Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features r&b and doo wop singer, Ben E. King. Enjoy!

“With every mistake, we must surely be learning.”

-- George Harrison

News and Opinion

Your daily irony supplement. A heaping helping today:

With Obama in Cuba, Pro-Torture Pundits Suddenly Concerned With Human Rights

While American human-rights hypocrisy is nothing new, a string of Bush-era, pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo pundits expressing indignation at Cuba’s human rights failings was still remarkable. ...

As a former Bush speechwriter, Marc Thiessen helped shape the messaging around “enhanced interrogation” that provided the Orwellian phraseology the administration hid behind while torturing hundreds of detainees. ...

Today, however, in the Washington Post opinion section, Thiessen suddenly discovered his inner human rights advocate, quoting an “activist” saying of Obama’s trip:

This will prolong the life of the dictatorship, is worsening the human rights situation there, marginalizing the democratic opposition and compromising US national security.

...

Rich Lowry. The National Review editor was another Bush-era torture advocate; The National Review’s contempt for basic human rights and legal norms continues, with the non-ironic article “Guantánamo Bay Detainees: Why Not Shoot Them?” published just last month. But Lowry has considerable concern for oppressed people in Cuba who aren’t on a US military base:

Obama’s Che Moment: President Obama’s Cuba Visit Ignores Continued Human Rights Abuses

[Click the link above for details about torture-supporting assholes Jonathan Alter, John Bolton and Bill O'Reilly and their sudden discovery of human rights concerns. - js]

Trump: Torture Could Have Prevented Brussels Attacks

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer today, Republican front-runner Donald Trump said it was possible that today’s terror attacks in Belgium could’ve been prevented with a sufficient amount of torture, saying he believes they could’ve made captured ISIS suspect Saleh Abdesalam “talk a lot faster” by torturing him.

“If he would’ve talked you might not have had the blow up,” Trump insisted, saying the US needs to “change our laws” to a “almost equal basis” with what ISIS does to its own detainees, saying he wants waterboarding as a “minimum form of torture” and also advocates “far worse.”

Frank Barat in Belgium: More War is Not the Answer to Brussels Bombings

In Argentina, mothers of 'disappeared' protest Obama's marking of 1976 coup

Argentina’s main human rights groups have announced they will boycott Barack Obama’s visit to the country, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of a military coup that led to the deaths of thousands of people.

Martial law was imposed on 24 March 1976, ushering in seven years of military rule during which Argentina’s generals made their victims disappear by throwing them alive from helicopters into the freezing waters of the Atlantic. ...

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger gave thinly veiled approval to Argentina’s military for the use of violence against leftwing activists. At a 1976 meeting with Argentina’s Admiral César Guzzetti, Kissinger advised the regime that “the quicker you succeed, the better” – words which the junta took as a green light for a campaign of state terrorism. ...

Both the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who continue to search for missing victims and babies born to their imprisoned daughters, have announced they will not be present at the ceremony.

Aware of the anti-US sentiment in Argentina, Obama is expected to announce the opening of US military and intelligence files related to the dictatorship, which will be added to the approximately 4,000 pages of diplomatic files already declassified by former US president Bill Clinton. ... But the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo are not convinced. “I don’t believe there will be anything in those documents – they always black out the names and the important parts,” said Nora Cortiñas of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

Amid West's Silence, Groups Call for Saudi Arms Embargo to Stem Carnage in Yemen

Human rights groups and others call for arms embargo, accuse US, UK, France, and Canada of complicity in war crimes

The flow of weapons to Saudi Arabia over the past year has "facilitated appalling crimes," according to leading international human rights groups, which argue that the United States and other western nations are thus complicit in the killing of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

To mark the nearly one year since the Saudi-led coalition began bombing Yemen, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are renewing the call for an international arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, while singling out the U.S., the United Kingdom, and France for their "complicity in the unlawful airstrikes."

Since March 25, 2015, when the Arab state coalition began its air assault, Amnesty estimates that more than 3,000 civilians including 700 children have been killed and at least 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes. The United Nations puts the death toll much higher, estimating as many as 6,200 civilians killed by the coalition fighting.

The anniversary of the bombing campaign falls less than two weeks after perhaps the deadliest attack yet, during which fighter jets bombed a market in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah, killing about 120 people including more than 20 children.

As Intercept journalist Mohammed Ali Kalfood wrote on Tuesday, after a series of bombings killed roughly 30 people in Brussels, Belgium: "While the horrific terrorist attacks against civilians in Europe receive extensive media coverage, the U.S.-supported bombings of civilians in Yemen get scant attention."

James Lynch, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Amnesty International, declared in a statement, "the international community’s response to the conflict in Yemen has been deeply cynical and utterly shameful." ...

"The irresponsible and unlawful flow of arms to the warring parties in Yemen has directly contributed to civilian suffering on a mass scale," Lynch continued. "It’s time for world leaders to stop putting their economic interests first, and for the UN Security Council to impose a full, comprehensive embargo on transfers of arms for use in Yemen."

Massive US airstrike in Yemen kills 'dozens' of people, Pentagon says

A massive US airstrike in Yemen has killed what the Pentagon estimates is “dozens” of people, the second such mass-casualty strike the US military has undertaken this month.

The two strikes, killing more than 200 people at what the Pentagon described as terrorist training camps, diverged so sharply from the previous years’ worth of relatively low-casualty strikes that observers speculated US policy might have quietly changed.

Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, announced late Tuesday that the US had bombed a mountain redoubt in Yemen used by al-Qaida’s local affiliate, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He said it was a “training camp” used by “more than 70 AQAP terrorists”.

An independent assessment of the actual impact of the strike, to include a full casualty total and civilian impact, was not immediately available. The Pentagon did not provide further detail of where in Yemen the alleged camp was located.

Reporting (or Not) the Ties Between US-Armed Syrian Rebels and Al Qaeda’s Affiliate

A crucial problem in news media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been how to characterize the relationship between the so-called “moderate” opposition forces armed by the CIA, on one hand, and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front (and its close ally Ahrar al Sham), on the other. But it is a politically sensitive issue for US policy, which seeks to overthrow Syria’s government without seeming to make common cause with the movement responsible for 9/11, and the system of news production has worked effectively to prevent the news media from reporting it fully and accurately.

The Obama administration has long portrayed the opposition groups it has been arming with anti-tank weapons as independent of Nusra Front. In reality, the administration has been relying on the close cooperation of these “moderate” groups with Nusra Front to put pressure on the Syrian government. The United States and its allies–especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey–want the civil war to end with the dissolution of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed by US rivals like Russia and Iran.

Reflecting the fact that Nusra Front was created by Al Qaeda and has confirmed its loyalty to it, the administration designated Nusra as a terrorist organization in 2013. But the US has carried out very few airstrikes against it since then, in contrast to the other offspring of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State or ISIS (Daesh), which has been the subject of intense air attacks from the US and its European allies. The US has remained silent about Nusra Front’s leading role in the military effort against Assad, concealing the fact that Nusra’s success in northwest Syria has been a key element in Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic strategy for Syria. ...

But a review of the coverage of the targeting of Russian airstrikes and the role of U.S.-supported armed groups in the war during the first few weeks in the three most influential US newspapers with the most resources for reporting accurately on the issue—the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal–reveals a pattern of stories that tilted strongly in the direction desired by the Obama administration, either ignoring the subordination of the “moderate” groups to Nusra Front entirely or giving it only the slightest mention.

[See article for extensive review of media coverage and slant. - js]

Preferred Jihadists and the Crisis in Syria

This is an excellent article, here's a teaser to get you started...

America's Post-Democratic Military

In the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a strange new military has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force that prides itself on its warrior ethos rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal.   As such, it’s a military increasingly divorced from the people, with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans (adulatory as they may feel toward its troops).  Abroad, it’s now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense.  In Washington, it has become a force unto itself, following its own priorities, pursuing its own agendas, increasingly unaccountable to either the president or Congress.

Three areas highlight the post-democratic transformation of this military with striking clarity: the blending of military professionals with privatized mercenaries in prosecuting unending “limited” wars; the way senior military commanders are cashing in on retirement; and finally the emergence of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a quasi-missionary imperial force with a presence in at least 135 countries a year (and counting). ...

Events since Desert Storm in 1991 suggest that the all-volunteer military has been more curse than blessing.  Partially to blame: a new dynamic in modern American history, the creation of a massive military force that is not of the people, by the people, or for the people.  It is, of course, a dynamic hardly new to history.  Writing in the eighteenth century about the decline and fall of Rome, the historian Edward Gibbon noted that:

“In the purer ages of the commonwealth [of Rome], the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”

As the U.S. has become more authoritarian and more expansive, its military has come to serve the needs of others, among them elites driven by dreams of profit and power.  Some will argue that this is nothing new.  I’ve read my Smedley Butler and I’m well aware that historically the U.S. military was often used in un-democratic ways to protect and advance various business interests.  In General Butler’s day, however, that military was a small quasi-professional force with a limited reach.  Today’s version is enormous, garrisoning roughly 800 foreign bases across the globe, capable of sending its Hellfire missile-armed drones on killing missions into country after country across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and possessing a vision of what it likes to call “full-spectrum dominance” meant to facilitate “global reach, global power.”  In sum, the U.S. military is far more powerful, far less accountable -- and far more dangerous.

Iran: US Not Following Through on Sanctions Relief

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei complained that the US is not following through with promised sanctions relief, saying many of the sanctions were only removed “on paper,” and that the US banking sanctions are still creating huge obstacles.

US banks are still largely forbidden from doing business with Iran, which wouldn’t in and of itself be a big deal since Iran’s deals are mostly with European and Asian companies anyhow, but international banks not based in the US are still fearing US punishment for processing the deals.

Gideon Levy: Americans "Are Supporting the First Signs of Fascism in Israel"

Probe launched into Pentagon handling of NSA whistleblower evidence

A federal watchdog has concluded that the Pentagon inspector general’s office may have improperly destroyed evidence during the high-profile leak prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake.

The Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with protecting federal employees who provide information on government wrongdoing, said its review of the handling of the Drake case had determined that there is “substantial likelihood” that there had been “possible violations of laws, rules or regulations” in the destruction of the evidence. ...

The Office of Special Counsel’s review reached the conclusion there was enough evidence to investigate that allegation.

The likely outcome of the Justice Department inspector general inquiry is unclear. The expected probe of top Pentagon inspector general officials was described as administrative, a process that could lead to reprimands, security clearances suspensions or firings, said people familiar with the inquiry. They asked to remain anonymous because the probe has not been made public.

The referral renews broader questions about the federal government’s dedication to protecting intelligence community or Defense Department employees who blow the whistle on wrongdoing.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said allegations of poor treatment of whistleblowers “might be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Government keeping its method to crack San Bernardino iPhone 'classified'

A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned.

The Justice Department made headlines on Monday when it postponed a federal court hearing in California. It had been due to confront Apple over an order that would have forced it to write software that would make it easier for investigators to guess the passcode for an iPhone used by San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook.

The government now says it may have figured out a way to get into the phone without Apple’s help. But it wants that discovery to remain secret, in an effort to prevent criminals, security researchers and even Apple itself from reengineering smartphones so that the tactic would no longer work.

Currently, the Justice Department is still testing to make sure the method doesn’t damage or erase data stored on devices before using it on Farook’s phone. The technique does successfully allow the government to get inside locked iPhones, the Guardian has confirmed.

Fired Texas trooper pleads not guilty to perjury charge in Sandra Bland's death

A fired Texas trooper pleaded not guilty to a charge of misdemeanor perjury stemming from his arrest last summer of Sandra Bland, a black woman who was later found dead in a county jail.

Brian Encinia entered his plea on Tuesday during a brief appearance before a Waller County judge as protesters gathered outside the courthouse in Hempstead, about 50 miles north-west of Houston. ... Encinia’s attorney, Larkin Eakin, said after Tuesday’s arraignment that the perjury charge “represents a fundamental misunderstanding of law enforcement procedures”. He said Encinia acted properly during the July 2015 traffic stop and subsequent arrest of Bland.

A county grand jury indicted Encinia in January on the perjury charge for saying in an affidavit that he removed a combative Bland from her car after stopping her near Houston for a minor traffic violation so he could conduct a safer traffic investigation.

Video of the stop shows Encinia drawing his stun gun and telling Bland, “I will light you up!”

The People of Puerto Rico vs. the Hedge Funds Goes to the Supreme Court

Puerto Rico Appeals to US Supreme Court for Help Digging Out of Debt

Puerto Rico asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday for permission to restructure the debt of its financially struggling public utilities under a court-supervised regime similar to Chapter 9 bankruptcy laws used by U.S. cities such as Detroit and Stockton, California.

In addition to potentially giving the commonwealth a better chance at repaying some of its $70 billion debt, the case "tests, at a fundamental level, how much authority the island of more than 3.5 million people has to manage its own governmental affairs," Lyle Denniston wrote at SCOTUSblog last week.

What's more, the case could chip away at hedge funds' stranglehold on the island. As journalist David Dayen wrote for the Winter 2016 issue of The American Prospect: "Puerto Rico is just the latest battlefield for a phalanx of hedge funds called 'vultures,' which pick at the withered sinews of troubled governments. In Greece, Argentina, Detroit, and now Puerto Rico, vultures have bought distressed debt on the cheap, and then used coercion, threats, and legal action to secure a massive windfall, compounding the effects on millions of citizens." ...

Jubilee USA has described the situation in Puerto Rico as a "humanitarian crisis" and opposes further austerity or cuts to help pay down the territory's debt. To that end, thousands of college students from the University of Puerto Rico approved a three-day, full-campus shutdown last week to protest recent austerity measures.

Why the U.S. isn’t prepared for the next recession

Are we ready for the next recession? ...

Ben Spielberg, a research analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, put it bluntly: “The short answer is no, we’re not.” The long answer, Spielberg continued, “is still no. But we can be if we take the right lessons from our historical experience and start to prepare for it now.”

But that’s a very big “if.”

In fact, Spielberg on Monday released a paper co-authored with economist Jared Bernstein arguing for a stronger set of automatic stabilizers, the programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps that kick in when economic conditions pressure incomes downward.

Spielberg and Bernstein also propose stronger, more direct government action in the next downturn, such as job creation programs that would subsidize hiring or help states offset the price of their own initiatives, or directly create and fund national service jobs. ...

That’s a tall order from a federal government that’s so far [from] being able to govern wisely that it had to build deep cuts into a budget in order to force itself to take action to avoid them — and still failed.

Snapshot of a broken system: How a profitable company justifies laying off 1,400 people & moved their jobs to Mexico

A viral video of 1,400 workers at a unionized Carrier air conditioner factory in Indianapolis being told their jobs would be outsourced to Mexico has become a searing example of the destructive power of globalization. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have highlighted the video, which surfaced earlier this year, and vowed to fight these corporate practices. But what most people didn’t understand until a New York Times article this weekend is that Carrier’s air conditioning business has, in fact, been quite profitable.

Last year, Carrier produced a significant chunk of total profits for its parent company, United Technologies. Of $7.6 billion in earnings in 2015, $2.9 billion came from the Climate, Controls & Security division, where Carrier resides. Profits from this division have expanded steadily in recent years, which is not what you’d expect from a unit desperate to cut labor costs. ...

So why would a profitable, growing business need to ship jobs to Mexico? Because their shareholders demanded it.

United Technologies hides behind statements about remaining globally competitive and maintaining its market position. But the truth is that the company felt pressure to boost the stock price, a key measure of executive performance. “Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent,” according to the Times story. Moving jobs from Indiana, where workers get $20 an hour, to Monterrey, Mexico, where they get $2-$3, is a way to grow earnings per share.

Two-out-of-Three Tuesday as Sanders Revolution Proves Resilient Strength

Bernie Sanders proved that his call for political revolution does, in fact, have strength in the western states by winning two out of three contests on Tuesday.

While rival Hillary Clinton met expectations in Arizona's closed primary where she bested Sanders by a margin of 58 to 40 percentage points, Sanders walloped the national frontrunner in open caucuses in both Utah and Idaho with huge margins of nearly 60 percentage points in both states.

According to CNN's figures early Wednesday morning, Sanders won Idaho with 78 percent of the vote compared to Clinton's 21 percent. In Utah, the gap was even larger, with Sanders holding 80 percent of the vote to Clinton's 20 percent.

Clinton claim on small donors is ‘mostly false,’ PolitiFact finds

Following victories in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Illinois, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton thanked her supporters — especially those who have given small amounts of money to her campaign.

“Keep contributing at hillaryclinton.com. Please, please join the 950,000 supporters who already have contributed, most less than $100, because our campaign depends on small donations for the majority of our support,” Clinton said. ...

If one defines “the majority of our support” as dollars, then Clinton is wrong — small donations accounted for 17 percent of all of her individual donations, which is well short of a majority. In fact, the Campaign Finance Institute calculated that a clear majority of the funds Clinton had raised through Jan. 31 from individuals came from donors giving $2,700 — the legal maximum that anyone can give.

On the other hand, the campaign could be right if they define “the majority of our support” as the number of donors. But this calculation isn’t transparent to outside analysis.

“Whenever a politician makes a claim about their average contribution or total number of donors, it’s impossible to independently verify,” said Michael Beckel, a reporter with the Center for Public Integrity.

Clinton said, “Our campaign depends on small donations for the majority of our support.”

The campaign’s best evidence for this isn’t independently verifiable. Otherwise, Clinton is wrong — small donors account for only 17 percent of the dollar amount her campaign has collected from individuals through Jan. 31.

Thomas Frank on the State of the Democratic Party

Bernie Sanders Spoke Up for Suffering Palestinians, but Few in Broadcast Media Covered It

As leading presidential candidates spoke at the Washington gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), promising support and a crackdown on boycotts of Israel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a dissenting speech in Salt Lake City, where he spoke up for suffering Palestinians. It received little broadcast media attention.

As Sanders trails Clinton in delegate count, his campaign has effectively been discounted by major media. ...

A query using the TV Eyes broadcast media search engine found that the text of the speech was mentioned only in a handful of outlets. Unlike the addresses by Clinton and Trump, no major broadcast outlet carried it live. CNN International read a section of Sanders’s prepared remarks in a segment with writer Peter Beinart, a frequent critic of Israeli settlements; Al Jazeera America read a portion of Sanders’s remarks in commentary on the speeches at AIPAC. BBC World played a portion of Sanders’ speech dealing with the need to be friends to both Israel and the Palestinians. Although MSNBC did not cover the speech or its content, Hardball with Chris Matthews featured former U.S. ambassador Marc Ginsberg to explain Sanders’s absence at AIPAC by saying, “Mr. Sanders … has never really extolled his jewishness, much less any support for Israel.”

Something Is Going Seriously Wrong at Arizona Polls Today

Arizona’s primaries aren’t even done yet, and there’s already legal action being taken as a result of incompetence or possibly even intentional sabotage.

Leaders from the Arizona branch of the Democratic Party have confirmed that its lawyers are officially making an inquiry after multiple Democratic voters showed up to the polls only to find that they were listed as independents, Republicans, or had no party affiliation at all. ...

No word has been given as to whether there was a pattern as to which kind of demographics were experiencing this kind of treatment, and no explanation has been given regarding what caused this bizarre error.

“We’ve been getting calls all day from lifelong Democrats who have been registered as independents,” Enrique Gutierrez, communications director for the Arizona Democratic Party, told US Uncut. “One woman even said she’d been registered as a Libertarian.”

Heh, we're working up to the possibility of an election contest between the two most universally reviled candidates ever. Woohoo!

CBS Poll: Trump and Clinton Have Historic Unfavorable Ratings Among Voters

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted between March 17-20, 2016 among a random sample of adults nationwide, 85 percent of which were registered voters, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have the highest unfavorable ratings (57 percent and 52 percent respectively) since CBS first began asking the question in its polls more than three decades ago. ...

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted this past December also found a majority of Americans, 59 percent, do not believe Clinton is “honest and trustworthy.”

The lack of Americans’ confidence in Clinton’s honesty runs far deeper than her suggestion that it stems from some vast right wing conspiracy. ...

America is still struggling to overcome the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, caused by the 2008 Wall Street crash. The country can ill afford a President who does not command the trust and confidence of a majority of its citizens.

Feds defend fracking rule against judicial hold

The Obama administration is fighting in federal court to defend its hydraulic fracturing (fracking) rule, saying a lower court committed a “legal error” when it put the regulation on hold.

Lawyers representing the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are asking the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver to overturn a Wyoming-based court’s decision last year to halt the rule and allow regulators to enforce it.

That judicial injunction stemmed from the arguments from various states and the oil and natural gas industry that Congress has expressly prohibited the federal government from regulating fracking, even on federal and American Indian land, as the BLM did early last year.

“The district court held that Congress has ‘directly spoken to the issue and precluded federal agency authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing not involving the use of diesel fuels.’ That was legal error,” lawyers wrote late Monday in their opening brief in their appeal of the injunction.

A Tale of Two Leaks: Fixed in California, Ignored in Alabama

EIGHT MILE, Ala.—Willa Vassar is convinced her skin is reacting to air pollution from a chemical spill about a half-mile from her home, in a small community outside Mobile. ... The chemical in the spill is tert-butyl mercaptan, an odorant mixed with natural gas to help in the detection of leaks. A class of chemicals, mercaptans made national news after a natural gas storage well in Los Angeles started leaking last October, prompting the evacuation of nearly 6,000 households after people complained of the odor and health issues.

The complaints in California echo those of the residents of Eight Mile: respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, rashes and nosebleeds. Further, Sempra Energy is now the parent corporation to the two companies responsible for the California and Alabama accidents, SoCal Gas and Mobile Gas. They are the most prominent examples of long-term residential exposure to mercaptan. But the similarities end there.

In California, federal, state and local authorities responded vigorously to the leak at the Aliso Canyon facility. The national media has covered the disaster extensively. The governor declared a state of emergency, and California is suing SoCal Gas. Los Angeles County has opened an assistance center for affected residents, offering help with everything from financial reimbursement to counseling services, and it has called for regular monitoring of public health. SoCal Gas has already paid more than $50 million to temporarily relocate people who lived near the leak. State and Congressional representatives have demanded investigations. Federal regulators have indicated they are mulling new rules to regulate gas storage wells like Aliso Canyon, whose leak was recently plugged.

In Alabama, mercaptan leaked from a storage tank into groundwater, after company officials say the tank was hit by lightning. It drew a far milder response. The leak occurred in 2008, but Mobile Gas failed to report its severity to state authorities, according to the news site AL.com. No one was evacuated despite the odor persisting for years and Eight Mile residents reporting continuing health problems. It remains unclear how much mercaptan was released from the leak, and the groundwater and public health in the area are no longer monitored.

The Environmental Protection Agency has deferred to the state of Alabama, because mercaptan is not considered a hazardous material, and the state has said it is satisfied with the remediation Mobile Gas has carried out. ...

To Eight Mile residents and the scientists, lawyers and community organizers who have worked with them, the responses in California and Alabama differ because of who got hurt in each community. The neighborhoods around Aliso Canyon are affluent and largely white, the million-dollar homes belonging to politicians and doctors. The affected area of Eight Mile is mostly black and working class, its trim brick ramblers home to many retirees and people making less than $25,000 a year. Eight Mile residents within a couple of miles of the leak site say they still smell the mercaptan eight years later, and like Vassar, suffer its effects.

People's Water Summit: Women and Girls "Bear Brunt" of Global Crisis

As a new report shows an estimated 650 million of the world's poorest people still lack access to water that is safe to consume and 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation, warriors from the frontlines of this global crisis—many of them women and girls—are gathering in New York on Tuesday to affirm that water is a human right.

The World Water Day event is being billed as an alternative "People's Summit" to the invite-only White House Water Summit also taking place Tuesday, and will "ensure the voices of those directly impacted and working on the ground as advocates on the human rights to water and sanitation are heard," according to organizers. Scheduled to coincide with the the 60th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, sponsors of the panel include Food & Water Watch, the U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN), Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, and WaterAid.

The latter group, an international non-profit headquartered in New York, released a report Tuesday entitled, Water: At What Cost? The State of the World's Water 2016. It finds that in 16 countries, more than 40 percent of the population does not even have access to a basic water facility like a protected well.

In turn, "[p]eople from impoverished, marginalized communities have no choice but to collect dirty water from open ponds and rivers," the report reads, "or spend large chunks of their income buying water from vendors"—in some cases, more than half their family's daily income.

"The price paid by these communities—in wasted income, ill-health, and lost productivity—is extremely high, and has a devastating impact from the family to the national level," WaterAid declares.

Also of Interest

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

A World War has Begun: Break the Silence

WikiLeaks: Hillary Clinton Pushed Mexico's Oil Privatization

AIPAC attendees slam Netanyahu’s racism when they think it’s Trump’s

Government Showdown With Apple Delayed

Ukraine Has Become a Problem Case for the European Union

A Little Night Music

Ben E King - Spanish Harlem

Ben E. King and The Drifters - There Goes My Baby

Ben E. King - That's when it hurts

Ben E King - Young Boy Blues

Ben E. King and The Drifters - I Count The Tears

Ben E. King - I Can't Break The News To Myself

Ben E. King - Save The Last Dance For Me