed in 1998 by a wide margin. Washington state and Colorado later followed suit.

Chicago residents blame city for water contamination in class-action lawsuit

Chicago residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against the city over the safety of its drinking water, claiming that “elevated and unsafe” levels of lead have contaminated their water supply for years due to risky construction projects.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday at the circuit court of Cook County, Illinois, claims that the city of Chicago has known for years that lead has seeped into drinking water due to street work, water meter installations or plumbing repairs, but failed to warn residents about the risk of lead in their water.

The city’s “negligent and reckless conduct” has caused a substantial risk to residents, the lawsuit states, without proper warnings. The three named plaintiffs in the case want the city to pay for diagnostic testing, as well as replace all of Chicago’s lead service lines in full.

The lawsuit states that the residents have shown symptoms of elevated lead levels, although testing has yet to confirm this.

Studies have shown that lead pipes carrying water into homes can be shaken or damaged by nearby construction work. This disturbance can cause the lead lining of the pipes to fracture and leech into the water, causing dangerous contamination.

An Environmental Protection Agency report from 2013 identified the problem in Chicago, warning that the city’s attempts to upgrade its water system could pose health risks from toxic metal poisoning. City officials have questioned the EPA’s findings, claiming that Chicago’s water is completely safe from lead contamination.

Inside How Citizens, Journalists, Doctors & Scientists Exposed the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up

To Protect Flint's Children, Get Them Out of There

As the Rust Belt city's water crisis continues, one public health expert is stressing that "the children of Flint remain in harm's way"—and suggests that the best response at the moment may be to consider temporary resettlement of the families affected.

Irwin Redlener, president and co-founder of Children's Health Fund, a professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness makes the argument in an op-ed published Wednesday at the Washington Post.

He acknowledges the task would be "unprecedented and complex" but states that doing so "needs to be on the table," as some "some 9,000 young children may have been exposed to contaminated water" already. And because "lead is still leaching into the drinking water from corroded pipes, and we can't be certain that the widely distributed hardware store water filters, which need to be installed properly and replaced on schedule, will reliably keep the water safe," parents have no certainty that their children will be spared exposure to the poison. ...

Redlener's call for resettlement comes as liberal groups arrive in Lansing to deliver nearly one million signatures calling on Gov. Rick Snyder to resign over his role in the water crisis, and as he and Flint Mayor Karen Weaver spar over the approach and speed to replacing the city's lead pipes. 

Keep It in the Ground: Author Terry Tempest Williams Buys 1,750 Acres of Oil & Gas Leases in Utah

Mercedes owner files US suit over diesel emissions

An owner of a Mercedes BlueTEC diesel car filed a class-action lawsuit in the United States, accusing the carmaker of knowingly programming its Clean Diesel vehicles to emit illegally high levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx), according to law firm Hagens Berman. ...

Hagens Berman said in a statement that on-road testing had shown Mercedes’s Clean Diesel cars produced average on-road NOx emissions that were 19 times above the US standard, with some instantaneous readings as high as 65 times more than the US limit.

Also of Interest

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

Michael Hudson interview: The New Global Financial Cold War

Henry Giroux: The Mad Violence of Casino Capitalism

Walmart Wages Are the Main Reason People Depend on Food Stamps

'El Viejito' for president: why Latinos in Nevada are switching to Bernie Sanders

Does Bernie Sanders Know What He’s Doing?

FBI Won’t Explain Its Bizarre New Way of Measuring Its Success Fighting Terror

Upgrade Your iPhone Passcode to Defeat the FBI’s Backdoor Strategy

This Viral Rant About Hillary Clinton is the Most Savage Takedown Ever

'We have never seen anything better' – the secrets of King Tut's tomb

A Little Night Music

Freddie King - Big Legged Woman

Freddie King - Boogie Funk

Freddie King - The Things That I Used To Do

Freddie King - Hideaway

Freddie King & Eric Clapton - Gambling Woman Blues

Freddie King - Look Over Yonders Wall

Freddie King - Live at the Sugar Bowl