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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features soul singer Joe Simon. Enjoy!

^{Joe Simon - The Chokin' Kind}

“Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling.”

-- Daniel Kahneman

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News and Opinion

Death by drone strike, dished out by algorithm

“Guns don’t kill people,” is the standard refrain of the National Rifle Association every time there is a mass shooting atrocity in the US. “People kill people.” Er, yes, but they do it with guns. Firearms are old technology, though. What about updating the proposition from 1791 (when the second amendment to the US constitution, which protects the right to bear arms, was ratified) to our own time? How about this, for example: “algorithms kill people”?

Sounds a bit extreme? Well, in April 2014, at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University, General Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, said this: “We kill people based on metadata”. He then qualified that stark assertion by reassuring the audience that the US government doesn’t kill American citizens on the basis of their metadata. They only kill foreigners.

Pakistanis, specifically. It turns out that the NSA hoovers up all the metadata of 55m mobile phone users in Pakistan and then feeds them into a machine-learning algorithm which supposedly identifies likely couriers working to shuttle messages and information between terrorists. ...

The NSA programme doing this is called Skynet, is not to be confused with the murderous intelligent machine network in the Terminator films. In essence, it’s a standard-issue machine-learning project. What happens is that the algorithm is fed the mobile metadata of a number of known terrorist suspects, and then sifts through the data of 55m users to try and find patterns that match those of the training set. It’s the same kind of approach that drives your spam filter: it’s fed examples of known spam, and then uses that to decide whether a particular message is junk mail or not. The critical difference is that if your filter gets it wrong, then the worst that can happen is that you are annoyed or amused by its clumsiness; if Skynet gets it wrong you could find yourself on the receiving end of a Hellfire missile dispatched by a Predator or a Reaper drone.

Turkey Demands Unconditional US Support in Fighting Syrian Kurds

Over the weekend, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu demanded that the US pledge “unconditional” military support for Turkey in the fight against the Kurdish YPG, a Syrian faction which has been the primary US ally in fighting ISIS.

“The only thing we expect from our US ally is to support Turkey with no ifs or buts,” Davutoglu insisted, reiterating the claim that the YPG was behind last week’s Ankara bombing, despite a Turkish faction, the TAK, claiming it.

Turkey has repeatedly demanded the US sever ties with the YPG, and the US has repeatedly rejected those demands.

Erdogan: Turkey has right to conduct anti-terror ops in Syria

Syria conflict: Turkish threats of intervention after Ankara bombing taken seriously by Barack Obama

The war in Syria is reaching a climax. The Syrian army, supported by Russian bombers, is advancing north of Aleppo to cut off the Syrian armed opposition from the Turkish border. The Syrian Kurds, backed by US air strikes, are closing in on Isis and non-Isis supply lines in the same area. In the wake of the bomb in Ankara on 17 February that killed 28 people, Turkey is threatening military intervention in Syria in retaliation for the attack. On Friday, President Barack Obama spent one hour and 20 minutes on the phone to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, urging restraint.

“The Turks and the Saudis are always trying to nudge the US into sending ground troops to Syria, but they are not going to launch a large-scale military intervention on their own,” said a former senior diplomat in the Middle East. Turkish and Saudi policy on Syria has hitherto been full of threats and bombast, but it is dangerously mercurial and some form of military action cannot be ruled out, even if it is opposed by the US or Russia.

The US knows that Turkish military action would be directed primarily against the Syrian Kurds and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) that have been America’s most effective ally fighting Isis. In his conversation with Mr Erdogan, Mr Obama is reported to have said that the YPG should not seek to exploit recent gains by the Syrian army north of Aleppo to take more territory. But at the very moment that the two men were speaking, the success of US-YPG co-operation was underlined by a little-reported victory in north-east Syria, where the Syrian Democratic Forces, a proxy for the YPG, captured the important Isis stronghold of Shadadeh with the help of US air strikes.

There is a further reason why the US would be loath to give up its military alliance with the Syrian Kurds. “Over a year ago, the Americans realised that the Turks were not going to close their border with Syria to Isis and other jihadis on its northern, Turkish side,” said the former diplomat. “So the Americans decided to close the border on the southern side, with the help of the Syrian Kurds.” It is this plan which is now close to fulfilment.

America Is In A Proxy War With Itself In Syria

The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.

The confusion is playing out on the battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this week.

Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.

The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes. ...

The recent clashes could make it difficult for the U.S. to build the crucial Arab component of its ISIS fight, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Andrew Tabler said. “If this continues, the U.S. is only going to have one option it can work with, which is the YPG. It’s not going to have the Arab option,” he said. “Which would be fine if the Kurds were the majority of the Syrian population, but they’re not. We need Sunni Arabs to defeat ISIS.”

Kosovo Chaos Undercuts Clinton ‘Success’

The insatiable appetite of America’s bipartisan foreign policy elites for military intervention — despite its record of creating failing states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen — traces back to the marriage of liberal and neoconservative interventionists during the Clinton administration’s 78-day bombing of Serbia to create the break-away state of Kosovo in 1999.

One scholar-advocate has called NATO’s campaign “The most important precedent supporting the legitimacy of unilateral humanitarian intervention.” Even Sen. Bernie Sanders was proud to support that use of American power, ostensibly “to prevent further genocide.”

But Kosovo, which is still not recognized as an independent state by nearly half of all UN members, and which still relies on 4,600 NATO troops to maintain order, is hardly a showcase for the benefits of military intervention. With an unemployment rate of 35 percent, Kosovo is wracked by persistent outbreaks of terrorism, crime, and political violence. ...

But it’s no wonder that Kosovo’s political fabric is so rent by violent confrontations. The rump state was created by a violent secessionist movement led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That guerrilla band of Albanian nationalists was covertly backed by the German secret service to weaken Serbia. Its terrorist attacks on Serbian villages and government personnel in the mid-1990s prompted a brutal military crackdown by Serbia, followed by NATO’s decisive intervention in 1999.

During the fighting the KLA drove tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to promote independence for the majority Albanian population. It recruited Islamist militants — including followers of Osama Bin Laden — from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and other countries. ...

None of that, however, stopped Washington from embracing the KLA’s cause against Serbia, a policy spearheaded by the liberal interventionist First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Without authorization from the United Nations, NATO began bombing Serbia in March 1999, killing some 500 civilians, demolishing billions of dollars’ worth of industrial plants, bridges, schools, libraries and hospitals, and even hitting the Chinese embassy. ...

Former KLA leaders, including its political head Hashim Thaçi, went on to dominate the new Kosovo state. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe declared that Thaçi, who was then Kosovo’s prime minister, headed a “mafia-like” group that smuggled drugs, guns and human organs on a grand scale through Eastern Europe. The report’s author accused the international community of turning a blind eye while Thaçi’s group of KLA veterans engaged in “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations” to maintain power and profit from their criminal activities.

Purveyors of Global Violence, US Continues to Lead World Arms Trade

The U.S. weapons industry continues to lead the world as the greatest supplier of major arms and munitions, according to an authoritative analysis, fueling the global violence and turmoil that has soared to unprecedented levels in recent years.

The report (pdf), put forth by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Monday, found that the U.S. continues to dominate the global arms trade, driving 33 percent of total exports between 2011 and 2015.

Meanwhile, the volume of the weapons sent to conflict areas from the United States has increased 27 percent compared to the period between 2006 and 2010, with an overall rise in the arms trade of 14 percent worldwide.

"As regional conflicts and tensions continue to mount, the [U.S.] remains the leading global arms supplier by a significant margin," said Dr. Aude Fleurant, director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme.

According to SIPRI, the U.S. has sold or donated major arms to at least 96 states in the past five years, which the report notes is a "significantly higher number of export destinations than any other supplier." What's more, another SIPRI analysis from December revealed that U.S.-based arms manufacturers are profiting heavily from these sales, reaping 54 percent of total global revenue.

Saudi Arabia leads surge in arms imports by Middle East states

Saudi imports up 275% in five years, with UK firms estimated to have sold £5.6bn of arms to the country, while imports by European states down 41%

The international transfer of weapons to the Middle East has risen dramatically over the past five years, with Saudi Arabia’s imports for 2011-15 increasing by 275% compared with 2006–10, according to an authoritative report.

Overall, imports by states in the Middle East increased by 61%; imports by European states decreased by 41% over the same period. Britain sold more weapons to Saudi Arabia than to any other country. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest US arms market and buys more American arms than British, the report shows. ...

The figures are contained in the latest arms sales survey by Sipri, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“A coalition of Arab states is putting mainly US- and European-sourced advanced arms into use in Yemen,” said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher with Sipri’s arms and military expenditure programme. “Despite low oil prices, large deliveries of arms to the Middle East are scheduled to continue as part of contracts signed in the past five years.”

[See also: SIPRI Report: World crises driving international arms trade - js]

Israel dramatically ramping up demolitions of Palestinian homes in West Bank

Since the beginning of this year, especially in early February, Israel’s Civil Administration has significantly increased the pace of Palestinian home demolitions in the West Bank’s Area C under full Israeli control (about 60 percent of the West Bank).

It has demolished 293 homes in just six weeks, compared with 447 for all of 2015. The average has surged to 49 from nine per week. The demolitions have left more than 480 Palestinians, including 220 children, homeless.

At the settlement subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, headed by Moti Yogev (Habayit Hayehudi), MKs have openly pressured Civil Administration officials to step up the demolitions and evict Palestinian communities from Area C.

Over the years, they have accused the administration of being powerless or deliberate foot dragging. They have especially complained about European aid to Palestinian construction in these areas, and demanded that the authorities destroy buildings that international organizations, particularly European ones, have donated.

Apple says the FBI is making access demands even China hasn't asked for

The US government is asking for greater access to Apple’s software than even the Chinese government, an Apple executive has said, as the company resists an order forcing it to help the government crack the passcode for a phone that was used by a San Bernardino shooter. ...

Apple’s legal team was huddled Friday preparing a response and declined to speak on the record. But in several calls with reporters, a senior Apple executive agreed to offer some response on the condition of anonymity and that reporters not quote the executive’s exact words.

The company’s executive said that the Justice Department’s request was so unprecedented that no other country – specifically mentioning China – had asked for similar access. That comes following reports that the country, a huge market for Apple, has asked to inspect western technology products for “security”.

The company executive also said it was safe to assume that Apple would continue to add more security features to its products to make it harder still for investigators to get access.

@CountyWire The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request pic.twitter.com/No5Mtio2rD

— Luis Miguel Abreu (@luis_abreu) February 21, 2016

FBI Approved Hack That Complicated Access to San Bernardino Shooter's iPhone Data

There's a new wrinkle in the fight between Apple and the FBI over unlocking an iPhone that belonged to a gunman in the San Bernardino mass shooting.

On Friday, a Twitter account associated with San Bernardino County said that the county worked with the FBI to reset the phone's iCloud password. That contradicts a previous claim by the bureau that the county acted alone to reset the password, a move that complicated efforts to access data on the phone.

The FBI has taken Apple to court to compel the company to unlock the iPhone, which is protected by a four-digit code and could be set to erase itself if more than 10 incorrect password guesses are made. Apple says it can't help the FBI unlock the phone without creating a special tool, and that doing so would set a dangerous precedent. Resetting the iCloud password was important because it potentially blocked an alternate way for authorities to access the data on the phone without Apple's help. ...

In theory, it could have been possible for investigators to get around the iPhone's passcode protection by having the phone backup its data remotely to the iCloud, which can happen automatically if the phone connects to one of its default WiFi networks. But if someone changes the iCloud password, the auto-backup feature can be disabled as a security precaution. Apple has already provided the FBI with Farook's iCloud data, but the last backup occurred on October 19, six weeks before the shooting.

On Sunday, San Bernardino County also tweeted a link to an ABC News story, which included an FBI statement that refuted previous remarks from an unnamed federal official who on Friday blamed the iCloud password reset on a "county information technology employee." The official had said the employee "executed the reset without being asked to do so by federal authorities."

Protests planned across US to back Apple in battle with FBI

Protesters are preparing to assemble in more than 30 cities to lash out at the FBI for obtaining a court order that requires Apple to make it easier to unlock an encrypted iPhone used by a gunman in December's mass shootings in Southern California.

The protests organized by the Internet rights group Fight for the Future are scheduled to occur Tuesday outside Apple stores in the U.S., the U.K., Hong Kong and Germany.

The U.S. protests will be in cities scattered across more than 20 states, including in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, where protesters plan to express their discontent outside the FBI's headquarters.

Apple v FBI: engineers would be ashamed to break their own encryption

Apple’s security team are a tight-knit tribe of hackers driven by a strict belief system and with almost unparalleled power around the company’s Cupertino campus, according to a former employee who worked closely with them.

“They’ll come into your office and just sit down with you and argue until they win, but they will always win,” said the engineer, who worked in a different department at Apple and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They dressed the same as us, they’re just as fun to talk to, but they’re fierce. They know how much responsibility they have and how vulnerable it could be.” ...

Engineers have a strong, almost religious belief system around their work. In this way of thinking, the FBI’s request is not just shortsighted and worldly but immoral. ...

“When you do InfoSec and your job is security, your moral view of the world is based on the fact that you can provide security through math, security that’s complete and secure not just because of any social contract but because literally the math works,” Ryan Orbuch, a serial entrepreneur who won Apple’s Design Award in 2013 said. “When someone comes and says I want you to break this for me, it goes against everything we believe in.”

Subprime Mortgage Whistleblowers Warn Bigger Crash on Its Way

TTIP Talks Are Looking a Bit Wobbly

TTIP is hugely behind schedule. It should have been signed off by now, and well into the ‘legal scrubbing’ stage where the lawyers tie up the legal loose ends and smooth of the rough edges. These negotiations are not open ended. Every delay, every extra month taken up at this stage is a threat to the entire project. We have the US elections looming, two of the frontrunners are against the new generation trade deals like TTIP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). There is no secret about the desperation of the Obama machine as they try to get the deal done and signed off before he vacates the White House at the end of the year. Obama is due to visit Germany in April to plead with all concerned to get a move on with the project. It is not impossible for the ratification vote in the European parliament to be held in 2019, after the next elections. That would make ratification in Europe very uncertain indeed.

There is a huge crisis over the proposals of corporate courts or ‘ISDS’ as it is often known. As the most contentious part of TTIP, it has attracted huge criticism and upset amongst members of the European parliament and in the public domain as well. In 2014, 150,000 responded to a European consultation on the issue and 97% of those responses were very negative. Since then, the trade commissioner in Brussels has dreamt up the Investor Court System as a proposed alternative. It has been made very clear that ICS is not alternative, more a repackaging of the dangerously flawed ISDS. Earlier this month, the largest association of German Judges completely slammed the ICS idea as undemocratic and undermining the sovereignty of domestic courts.

There is a great deal of good information in this article about both McKesson and Teach For America and their relationship with privatizers and corporate profiteers. It's worth a full read.

Why DeRay Mckesson's Baltimore Campaign Looks Like It Comes Right Out of Teach for America's Playbook

As Mckesson launches his outsider candidacy for mayor of Baltimore, many worry his roots in the education privatization movement put the city’s public schools in peril.

The reality behind Teach For America’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA's funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.

Teach for America’s peculiar brand of social justice was on bold display at its 25th Anniversary Summit the weekend of February 5. The confab drew 15,000 corps members, alumni and supporters to Washington for three days of seminars on lofty issues like, “Allies, Co-Conspirators and Coalition Building: Showing Up for Justice Across Lines of Power.” But one of the biggest draws was the discussion on “The New Civil Rights Agenda and Education,” co-headlined by DeRay Mckesson, the TFA alum and 30-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who received a $10,000 award from TFA last year. ...

Mckesson’s political platform, which he has begun rolling out on the DeRay For Mayor website, seems modeled in part on those who have forced corporate education reforms under big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg. Both of those mayors have justified unilateral takeovers of the public school districts in their respective cities using teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, which have consistently been debunked as unreliable measures of academic performance.

The language in his section on education is typical of school privatization advocates, according to Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education at California State University at Sacremento who has written extensively about Teach For America on his website, Cloaking Inequity.

“Most of it is pretty consistent with what TFA says on a daily basis,” he told me.

I could not get confirmation from Mckesson about whether his candidacy was supported by Teach For America.

Ralph Nader: Scalia, Hillary, and the Upholding of Corporate Supremacy

The wealthy and powerful are different from regular folks...

A throne of her own: $40,000 toilet built for Thai royal's visit to Cambodia

A toilet estimated to have cost up to $40,000 has been built for the personal use of Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand when she visits Cambodia, officials have said.

The toilet – a freestanding outhouse measuring 8 sq metres – is fully air-conditioned, took two weeks to build and cost 66 times the average annual salary in Cambodia. Thai building firm SCG Cement-Building Materials was tasked with the job, bringing in contractors and special materials from Thailand. The final touch will be added on Monday when a special imported commode will arrive. ...

Once the princess leaves Ratanakiri, her special commode will be thrown out and the building will be converted into an office for local officials. A manager from SCG, identified only as Mr Pursat, said: “Normal people can’t use a [royal] toilet.”

A large proportion of Cambodia’s population has trouble accessing any toilet at all. About 33% of schools nationwide have no toilet facilities, according to data from the Cambodian ministry of education. NGOs estimate that the figure could be as high as 80% in rural areas such as Ratanakiri.

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Sanders Pledges 'Path to Victory' as Clinton Ekes Out Nevada Win

Clinton gets 52.2 percent of the vote as Sanders splinters her supposed 'firewall'

Sanders won many of the northern counties that favored President Barack Obama, then a senator, when he ran against Clinton in 2008. Clinton was buoyed by Clark County, where almost 75 percent of Nevada's 2.8 million residents live.

As the Los Angeles Times reported from the road, some precincts in Nevada were breaking caucus ties by pulling cards out of a deck.

Meanwhile, entrance polls found that voters were split between "empathy and experience," as the LAT's David Lauter wrote.

The Guardian also notes that Clinton has something new to worry about:

Sanders won 54% of the Latino vote, according to the sample data, compared to Clinton’s 43%. That is a worrying result for Clinton, who has staked her campaign on the promise of winning minority voters.

Some Latino voters, particularly younger people and low-wage workers, appeared to be opting for Sanders in the final weeks of the campaign. In the final 48 hours of the campaign, the Clinton camp ramped up a negative push against Sanders, questioning his commitment to immigration reform and claiming he neglected communities in his three decades in public office.

On Twitter, Sanders thanked the people of Nevada for "the support they have given us and the boost that their support will give us as we go forward."

"I am very proud of the campaign we ran," he said. "Five weeks ago we were 25 points behind and we ended up in a very close election."

Interesting...

The Fight Between Bernie Sanders And Hillary Clinton Is Officially Super Ugly

A former executive director of the congressional Joint Economic Committee on Thursday accused columnist Paul Krugman and four prominent Democratic economists of dishonestly smearing an academic in order to score political points for Hillary Clinton.

The dispute, which is ostensibly over the ultimate cost of Bernie Sanders' economic agenda, is more than a simple war among wonks. It demonstrates that elite economists -- not merely paid campaign operatives -- are fueling the ugly escalation of hostilities between major factions of the Democratic Party as the presidential primary continues.

To explain the costs and benefits of his Medicare-for-all health care plan, $15-an-hour minimum wage, gender pay equity, increased infrastructure spending and other programs, the Sanders campaign has touted an analysis performed by University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Gerald Friedman. 

Earlier this week, four economists -- Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Laura D’Andrea Tyson -- wrote an open letter accusing Friedman of making "extreme claims" in that study that "undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda." Krugman then published multiple blog posts citing the letter as evidence that the Sanders campaign was engaging in "fantasy" and "voodoo."

The problem with these condemnations, according to former [Joint Economic Committee - js] JEC Executive Director James Galbraith, is that none of the economists involved in the fracas actually crunched any numbers to show why Friedman's study was supposedly such a sham. Galbraith now teaches economics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Refuse to Choose Between Apple and the FBI

When Democratic town hall host José Díaz-Balart asked Sanders, “Whose side are you on?” Sanders replied: “Both.”

“I am very fearful in America about Big Brother. And that means not only the federal government getting into your emails or knowing what books you’re taking out of the library, or private corporations knowing everything there is to know about you in terms of your health records, your banking records, your consumer practices,” Sanders said.

“On the other hand, what I also worry about is the possibility of another terrorist attack against our country. And frankly, I think there is a middle ground that can be reached.”

Clinton called the situation a “difficult dilemma.” She discussed some of the main concerns Apple has “about opening the door, creating what they call a backdoor into encryption.” And she pointed out that the capability could be abused by authoritarian regimes like “the Chinese, Russian, Iranian governments” who want the same kind of access.

But she concluded with a favorite law enforcement talking point: that the smart people in America can surely solve this problem and find a way to help the FBI access encrypted communications with a little brainstorming and teamwork. “As smart as we are, there’s got to be some way on a very specific basis we could try to help get information around crimes and terrorism,” she said. Technologists refer to this as the “magic pony” solution.

Wall Street Analyst Says Hillary Clinton Would be the Best President for Health Care Investors

Amid a tense battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over competing visions for health care, a leading Wall Street analyst has put out a report saying that Clinton would be the best candidate for health care investors.

In a report titled “Healthcare: Our 2016 Outlook,”Jeffrey Loo of S&P Capital’s IQ Healthcare Equity Research writes that Clinton should be the preferred choice for the industry because she will preserve the Affordable Care Act and be unable to pass meaningful drug reform legislation.

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From the Bureau of Wrist-Slapping Judges:

CEO Behind West Virginia’s Historic Chemical Spill Gets 1 Month In Prison

The former president of the company that contaminated drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians has been sentenced to one month in prison — the minimum sentence allowed for the crimes at hand.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail’s Ken Ward Jr. reported the sentencing of Freedom Industries’ former president Gary Southern on Wednesday. In addition to one month of prison time, Southern was also given a $20,000 fine for charges related to the January 2014 spill. Under federal guidelines, the recommended sentence was 24 to 30 months and a fine of up to $300,000.

“This defendant is hardly a criminal,” U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston said after handing down the sentence, according to Ward. “I stand by that statement.”

In August of last year, Southern pled guilty to environmental crimes, including violating a Clean Water Act permit and negligent discharge of a pollutant. That pollutant, a coal-cleaning chemical called crude MCHM, spilled from one of the company’s rusty, neglected tanks into the Elk River in January 2014, contaminating drinking water for 300,000 people. More than 100 people sought medical treatment for issues they believed were related to coming in contact with contaminated water.

Climate experts urge leading scientists' association: reject Exxon sponsorship

Leading researchers have called on the world’s largest association of earth and space scientists to reject sponsorship from ExxonMobil, because of the oil company’s record of funding climate denial.

In a letter made available to the Guardian, climate scientists James Hansen (formerly of Nasa), Michael Mann (Penn State), Kerry Emanuel (MIT) and more than 100 other researchers said they were deeply troubled by the “well-documented complicity of ExxonMobil in climate denial and misinformation”.

The scientists urged the American Geophysical Union to reject funding from Exxon, as a matter of scientific integrity. The AGU’s annual meetings are among the largest of their kind, drawing about 25,000 scientists.

Exxon is under criminal investigation in New York and California for misleading investors and the public about the dangers of climate change. ...

The AGU said in a blogpost that it would review Exxon’s current activities, and take up the issue at a board meeting in April. Last year, the association decided there was no reason to cut financial connections with the oil company.

Fiji: devastation across the islands in the wake of super cyclone Winston

University of Chicago professors urge fossil fuel divestment over climate change fears

More than 250 professors at the University of Chicago have called on the school to fight climate change by ridding itself of fossil fuel holdings – a gesture that would have exceptional resonance from the former home of Barack Obama and alma mater of current presidential contender Bernie Sanders.

In a symbolic show of solidarity with student activists, professors urged the elite private university to purge its $7.6bn endowment of coal, oil and gas companies, citing the “universal and existential” threat posed by climate change.

The petition, which was made available to the Guardian, was endorsed by professors from more than 50 departments, in all representing about 10% of faculty.

“We believe that profiting from these industries conflicts with the paramount social value of avoiding significant and permanent degradation of our planet that, if left unchecked, will adversely affect all of us, personally and as an institution,” the petition said.

Student leaders of the Stop Funding Climate Change campaign have been pressing the university to dump its fossil fuel holdings as part of the rapidly growing divestment movement.

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Also of Interest

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

Bernie Sanders and the Depressing Reality of Populism

Krugman and His Gang’s Libeling of Economist Gerald Friedman for Finding That Conventional Models Show That Sanders Plan Could Work

United States On Path to Becoming Major Exporter of Natural Gas Despite Climate Impacts

Five Questions for CIA Director John Brennan

Is Obama About to Nominate an Exxon Lawyer to the Supreme Court?

Slouching Down a March of Folly

Albert Woodfox speaks after 43 years in solitary confinement: 'I would not let them drive me insane'

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A Little Night Music

Joe Simon - Farther On Down the Road

Joe Simon - Drowning In The Sea Of Love

Joe Simon - Trouble In My Home

Joe Simon - Bring It On Home To Me

Joe Simon - No Sad Songs

Joe Simon - The Whoo Pee

Joe Simon - Get Down (Get Down On The Floor)

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