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This evening's music features Chicago blues singer and slide guitarist Johnny Littlejohn. Enjoy!

“You know, that is one of the consequences of the weak sense of responsibility of the press. The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments. It makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted.”

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

News and Opinion

Glenn Greenwald skewers the mainstream fake news purveyors:

Why Has Trust in Media Collapsed? Look at Actions of WSJ, Yahoo, Business Insider and Slate.

Last week, we published documents that definitively debunked and disproved a claim which numerous media outlets had circulated and affirmed for years: that Edward Snowden lied about where he was during his first 11 days in Hong Kong. ... The same day our story was published, the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage – who had previously spent weeks documenting that this claim about Snowden never had any journalistic basis to begin with – confirmed the authenticity of the new documents. ...

[O]nly one of the media outlets that published what is now a significant and documented falsehood – Brazil’s Folha – has even acknowledged these new documents. In Folha’s case, they did so lamely and grudgingly: rather than add an editor’s note or correction to their original story by reporter Igor Gielow (which still stands uncorrected), they published a short news article about these new hotel documents, which merely noted that I claim that these new documents “resolve a mystery” about Snowden. The Folha article also neglects to note that they were one of the outlets originally publishing the false story. But at least they said something.

That stands in stark contrast to all the U.S. outlets that published this falsehood and yet, 10 days later, have said literally nothing, continuing to allow what they now know is a factually false story to remain online uncorrected. They have simply refused even to address or acknowledge this new evidence. That includes the newspaper that first printed this falsehood and then re-published it most frequently – the Wall Street Journal – but also outlets such as Business Insider, Yahoo News and Slate, as well as [former CIA and NSA chief Michael] Hayden, [MSNBC’s Joy Ann] Reid, and most amazingly, [WSJ op-ed writer] Edward Jay Epstein, whose book aggressively features this fraud.

That journalists and editors at these outlets are well-aware of these new documents proving the falsehood of their stories is beyond question. ...

If you publish serious claims without any basis that mislead readers, and then refuse to acknowledge new evidence that disproves your original claims – all because you dislike the people you originally smeared with falsehoods too much to correct your error or because you hope the embarrassment will disappear faster if you don’t admit error – why should anyone view you as being different than Macedonian teenagers or “alt-right” conspiracy sites? What are the cognizable differences?

U.S. War Footprint Grows in Middle East, With No Endgame in Sight

The United States launched more airstrikes in Yemen this month than during all of last year. In Syria, it has airlifted local forces to front-line positions and has been accused of killing civilians in airstrikes. In Iraq, American troops and aircraft are central in supporting an urban offensive in Mosul, where airstrikes killed scores of people on March 17.

Two months after the inauguration of President Trump, indications are mounting that the United States military is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames.

Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama. On display are some of the first indications of how complicated military operations are continuing under a president who has vowed to make the military “fight to win.” ...

And they coincide with the settling in of a president who has vowed to intensify the fight against extremists abroad, and whose budgetary and rhetorical priorities have indicated a military-first approach even as he has proposed cuts in diplomatic spending.

To some critics, that suggests that much more change is to come, in difficult situations in a roiled Middle East that have never had clear solutions.

Robert Malley, a former senior official in the Obama administration and now vice president for policy at the International Crisis Group, said the uptick in military involvement since Mr. Trump took office did not appear to have been accompanied by increased planning for the day after potential military victories.

Amnesty: Hundreds of Iraqi Civilians Killed in U.S. Airstrikes After Being Told Not to Flee Mosul

Gosh yes, it might be hard to avoid casualties when you are dropping 500 bombs a week on a single city.

U.S. military says difficult to avoid Mosul casualties

A senior U.S. general said on Wednesday it will be difficult to maintain "extraordinarily high standards" to avoid civilian casualties in Mosul, even as the U.S. military begins a formal investigation into an explosion in the Iraqi city that is believed to have killed scores of civilians.

The U.S. military has acknowledged the U.S.-led coalition probably had a role in the March 17 explosion but said Islamic State also could be to blame.

Local officials and eyewitnesses say as many as 240 people may have been killed in the Al-Jadida district when a huge blast caused a building to collapse, burying families inside. ...

The comments about standards by Votel are likely to cause concern. Human rights groups already are slamming the U.S. military for an increase in the allegations of civilian casualties in recent weeks.

Amnesty International has said the high civilian toll in Mosul suggested U.S.-led coalition forces had failed to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths.

U.S. Generals Warn of More Civilian Casualties, As ISIS Wages Desperate Fight in Mosul

The close-quarter fighting between Iraqi forces and militants using human shields and booby-trapped houses to slow their advance is making it harder to avoid endangering more civilians, a top U.S. military commander said Wednesday.

“I believe that as we move into these urban environments, it is going to become more and more difficult to apply an extraordinarily high standard” for preventing civilian casualties, “but we will try,” head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, told members of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee.

But Votel stressed that the basic rules of engagement for U.S. airstrikes has not changed in recent weeks, and American forces always try and avoid civilian casualties.

U.S.-trained Iraqi forces — often in touch with American advisors nearby — are calling for air support every day inside Mosul, and American and and coalition aircraft are hitting dozens of targets a day. Given relatively new rules that allow U.S. commanders to approve strikes more quickly than they had in the past, the numbers of bombs falling are hitting record highs for the 31-month U.S.-led air campaign.

Syrian refugees: more than 5m have now fled their country, says UN

The number of refugees who have fled Syria has topped five million people for the first time since the civil war began six years ago, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

Half of Syria’s 22 million population has been uprooted by a conflict that has now lasted longer than the second world war, the figures released by the UNHCR show, with 6.3 million people who are still inside the country’s borders forced from their homes. ...

A surge in violence in Aleppo, as government forces backed by Russian airstrikes retook Syria’s second city at the end of 2016, resulted in 47,000 people fleeing to neighbouring Turkey, it said. Camps for internally displaced people close to the Turkish border also hold those who have fled the fighting in northern Syria.

The latest arrivals into Turkey mean the number of Syrians who have fled the country stands at more than five million, four years after the UNHCR announced that one million people had fled.

Yemen: Trump Expands U.S. Military Role in Saudi War as Yemenis Brace for Famine

CENTCOM chief: 'Vital US interests at stake' in Yemen

As the White House is reportedly weighing deeper military involvement in the Yemeni civil war alongside Middle Eastern allies, America’s top commander in the region told Congress “there are vital U.S. interests at stake” in the fight.

Army Gen. Joseph Votel told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the U.S. does not want Yemen to be used as a sanctuary for attacks against the U.S. and allies or for militants to choke off the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb strait, which runs past Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula as well as Djibouti and Eritrea on the Horn of Africa.

Iona Craig on What Really Happened When U.S. Navy SEALs Stormed a Yemeni Village, Killing Dozens

Trump administration drops human rights conditions to sell fighter jets to Bahrain

The Trump administration has told Congress it plans to approve a multibillion-dollar sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain without the human rights conditions imposed by the Obama administration.

If finalised, the approval would allow the Gulf island to purchase 19 of the jets from Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp, plus improvements to other jets in Bahrain’s fleet. Though Congress has opportunities to block the sale, it is unlikely it will act to do so, given the Republican majority’s strong support.

The decision on Wednesday is the latest signal that the Trump administration is prioritising support for Sunni-led countries seen as critical to opposing Iran’s influence in the region, ahead of human rights issues that President Barack Obama had elevated.

Under Obama, the US withdrew approval before the deal was finalised because it said Bahrain had not taken steps it had promised to improve human rights.

US state department official charged with accepting bribes from Chinese spies

A US state department official has been arrested and charged in a federal court after allegedly accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of payments and gifts from Chinese spies in return for information.

Candace Claiborne appeared in court in Washington DC on Wednesday charged with lying to the FBI and concealing frequent contacts with two Chinese intelligence officials over several years. Claiborne, a 60-year-old administrative official with a top secret security clearance, is accused of receiving an Apple laptop, an iPhone and thousands of dollars in cash from the Chinese officials, despite privately acknowledging that they were “spies”. An unidentified relative of Claiborne also allegedly received gifts and benefits from the Chinese officials under the scheme, and was even protected from a police investigation when he allegedly “committed a serious crime” while studying in China in August 2013.

“Claiborne used her position and her access to sensitive diplomatic data for personal profit,” Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement on Wednesday. Claiborne faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted. In an unsealed criminal complaint filed to federal court, prosecutors said that Claiborne had admitted passing information to the Chinese officials but insisted that it was always unclassified.

To Serve AT&T and Comcast, Congressional GOP Votes to Destroy Online Privacy

Clarifying events n politics are often healthy even when they produce awful outcomes. Such is the case with yesterday’s vote by House Republicans to free internet service providers (ISPs) – primarily AT&T, Comcast and Verizon – from the Obama-era FCC regulations barring them from storing and selling their users’ browsing histories without their consent. The vote followed an identical one last week in the Senate exclusively along party lines.

It’s hard to overstate what a blow to individual privacy this is. Unlike Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google – which can track and sell only those activities of yours which you engage in while using their specific service – ISPs can track everything you do online. ...

It’s hardly rare for the U.S. Congress to enact measures gutting online privacy: indeed, the last two decades have ushered in a legislative scheme that implements a virtually ubiquitous Surveillance State composed of both public intelligence and military agencies along with their private-sector “partners.” Members of Congress voting for these pro-surveillance measures invariably offer the pretext that they are acting for the benefit of American citizens – whose privacy they are gutting – by Keeping Them Safe™.

But what distinguishes this latest vote is that this pretext is unavailable. Nobody can claim with a straight face that allowing AT&T and Comcast to sell their users’ browser histories has any relationship to national security. Indeed, there’s no minimally persuasive rationale that can be concocted for this vote. It manifestly has only one purpose: maximizing the commercial interests of these telecom giants at the expense of ordinary citizens. It’s so blatant here that it cannot even be disguised.

That’s why, despite its devastating harm for individual privacy, there is a beneficial aspect to this episode. It illustrates – for those who haven’t yet realized it – who actually dominates Congress and owns its members: the corporate donor class.

Paraguay fears dictatorship as president moves to amend constitution

After months of behind-the-scenes preparations, Paraguay’s president, Horacio Cartes, has moved to amend the constitution to allow him to be re-elected in 2018, prompting warnings that the country where Alfredo Stroessner ruled for more than 30 years is once again sliding towards dictatorship.

Members of the governing rightwing Colorado party – which has held power for all but four of the past 70 years – joined with several opposition legislators to propose changes to the senate’s procedural rules, a precursor to introducing a re-election bill after a similar attempt was narrowly defeated in August. ...

On Tuesday, riot police and elite troops sealed off the small South American country’s congress. Inside, legislators traded punches and fierce insults, and – after the speaker of the house delayed a vote until Thursday – a pro-Cartes senator seized a microphone, proclaimed himself senate president, and steam-rolled through the changes with a show of hands. A vote on re-election itself is expected to be passed in the coming days.

Opposition parties and dissident Colorados have promised to resist moves towards re-election, decrying a “coup d’etat” and the imposition of a “dictatorship”. Polls suggest that nearly 80% of Paraguayans oppose re-election via constitutional amendment, although some favour a more gradual constitutional reform that would eventually allow re-election.

Sinixt First Nation wins recognition in Canada decades after 'extinction'

When Annie Joseph died in the 1950s, she had been the last known member of the Sinixt First Nation in Canada for more than a decade – and with her death, the country’s government declared the band extinct. But some 60 years later, the Sinixt have won an unprecedented court victory to have their existence recognized in Canada.

The provincial court hearing, which began last autumn in the city of Nelson, British Columbia, stemmed from charges laid against Rick DeSautel, who lives on a reservation in Washington state, just south of the Canada-US border. For years, DeSautel had regularly crossed into Canada to hunt. In 2010, after he killed an elk some 40 miles north of the US border, conservation officers charged him with hunting without a licence and hunting as a non-resident.

DeSautel took his case to court, arguing that as a member of the Sinixt First Nation – whose land straddled parts of Canada and the US – he had been exercising his right to hunt in the traditional territory of his ancestors. The Crown countered that the Sinixt First Nation ceased to exist in 1956. This week the court sided with DeSautel, acquitting him of all charges and recognising that the Sinixt – who were gradually pushed into the American part of their territory more than a century ago – still have rights in Canada.

Republicans are ready to invoke the nuclear option to get Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court

Senior aides to Republican and Democratic senators are saying they expect Republicans to invoke the “nuclear option” rule change in order to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed as the ninth Supreme Court justice next week.

“It’s a virtual certainty at this point,” a senior aide to a GOP Senator told VICE News, citing Democratic resistance.

The rarely used procedure would allow the Senate to change its usual rules to allow confirmation of a justice with a simple majority. At the moment, a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee can only be overcome with 60 votes, which would currently require eight Democrats to vote yes. Democrats changed the filibuster rules in 2013 to require only 51 votes for other judicial and Cabinet positions but maintained the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees.

The Supreme Court just paved the way for Texas to potentially overturn dozens of death sentences

Texas death row inmate Bobby Moore has been trying to convince the state that he’s intellectually disabled for 14 years. At the age of 20, he was sentenced to death for shooting and killing an elderly grocery store clerk during a failed robbery. And after years of legal battles, the Supreme Court finally stepped in.

In a 5-3 decision Tuesday, the High Court found deep flaws in Texas’ standard for determining intellectual disability in death penalty cases, sending Moore’s case back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for reassessment. The ruling also opens the door for dozens of other death row inmates in the state to challenge their sentences, according to Jordan Steiker, director of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas. ...

According to the majority Supreme Court opinion, at 13, Moore couldn’t understand how the days of the week and the seasons worked. He couldn’t tell time or comprehend the measurement system either. Teachers, his father, and other students called him stupid because he couldn’t read or write. And after failing the ninth grade and dropping out of school, he was kicked out of his house and forced to live on the street and search for food in trash cans.

In 2014, a Texas trial court found that Moore couldn’t be executed because he met the definition of intellectually disabled under the updated American Association of Intellect and Developmental Disability guidelines — not the 2004 standard the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was using. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the trial court’s finding in 2015 and ruled that Moore wasn’t intellectually disabled — and therefore, could be executed. That’s when the Supreme Court stepped in.

In its Tuesday decision, the Supreme Court ruled the 2004 standard was invalid, returning Moore’s case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for reconsideration of his intellectual disability. While the justices differ about who should decide the standard for intellectual disability — either scientists or judges and juries — all eight agree that Texas’ standard is unacceptable.

Keiser Report: Lethal Economic Shocks

Immigration crackdown enables worker exploitation, labor department staff say

Undocumented workers are refusing to cooperate with US Department of Labor (DoL) investigations due to deportation fears, in some cases even declining to accept back wages owed to them and running away from staff who show up at their workplace, according to agency employees and internal emails.

Multiple current and former DoL employees told the Guardian that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric have caused panic among exploited undocumented workers across industries, preventing labor officials from conducting investigations and enforcing employment laws.

The lack of cooperation by immigrant workers threatens to disrupt a key function of the labor department, which is supposed to operate independently from immigration authorities. The federal government has long claimed that undocumented workers will not risk deportation if they speak up about violations or give the DoL personal information so they can collect stolen wages.

But as the Trump administration has increasingly instilled fear and anxiety in immigrant communities, the DoL’s Wage and Hour Division has struggled to communicate with undocumented workers, according to two DoL sources, who described an atmosphere of low morale and frustration within the agency. As a result, it is becoming easier for employers to mistreat and underpay workers, said the DoL employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

Dreamer goes free

After nearly two months of court battles, Daniel Ramirez Medina will soon walk free, but his case’s future — and what it means for the thousands of other people in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, or DACA— remains uncertain.

Ramirez, who immigrated illegally to the United States as a child and later received protection under the DACA program, was granted bond by a Seattle-area immigration court Tuesday afternoon, according to a statement by his legal team. The team’s spokesperson did not know exactly when Ramirez, who has no criminal record, will be released from detention.

But the fact that Ramirez had to have an immigration court hearing may actually be a loss for his legal team, who had originally sought to keep the case in federal district court. In a brief filed in early March, his lawyers argued that Ramirez is not fighting deportation but an unconstitutional arrest and detention. So federal district court, not immigration court, is the only place that can judge his case’s constitutional complications — and potentially set precedent for the 750,000 other DACA recipients in the U.S.

Following a March 8 hearing, a magistrate judge recommended the case stay in federal district court, and Chief Judge Ricardo Martinez is still deciding if that will happen. But in a Friday ruling, Martinez found that even if Ramirez’s arrest and detention were found likely to be unconstitutional, the federal district court still wouldn’t have the authority to release him.

So Ramirez’s legal team hastily arranged the hearing. “Daniel has been in detention for almost two months,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a member of Ramirez’s legal team, in a statement. “We are relieved that he will be released and look forward to arguing the merits of this case in federal court.”

Senators vow Trump-Russia inquiry will be bipartisan and independent

The leaders of the Senate intelligence committee have pledged that their investigation of Russian interference in last year’s presidential election will be independent and bipartisan, as a bitter dispute continues to cloud a similar inquiry in the House of Representatives.

In a good-humoured and tactile show of unity on Wednesday, Republican senator Richard Burr and his Democratic counterpart Mark Warner told reporters that they owe it to America, and the world, to “follow the intelligence wherever it leads”. Their first public hearing takes place tomorrow, with former NSA chief Keith Alexander being the most prominent witness.

Burr, the committee chairman, initially deflected questions about alleged collusion between Trump’s associates and Moscow, insisting: “We would be crazy to try to draw conclusions from where we are in the investigation.” ...

Warner gave an insight into the extent of the covert Russian operation and said it was important to put the public on alert because of a fundamental threat to democracy, in the US and abroad.

This included reports of “upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers, which are then called a botnet. They can then generate news down to specific areas … in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving – whoever your vendor may have been – ‘Trump versus Clinton’, but instead ‘Clinton is sick’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from some source’. Fake news.”

RT & Sputnik blamed for interfering in Google search results

If you are following the Trump-Russia hysteria, this is an indispensable article for pointing out the holes in the Democrats' circumstantial case of unsubstantiated, trumped-up oppo-research arguments. Here's the intro:

The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate

An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp’s contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it was Hillary Clinton’s.

And, awareness of this activity doesn’t require you to spin conspiracy theories about what may or may not have been said during some seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case, you have open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.

Indeed, you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, in his opening statement at last week’s public hearing on so-called “Russia-gate.” Schiff’s seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia followed the script prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump. ...

Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports had numerous other problems, including the inability of a variety of investigators to confirm key elements, such as the salacious claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton’s mysterious benefactors who were financing Steele’s dirt digging and who have kept their identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now threatening the survival of Trump’s embattled presidency.

Senate Intel Committee May Interview Ex-UK Spy Christopher Steele

The Senate Intelligence Committee is in talks to interview Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who compiled the dossier that alleges a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, three sources with direct knowledge told NBC News.

Steele, however, remains concerned about his safety and is not inclined to leave London. He is also concerned about how he might be treated by the Trump administration, according to the sources.

Climate change: China calls US 'selfish' after Trump seeks to bring back coal

Chinese state media has lambasted Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back many Obama-era environmental regulations, with a state-run tabloid saying that: “No matter how hard Beijing tries, it won’t be able to take on all the responsibilities that Washington refuses to take.”

In an editorial highly critical of Trump’s retreat on environmental regulation, the Global Times made it clear Beijing was uncomfortable taking over leadership of the fight against climate change and could not fill the vacuum left by the US.

“Western opinion should continue to pressure the Trump administration on climate change. Washington’s political selfishness must be discouraged,” the editorial said. “China will remain the world’s biggest developing country for a long time. How can it be expected to sacrifice its own development space for those developed western powerhouses?”

China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, followed by the US, and Chinese leaders firmly agree climate change is a real threat. ... China is both the worlds largest exporter of renewable energy, and at the same time one of the leading exporters of coal-fired power plants

Trump gave the coal industry a gift this week. Here's what it cost.

The coal industry has shrunk considerably since 2008. Total U.S. coal production is down by one-quarter, according to the Energy Information Administration, due to low-cost natural gas. But coal companies also blame President Obama’s climate regulations, so the industry concentrated its political giving in 2016 even more heavily than usual on Republicans. Of the $13.7 million donated by companies and their executives, just 3 percent went to Democrats, down from 9 percent in 2012. Coal company executives gave $240,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign, compared to just $2,819 to Hillary Clinton. ...

In return, the coal industry got two things it has been wanting: rolled-back emissions limits on coal-fired power plants and reopening coal mining on public lands with low-cost leases. Those industry priorities were addressed in two policies Trump announced Tuesday: repealing the Clean Power Plan, which would have regulated carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, and lifting the year-old moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal land.

Environmentalists and corporate accountability activists had argued that the coal leasing timeout, initiated last year, was long overdue, but Western coal companies that extract mainly from federal land were unhappy with it. The federal government charges far below market rates for coal extraction leases. It also didn’t factor in the cost of climate change. Using the government’s own estimates for those costs, Greenpeace calculated in 2014 that coal leases had already cost the public between $52 billion and $530 billion during the Obama administration. “It’s welfare for coal,” says Diana Best, Greenpeace’s senior climate and energy campaigner. Environmental groups had sued the administration to force a reevaluation of the coal leasing program. ...

Tuesday’s executive orders are just some of Trump’s pro-coal policies. In February, Trump signed a bill repealing the EPA’s Stream Protection Rule, which would have stopped coal companies from dumping strip mining detritus in waterways. He is expected to name coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, a former aide to climate-science denier Sen. James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, as the second-ranking official at EPA. And Trump’s pledge to conduct a review of other Obama-era regulations of coal products such as smog and coal ash may result in more favors to the industry.

South Australia to get $1bn solar farm and world's biggest battery

A huge $1bn solar farm and battery project will be built and ready to operate in South Australia’s Riverland region by the end of the year. Battery storage developer Lyon Group says the system will be the biggest of its kind in the world, boasting 3.4 million solar panels and 1.1 million batteries. ...

Premier Jay Weatherill commended the Lyon Group for the Riverland initiative, which will enable 330mw of power generation and at least 100mw of storage. “Projects of this sort, renewable energy projects, represent the future,” he said. The premier said the company is among several to express interest in building a 100mw battery as part of the South Australia government’s power plan announced this month, to be financed by a new $150 million renewable technology fund.

Also of Interest

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

Democrats Against Single Payer

I Spent a Week Trying To Make the Broadband Lobby Answer a Simple Question About Selling Your Data

Comcast-Funded Civil Rights Groups Claim Low-Income People Prefer Ads Over Privacy

Snoops may soon be able to buy your browsing history. Thank the US Congress

Israel Hits Back Against Boycott

Inequality Update: Who Gains When Income Grows?

A Little Night Music

John Little John - 29 Ways

John Little John - Johnny's Jive

John Little John - I Can't Stay Here

John Little John - Guitar King

John Littlejohn & Carey Bell - Shake your moneymaker

Johnny Little John - I Need Lovin

Johnny Little John - The Sun Is Shining

John Littlejohn - Treat Me Wrong

John Littlejohn - Can't Be Still

Johnny Littlejohn - Keep on running