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This evening's music features r&b singer Nappy Brown. Enjoy!

“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”

-- James Madison,

News and Opinion

The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos

[According to a document obtained by The Intercept about In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm,] among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant. ...

The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media. ...

Dataminr directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to visualize and quickly spot trends on behalf of law enforcement agencies and hedge funds, among other clients.

Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments.

PATHAR’s product, Dunami, is used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “mine Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media to determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization,” according to an investigation by Reveal.

TransVoyant, founded by former Lockheed Martin Vice President Dennis Groseclose, provides a similar service by analyzing multiple data points for so-called decision-makers. ...

Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.

Microsoft Says U.S. Is Abusing Secret Warrants

"We appreciate that there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine.”

With those words, Smith announced that Microsoft was suing the Department of Justice for the right to inform its customers when the government is reading their emails. ...

Secret government searches are eroding people’s trust in the cloud, Smith wrote — including large and small businesses now keeping massive amounts of records online. “The transition to the cloud does not alter people’s expectations of privacy and should not alter the fundamental constitutional requirement that the government must — with few exceptions — give notice when it searches and seizes private information or communications,” he wrote. ...

These requests, though signed off on by a judge, qualify as unconstitutional searches, the attorneys argue. It “violates both the Fourth Amendment, which affords people and businesses the right to know if the government searches or seizes their property, and the First Amendment, which enshrines Microsoft’s rights to talk to its customers and to discuss how the government conducts its investigations — subject only to restraints narrowly tailored to serve compelling government interests,” they wrote.

Swedish prosecutors argue for upholding Assange arrest warrant

Swedish prosecutors still believe an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be upheld, they said on Thursday in reply to the Stockholm District Court that will decide whether to lift the warrant.

Lawyers for Assange asked the court in February to overturn the warrant, following a statement by a U.N. advisory panel that his stay in Ecuador's London embassy amounts to "arbitrary detention".

Vindication: Protesters Who 'Put Arms Trade on Trial' Acquitted

Protesters who had blocked the road outside one of the world's largest arms fairs were cleared of charges on Friday, with the judge finding "credible and largely unchallenged evidence" of wrongdoing at the weapons expo.

In mid-September while the DSEI (Defence Security Equipment International) was underway in London, the five men and three women were charged with wilful obstruction of a highway for attempting to stop delivery of equipment to the arms fair.

"They said they had acted to stop the sale of weapons to regimes accused of human rights abuses, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Israel," the Guardian reports.

A statement released in November 2015 by the protesters reads, in part,  "Whilst outside the Excel Centre we were being detained and arrested by police, inside businessmen prepared to sell weapons designed to torture, maim and kill, for corporate profit." They added, "we invite you to question why it is us—and not the war makers and profiteers —that are on trial."

As the Independent reported, "District Judge Angus Hamilton accepted the defendants' argument that they had tried to prevent a greater crime from occurring by blocking a road to stop tanks and other armored vehicles from arriving at the exhibition center."

“[There is] clear, credible and largely unchallenged evidence from the expert witnesses of wrongdoing at DSEI and compelling evidence that it took place in 2015," the Independent reports Hamilton as saying.

"It was not appropriately investigated by the authorities. This could be inferred from the responses of the police officers, that they did not take the defendants' allegations seriously."

Judge acquits DSEi protestors,
accepts argument they had tried to prevent greater crime from occurring. https://t.co/x9dDmFxHV1 #StopDSEI

— Jill Segger (@quakerpen) April 15, 2016

US Commandos, Warplanes Deployed to Philippines

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today announced the US will be escalating its “regular rotations” of troops and warplanes into the Philippines, though despite a growing number of troops in the country at any given time, he insisted this was not an increased “permanent footprint.”

300 Air Force commandos, along with a number of additional US combat aircraft are heading to the Philippines this go around, with an eye on escalating tensions with China over maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Syria Rebel Group Offers ‘Equal’ Transition Govt, Without Assad

Pro-Saudi Syrian rebel group the High Negotiations Committee (HNC) has announced they are willing to share the transitional government “equally” with members of the current Syrian government, so long as President Assad is excluded.

In addition to Assad, the HNC insists they will not accept any veto power from the government, nor anyone else who is a “criminal,” though they didn’t make clear exactly what that means.

The Assad government has already rejected the idea of him being excluded outright, and given the size disparity probably won’t entertain an equal representation for the HNC, a rebel faction which only includes some smaller territorial holdings.

A New Nuclear Arms Race Feared as U.S. & Others Aim to Build Smaller, "More Usable" Nukes

Kerry: US Would’ve Been Justified Shooting Down Unarmed Russian Jets

US officials are still on about yesterday’s incident, in which a pair of unarmed Russian jets flew within 30 feet of a US destroyer in the Baltic Sea, something US officials described as a “simulated attack” that proved Russia’s “unprofessional” nature.

Today, Secretary of State John Kerry declared the flights “provocative” and insisted the USS Donald Cook would’ve been well within its rights to shoot down the planes under the “rules of engagement” they are placed under.

Which is a stunning claim, since the USS Donald Cook is deployed in the peaceful Baltic, off the coast of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and the US and Russia are not at war. That they have rules of engagement allowing them to unilaterally attack Russian aircraft at all seems unwise.

Will the Pentagon Ever Be Able to Be Audited?

In 1990 Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required every federal agency to be auditable. Since then every agency has complied—except for the Department of Defense. Instead, there’s been a saga of audit readiness plans and billions spent to upgrade out-of-date financial systems—plans and upgrades the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated in 2010 wasted nearly $6 billion. After significant pressure from Congress, particularly then-Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set a 2014 deadline for all components and the DoD as a whole to have auditable records of incoming budget resources, referred to as Statements of Budgetary Resources (SBR). ...

The Department failed to meet its goal for 2014, and as it stands, no DoD component is likely to meet it in the next year. “I think we are on the right track,” DoD Comptroller Mike McCord said last winter. “[But] it will take a couple more years.”

Some in Congress are sick of waiting. Both the Senate and the House have bipartisan bills that would hold the Department of Defense accountable for continuing to fail to be auditable. In the House, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Michael Burgess (R-TX) have a bill, H.R. 942, that would reduce by .5 percent a federal agency’s discretionary budget authority for a fiscal year if that agency’s financial statement for the previous fiscal year cannot be audited by an external independent auditor.  In the Senate, Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced legislation, S. 327, that could penalize the Department with the loss of reprograming and transfer authority for funds if it not audit-ready by 2017. Losing these authorities would deprive DoD of a beloved tool because it allows the Department to move money around in between congressional appropriations.

ACLU Sues Bureau of Prisons Over Missing Torture Documents

The ACLU sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on Thursday for documents related to its inspection of a CIA black site in 2002. According to the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, which was declassified in 2014, officers from the BOP conducted a detailed assessment of the infamous detention center known as “COBALT,” or the “salt pit,” near Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

After the ACLU filed a request for those documents in 2014, the bureau twice denied having any. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the government cannot deny the existence of documents it holds outright; instead, the government must notify the requester that it is withholding documents, and reference specific “exemptions,” like national security.

The ACLU lawsuit alleges that either the bureau conducted an inadequate search, or is illegally denying the existence of documents.

This is an interesting article worth a full read. You may or may not agree with the conclusions, which I'll excerpt here, but the history is well described.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

... Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

North Carolina reels from business backlash to anti-LGBT law

Since North Carolina’s anti-LGBT so-called “bathroom bill” was signed into law, the Greater Raleigh Convention Center has lost six firm bookings worth an estimated $2.4m, according to its president and CEO, Denny Edwards. Another 16 bookings worth an estimated $44m are also in jeopardy.

“There’s going to be some long-term effect,” said Edwards, “and there’s a concern within North Carolina about the greater impact and how much damage this is doing to the wider economy.” For Raleigh’s conference business, he says, “it’s really causing chaos.” ...

On Tuesday, Governor Pat McCrory backpedalled slightly, calling for changes to the law and signing an order that gave state employees non-discrimination protections. But thus far, there’s little sign that McCrory’s tweak has changed the backlash to the law. ...

“The backlash continues because people understand the executive orders haven’t changed and have not addressed the problems with the legislation,” Sarah Preston of the North Carolina ACLU told the Guardian. She called it “a poor effort to save face”.

Much solidarity w/ those risking arrest at #DemocracySpring. Volunteer for actions this week https://t.co/0KqapdTGO2 pic.twitter.com/De47HkZFtF

— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 13, 2016

600+ Arrests in Nation's Capital Aimed at Rapidly 'Shifting Political Weather'

Though you wouldn't know it by tuning in to mainstream media, more than 600 people have been arrested in the nation's capital since Monday as part of Democracy Spring, the mass civil disobedience campaign aimed at getting big money out of politics, restoring voting rights, and reviving democracy.

Close to 100 demonstrators were taken into custody and released on Wednesday, a day dedicated to the struggle for racial justice, as roughly 1,000 non-violent protesters looked on. Also Wednesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) endorsed the movement.

"We are proud to stand with our allies calling for a democracy that is open and accountable, and a government that puts the needs of hard working people ahead of big corporations," said CPC co-chairs Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). "The issues raised by these progressive groups are the defining issues of our time."

Pepper-sprayed students outraged as UC Davis tried to scrub incident from web

The University of California at Davis is being accused of censorship after quietly seeking to hide web references to a widely reported incident in which police sprayed student activists from the then nascent Occupy movement four years ago.

The photograph and video went viral across the world, prompting a major backlash against the California university and its chancellor Linda PB Katehi, who was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful activists Students are once again calling for Katehi’s resignation.

Details of the attempt to remove references of the pepper-spraying incident were revealed by the Sacramento Bee, which reported that UC Davis hired a communications firm on a $15,000-a-month contract with a goal of eradicating “references to the pepper spray incident on Google”, including “negative search results” for Katehi.

It's Official: The Chicago Police Department Has a Serious Racism Problem

The Chicago Police Department is plagued by racism and many of its officers show "no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color," a panel tasked by the city's mayor to probe department practices declared on Wednesday. ...

"The deaths of numerous men and women of color whose lives came to an end solely because of an encounter with CPD became a rallying cry," the task force wrote in the report. "Far too many of our residents are at daily risk of being caught up in a cycle of policing that deprives them of their basic human rights."

Chicago Police Department spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said the department had not yet seen the recommendations from the task force, but that the superintendent was awaiting its findings. The task force said the department's own data supported the view among residents that it's officers have "no regard to the sanctity of life" when it comes to people of color.

Of the 404 police shootings between 2008 and 2015, 74 percent involved black people being shot or killed, 14 percent involved Hispanics, 8 percent involved whites, and 0.25 percent involved Asian-Americans. The task force said police used Taser stun guns on suspects in about the same proportions and that blacks were disproportionately subjected to traffic stops.

"The community's lack of trust in CPD is justified," the report concluded.

Juan González: Clinton Has "Really Distorted" What Happened When NY Daily News Interviewed Sanders

Squabbles, Sarcasm, and Side-eye as Sanders and Clinton Square Off at New York Debate

It took less than 10 minutes for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to completely lose their cool and start yelling over each other at the Democratic debate at Brooklyn's Navy Yard on Thursday night.

Fresh off a heated week of campaigning, during which both campaigns upped attacks on each other, the candidates went head to head over a series of critical issues that have reached a peak in recent days, including Wall Street reforms, gun violence, the minimum wage, and whether each are qualified to be president. It was a show of spiking tension ahead of the high-stakes New York primary on April 19, and neither candidate held back.

It was clear from the beginning that the CNN debate moderators were angling for some mudslinging, after they launched straight into a question directed at Sanders about Clinton's judgment and qualifications. The Vermont senator began with brief niceties noting Clinton "of course" has the "experience and intelligence" to be president, before pivoting to slam what he saw as poor judgment over her vote for the Iraq War and taking "tens of millions" from special interests through her super PACs. ...

Immediately after the debate, Sanders boarded a charter straight to Rome, where he will spend the next two days at a conference held by the Vatican. Clinton will remain in New York, taking full advantage of an extra two days of campaigning in the state while her rival is out of town.

Pope Francis and Bernie Sanders: unlikely allies in the fight for equality

The Vatican seems like an unlikely pit stop for a US politician trying to wage a political revolution. But with just four days to go before the critical New York primary, Bernie Sanders’ detour to Rome, where he will participate in a Vatican-sponsored conference on economic and social issues on Friday, represents an opportunity for the Vermont senator to align himself with a man whose scathing criticisms of capitalism and income inequality closely resemble his own: Pope Francis.

No meeting with the pope is planned, a Vatican spokesman confirmed. But the trip gives the leftwing candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who is aiming for an unlikely upset over frontrunner Hillary Clinton, a chance to shine among Catholic voters, especially white Catholics who are considered the pre-eminent swing voters of any presidential election.

“Clearly this pope is very popular and I think that Sanders is correct in saying his views are closer to the pope than most other candidates’ views,” said Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “Everyone likes to wrap themselves in the aura of some popular person, so this isn’t a big surprise.” ...

While it might have been considered unimaginable for a progressive candidate like Sanders to seek approval from a pope over the past few decades – given the church’s vehement opposition to same-sex marriage, contraception and abortion – Sanders’ move shows that Francis’s popularity (nine in 10 American Catholics have a favourable view of him) and outspoken advocacy for the poor and disenfranchised, and his environmentalism, are considered by Sanders to be more important than other ideological differences. Whether voters might be swayed by the appearance of Francis’s approval for Sanders – he has also openly questioned whether Donald Trump is a true Christian – is more difficult to predict. ...

According to the conference agenda, Sanders will be delivering remarks on the “urgency of a moral economy”.

Democratic Debate: Clinton Dangerously Trumpets Obama’s Record

Early in last night’s debate, when Sanders raised the fact that she and a Super Pac supporting her have taken $15 million from Wall Street, Clinton had this to say: 

“Well, make — make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama. President Obama…You know, let me tell you why. You may not like the answer, but I’ll tell you why. President Obama had a super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.  So this is — this is a phony — this is a phony attack that is designed to raise questions when there is no evidence or support, to undergird the continuation that he is putting forward in these attacks.”

This is a highly dangerous quagmire of quicksand for Hillary Clinton to stand on. It will only work if she can turn out millions of low information voters in the remaining state primaries. Unfortunately for her, Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing tens of thousands of newly engaged voters to his high information rallies and speeches and millions more to his high information campaign web site.

What has remained unsaid in this debate cycle is that Dodd-Frank is the antithesis of financial reform with teeth and provided no real cops on the beat. Dodd-Frank is, in fact, the very evidence that Hillary says doesn’t exist to show that Wall Street bought itself a boatload of cozy deals from Obama in exchange for its cash windfall to his campaign.

When Obama took office in January 2009, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. At that point, Obama had two years to use his bully pulpit to enact meaningful legislation and put real cops on the beat. What did Dodd-Frank do instead? It gave increased authority to the Federal Reserve, the very regulator whose crony ties to Wall Street had prevented it from reining in the abuses that led to the 2008 crash. Just how ludicrous that structure was came into focus in 2012 when Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was sitting on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as his bank was being investigated by the Fed for gambling in derivatives with depositor funds and losing $6.2 billion. ...

Not only did Dodd-Frank fail to end future taxpayer bailouts of the mega banks, as stated just this week by the Vice Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Thomas Hoenig on the occasion of three of the five largest banks in the country flunking their regulatory plans to unwind in a crisis without taxpayer assistance, but the largest banks have moved beyond the frauds perpetrated during the crisis to serial new frauds — like rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor, and manipulating physical commodities markets and electric markets. In May of last year, for the first time in U.S. history, two of the nation’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, admitted to felony counts related to rigging the foreign currency markets.

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

Why Bill Clinton is Full of Shit

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been making the rounds to defend his policies while in office to support his wife’s run for President. The close working relationship that he and Hillary Clinton have infers a symbiosis that other ‘First Couples’ wouldn’t be jointly held accountable for. And in contrast to the oft offered argument that Mrs. Clinton isn’t responsible for her husband’s policies, she has taken responsibility (links below) for her role in developing, promoting and implementing the omnibus crime bill of 1994 that led to the massive buildout of the carceral state (mass incarceration) and for her use of the term ‘super-predator’ as racist slander against Black children.

When Bill Clinton was recently confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors he reiterated the talking points that he (and Hillary) used in 1994, that drug ‘gang’ violence was real, that his (and Hillary’s) interest was humanitarian, that many Blacks supported the crime bill and that the growth in incarceration rates for people of color was an unintended consequence. Left unsaid was that the crime bill was but one part of the Clinton’s opportunistic ‘dog-whistle’ strategy, that the policies tied to more than three centuries of racial repression in the U.S. and that regardless of whether the Clintons fully thought through the implications, they were willing to gamble with the lives of millions of Black and Brown youth for political gain.

Contemporary political rhetoric ‘works,’ to the extent that it does, by erecting walls between ideas, acts and policies that might otherwise be plausibly related. Basic physical security, as in freedom from violence for one’s person, family, neighbors and community, is a human right in a most basic sense. It is also the human right that has been most tightly circumscribed throughout American history. The American ‘story,’ as in the history written by the dominant culture, has been of White America ‘under attack’ from hostile indigenous peoples and inner-city ‘criminals’ whereas the overwhelming preponderance of actual violence has been committed against the indigenous population, kidnapped Africans held in slavery and their descendants.

Bill Clinton's crime bill destroyed lives, and there's no point denying it

Here is an actual headline that appeared in the New York Times this week: Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law. ...

As historical interpretations go, this one is pretty non-controversial. Everyone who has heard about the “War on Drugs” knows that what we now call “mass incarceration”, the de facto national policy of locking up millions of low-level offenders, began long before 1994. And yet similar stories reporting that non-startling fact are now being published all across the American media landscape. That mass incarceration commenced before 1994 is apparently Big News.

Why report a historical fact that everyone already knows? The answer is because former president Bill Clinton, the man who called for and signed the 1994 crime bill, is also the husband of the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic voters are having trouble squaring his draconian crime bill with his wife’s liberal image.

That might be the reason so many of these stories seem to unfold with the same goal in mind: to minimize Clinton’s moral culpability for what went on back in the 1990s. ... All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.

Another interesting fact. Two weeks after Clinton signed the big crime bill in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry. ... For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for deliverance from out of Glass–Steagall’s house of bondage. For another class of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North American Free Trade Agreement. As I have written elsewhere, some got the carrot, others got the stick.

[Go read the rest of Thomas Frank's article to see why the mass incarceration of black people was certainly not an unintended consequence of the 1994 law that Bill Clinton signed and Hillary "Superpredator" Clinton flacked for. - js]

Bernie Sanders: Treating Palestinians with Respect & Dignity Does Not Make Me Anti-Israel

Bernie Sanders Hires Outspoken Critic of Occupation as Jewish Outreach Director

Simone Zimmerman, the Bernie Sanders campaign’s newly hired national
Jewish outreach coordinator
, is quite familiar with the American Jewish establishment.

She is used to fighting against it.

During the 2014 Gaza war, Zimmerman was one of the leaders of a group of young Jews that held regular protest vigils outside the offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, reading the names of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the conflict. ...

She opposes Israel’s occupation, wants Hillel to allow participation by groups that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, is against Jewish federation funding for Israeli projects in the West Bank and wrote favorably of the efforts of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-BDS group, to get “international corporations to stop profiting off human rights abuses.” (The Anti-Defamation League has called JVP one of America’s top 10 anti-Israel groups.)

Bernie Sanders Suspends Jewish Outreach Director Who Wrote 'Fuck You, Bibi'

On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders named Simone Zimmerman as his national Jewish outreach coordinator two days ago. Two days later, following reports that she had published profanity-laced messages online critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his campaign announced late on Thursday that it had suspended her.

"She has been suspended while we investigate the matter," Sanders spokesperson Michael Briggs told the New York Times.

Zimmerman has not been meek in her criticism of Israeli policies, or of its prime minister. The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon published an article on Wednesday, highlighting some of the aggressive language Zimmerman used to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Facebook post last March.

"Bibi Netanyahu is an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative asshole," she wrote, referring to the prime minister by his nickname. "Fuck you, Bibi, for daring to insist that you legitimately represent every fraction of the Jewish world." ...

That Sanders, who would be the nation's first Jewish president, had tapped a Jewish organizer with a history of criticizing Israel and challenging Jewish institutions came as no surprise to Daniel Sieradski, the head of Jews For Bernie, a New York PAC supporting the senator's presidential bid.

"Sanders isn't just the anti-establishment candidate, he's the anti-Jewish establishment candidate," Sieradski remarked. "Bernie is seen as being refreshingly honest about the topics Jewish voters care about."

Sanders' Climate Change Plan Endorsed by Economists Studying Carbon Tax Initiatives

As Exxon Tries to Duck Subpoenas, Groups Keep Urging Clinton to Reject Big Oil

Amid the presidential election and with renewed public scrutiny over its role in the decades-long suppression of climate science, oil giant ExxonMobil is going to court in Texas over a subpoena issued by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands in an attempt to avoid answering questions.

Exxon on Wednesday filed a petition in Fort Worth after Attorney General Claude Earl Walker and his counterpart from Massachusetts announced they would join the effort, along with those concurrently ongoing in New York and California, to investigate what exactly the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change.

It's unlikely the company will be successful in blocking the subpoena, writes InsideClimate News, one of the outlets that helped exposed the fossil fuel industry's collusion in the coverup. ...

On Thursday, activists released a letter urging the Clinton Foundation to return the more than one million in donations it has received from Exxon.

"ExxonMobil is a company that has been fighting efforts to address the climate crisis for over 25 years," the letter states. "This includes spending $30 million to support groups whose basic purpose is to encourage doubt and denial about the facts of climate change. Given that [the Clinton Foundation] does work to fight climate change, we are writing to urge you to return the more than $1 million that your foundation has received from ExxonMobil in recent years."

Landmark Climate Lawsuit: Meet the Youth Activists Suing the U.S. Government & Fossil Fuel Industry

Hottest March on Record as Earth Keeps Hurtling Past Temperature Milestones

Earth is on a roll. 

Adding "yet another month to a new mountain chain of extreme global temperature peaks," March 2016 was the warmest since at least 1891, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

Not only that, but, as February did, March broke the previous record by the greatest margin yet seen for any month. Compared to the 20th-century average, March was 1.07°C hotter across the globe, according to the JMA figures, while February was 1.04°C higher.

If April also sets a monthly record—and there's no reason to think it won't—"the Earth will have had an astonishing 12 month string of record-shattering months," writes Andrew Freedman for Mashable.

The JMA's findings are likely to be confirmed by forthcoming reports from the UK Met Office as well as NASA and NOAA, whose satellite data indicates last month was the warmest March in records dating to 1979.

Scientists have pinned the record warmth to a combination of human-caused climate change and this year's strong El Niño event.

Superbugs on Track to Kill More People Than Cancer

Antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" are on track to kill more people than cancer, the UK's chief financial minister will warn Thursday.

By 2050, Chancellor George Osborne will say, antimicrobial resistance could claim the lives of as many as 10 million people a year globally unless global action is taken. By comparison, the World Heath Organization (WHO) estimates that 8.2 million people die each year from cancer. ...

"We have to dramatically shift incentives for pharmaceutical companies and others to create a long-term solution to this problem, with new rewards, funded globally, that support the development of new antibiotics and ensure access to antibiotics in the developing world.

"To achieve a long-term solution we also need better rapid diagnostics that will cut the vast amounts of unnecessary antibiotic use," his statement reads.

Food safety and environmental watchdogs in the U.S. have pointed to such use as part of the problems with industrial agriculture.

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, for example, said in 2013, "Right now, 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are used for industrial agriculture, and most of these drugs are routinely fed to animals to make them grow faster and compensate for filthy conditions. This is done to help the meat industry execute on its highly consolidated business model for profit. And the American public pays through antibiotic-resistant infections."

How the EPA Allowed Oil and Gas Companies to Contaminate Our Drinking Water

Also of Interest

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

Big Bank 'Living Wills' Are a Failure — and Point to a Bigger Problem

Statement from Senator Warren on Rejection of Banks' "Living Wills" by Fed and FDIC

Warren, Sanders Sponsor Bill Going After TurboTax, Complexity of Tax Filing

Barack Obama Never Said Money Wasn’t Corrupting; In Fact, He Said the Opposite

Occupy Wall Street rises up for Sanders

Nuit debout protests are confirmation that France’s political system is broken

The Bernie Sanders Miracle: American Crowd in Brooklyn Cheers Palestinian Dignity

On This Anniversary of Rwandan Genocide, Bill Clinton’s Words Ring Hollow

Coral Crisis: Great Barrier Reef Bleaching Is "The Worst We've Ever Seen"

Scientists Are Watching in Horror as Ice Collapses

A Little Night Music

Nappy Brown - Piddily Patter Patter

Nappy Brown - Cried Like A Baby

Nappy Brown - Coal Miner

Nappy Brown - Love Locks

Nappy Brown - Cherry Red

Nappy Brown - Deep Sea Diver

Nappy Brown - Skidy Woe