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This evening's music features Georgia barrelhouse piano player Piano Red, aka Dr. Feelgood. Enjoy!

"Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood."

-- Gandhi

News and Opinion

Donald Trump's foreign policy speech shows: we have no anti-war candidates

Now that it’s increasingly likely that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the two major candidates for president in the general election, voters are once again left without a true anti-war candidate, or even a decisive break from the last decade and a half of disastrous foreign policy. ...

While Trump’s foreign policy seems random and unpredictable (he actually bragged about this), it’s hard to see how Clinton’s approach to war is much better. Clinton has run on a more hawkish foreign policy than most Democrats and Republicans. As many have pointed out, her positions are often more militaristic than anyone else in the race. She is in favor of a no-fly zone in Syria – a euphemism for declaring war on the Assad regime on one side, while also bombing Isis on the other. She was for the Iraq war, the 2011 Libyan war and the Afghanistan surge. She also counts among her friends unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger, and she has neocons already lining up behind her rather than supporting Trump.

This is not to say Trump and Clinton are the same when it comes to foreign policy – there is plenty of legitimate disagreement. Trump’s xenophobic call for a ban on Muslim immigrants and open calls for torture come to mind. But on a lot of issues, like the Isis war, praise for dictators and trillions of dollars in military spending, voters are left with a similar choice on foreign policy as they had in 2012. (Remember: for all Mitt Romney’s bluster and slimy rhetoric, he and Obama basically had the same approach to foreign policy as well.)

Now the only question is which candidate will be elected to continue expanding the $2tn, never-ending war on terror that has already spread across the Middle East.

Geneva talks on Syria: "The latest troubles to hit the talks are hardly surprising"

Syria Peace Talks Failed, Few Realistic Alternatives

With the rebels leaving, the peace process in Geneva is in tatters, and with all factions once again gearing up for offensives, the ceasefire doesn’t look like it will last much longer. Officials say there is no date scheduled for additional talks, and last week officials cautioned it might take a year to make a serious run at another deal.

But what happens next? That’s not at all clear. There were a few alternative proposals raised during the peace talks, but none sound like they’ve got realistic support, and hopes for a serious new push in the near term seem remote. ...

In the near term, the result is likely just more fighting, as while everyone seemed for a time to be sick enough of the civil war to take a break and negotiate, there still isn’t much appetite to compromise on a post-war situation.

Russia Urges UN Security Council to Blacklist Syrian Islamist Groups

Russia has formally proposed that the UN Security Council add Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam to the “blacklist” of Syrian rebel factions considered terrorist organizations, citing each group’s close links to existing terror groups, particularly al-Qaeda.

Jaish al-Islam is a group based around Damascus, with close ties to Saudi Arabia’s hastily assembled “High Negotiation Committee,” which has since presented itself as the exclusive “rebel” group at peace talks. In the area around Damascus, it has worked with both al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and at times reportedly ISIS factions.

Ahrar al-Sham, another group heavily backed by the Saudi government, is part of the Islamic Front, and its leadership has repeatedly presented itself as having close ties to al-Qaeda. The group is not part of the Saudi-backed HNC, however, insisting the bloc doesn’t represent sufficiently “revolutionary” groups.

Airstrike on MSF-backed Aleppo hospital kills patients and doctors

A Syrian hospital backed by Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been destroyed in an airstrike in Aleppo, killing patients and doctors including one of the last paediatricians remaining in the rebel-held part of the city.

MSF said the al-Quds hospital was targeted in an airstrike on Wednesday that killed 14 patients and staff members including at least two doctors, with the toll expected to rise.

The latest attack is part of a broader pattern of systematic targeting of hospitals by the government of Bashar al-Assad, as the humanitarian situation in the divided commercial capital of Syria grows more desperate under intense combat.

Germany: A satirical and controversial poem

Look Who Funds Ukraine's 'Anti-Putin' Internet TV

The best way to raise funds for a media project in Ukraine? Go full-bore anti-Russia to easily woo North American and European governments to give you money.

Kiev-based Hromadske.TV is the symbol of the info wars between Moscow and the Western world, a war that the West claims it is losing to the big guns in Moscow. So worried are the Europeans, Canadians and Americans that the Russians are beating them at their own game –the sexy world of news and entertainment — that they’re funding the company. ...

Who are they? They are the Canada International Development Agency (CIDA); the Embassy of The Netherlands in Ukraine; another Canadian charity called the Ukrainian World Foundation; independent DC-based Pact World; the U.S. Embassy of Ukraine’s Media Development Fund; California based Internews Network; Swiss Cooperation Office and the Swiss International Development Agency; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund is one of the four biggest donors; the Swedish International Liberal Center; Thomson Foundation; the German Embassy of Ukraine and the biggest funder of all, the European Commission’s Ukrainian delegation office.

Email Privacy Bill Passes House Unanimously

The House voted unanimously, 419-0, on Wednesday to bring the law that protects the privacy of Americans’ e-mails into the 21^st century.

The Email Privacy Act would reform the 1986 Email Communications Privacy Act by requiring all federal agencies (with few exceptions) to get a warrant before searching old digital communications stored in the cloud by companies like Google and Facebook.

Study: NSA Surveillance Has Chilling Effort on Internet Browsing

A new study in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found that traffic on Wikipedia articles considered “sensitive” or terror-related plummeted drastically in the immediate wake of revelations about broad NSA surveillance of Internet use.

The research is seen particularly likely to aid an ACLU lawsuit by Wikipedia against the NSA and Justice Department, showing that the nonprofit was indeed harmed by the American government’s increasingly aggressive surveillance schemes.

A study last month from Wayne State University had similarly provided evidence that Americans are increasingly unwilling to express “controversial” views online if they believe those views are likely to be seen by the government.

Obama administration urges states to curb use of solitary confinement

The Obama administration is pressing individual states to join its mission to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in US prisons, in the hope of reining in a practice that is still widespread despite having been denounced as potentially amounting to torture.

The drive from the White House and Department of Justice is tacit recognition that without the cooperation of state corrections departments and legislatures – many of them Republican-controlled – the goal of reducing solitary confinement will remain a pipe dream.

There are as many as 100,000 people in segregated cells in the US, a number that sets the country apart from most of the rest of the world and exceeds the entire prison populations of countries such as the UK, France and Germany.

This year Barack Obama announced far-reaching reforms that would dramatically reduce the use of solitary, or “restrictive housing”, within the federal prison system. He said the practice of placing inmates in tiny cells with virtually no human contact was overused and an “affront to our common humanity”.

Without support at state level, however, he is stymied in his wider ambitions. The figure of 10,000 prisoners held in isolation by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is dwarfed by that of as many as 90,000 inmates kept in similarly harsh conditions in state-run prisons.

Baltimore Police Shot a 13-Year-Old Boy Who Was Carrying a Replica Gun

Baltimore police officers shot a 13-year-old boy in a southeast neighborhood of the city on Wednesday afternoon who was carrying a replica gun.

At a brief news conference, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said that two plainclothes detectives were driving down the street in an unmarked vehicle when they spotted the teenager with what appeared to be a firearm. After identifying themselves as police officers, the boy took off on foot with the apparent weapon in hand.

The chase went on for about 150 yards, Davis said, before one of the officers fired at the boy, wounding him non-fatally. He did not say how many shots were fired or how many times the boy was shot, but said he was shot in his "lower-extremities."

Davis noted that the boy will survive and said that he had "no reason to believe that these officers acted inappropriately in any way," adding that the fake gun was an "absolute identical replica" of a Beretta 92FS semi-automatic pistol.

"He had every opportunity to stop, drop the gun, and comply with the police officer's instructions," Davis said. ...

Local investigative reporter Jayne Miller later tweeted that a witness said that they saw the boy being chased by two men and then spotted the gun, which the officers ordered him to drop. The boy did not point the gun at the officers, according to the witness, but "held it up" while yelling, "It's not real!"

Mark Weisbrot: US actively trying to oust Maduro

Dilma Rousseff admits she may miss out on Olympic Games role

Dilma Rousseff, the embattled president Brazilian president, has acknowledged the possibility that she may not play any official role during the Olympic Games if the senate passes an impeachment motion against her.

The Brazilian parliament’s lower house last week overwhelmingly approved a motion for her impeachment. If the senate follows suit in the next few weeks, Rousseff may have to step down as early as May – three months before the Games start in Rio de Janeiro. She will be at least temporarily replaced by a centre-right administration led by vice-president Michel Temer. ...

Since her election in 2010, the Brazilian president has seen her ratings plummet amid an economic recession and bribery scandal involving the state-run oil company Petrobras. But Rousseff has not been charged with any crime and many are uneasy that she is being impeached on a technicality by opposition politicians who stand accused of far more serious wrongdoing.

The Olympic flame was lit in Greece, at the start of a 15-week journey that will culminate with the 5 August opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro.

Puerto Rico’s Governor Says the Island Will Default on Monday

Puerto Rican officials talked tough ahead of a major debt payment due on Monday, with the U.S. territory’s governor predicting default, and chances slipping for a restructuring deal with creditors.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said “there will be a default on Monday,” adding, “I don’t think there is a deal on the table that avoids a default.”

Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, the island’s primary fiscal agent, owes creditors $422 million on Monday, a payment Garcia Padilla has said the bank cannot afford. The looming default is part of a broader economic crisis in the Caribbean haven plagued by $70 billion in total debt, a shrinking population and a 45% poverty rate.

Yanis Varoufakis: Bailouts of Greece are Pretense for Massive Payout for German and French Banks

Luxembourg Puts Journalist and Whistleblowers On Trial for Ruining Its “Magical Fairyland” of Tax Avoidance

Luxembourg is trying to throw two French whistleblowers and a journalist in prison for their role in the “LuxLeaks” exposé that revealed the tiny country’s outsized role in enabling corporate tax avoidance.

The trial of Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet, two former employees of the international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, and journalist Edouard Perrin began Tuesday. ...

Perrin, a reporter with Premières Lignes Television in Paris, produced the first LuxLeaks reporting. PwC documents were later obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and, together with records from other accounting giants, formed the basis for the 2014 “LuxLeaks” series involving over 80 journalists across the world. ...

The LuxLeaks series exposed Luxembourg as a “magical fairyland” for multinational corporations trying to avoid taxes, and now other countries are trying to shut it down.

The government of Luxembourg made sweetheart deals with over 340 multinational corporations that enabled the companies to claim much of their profits had been generated by Luxembourg subsidiaries, which were then taxed at rates as low as 1 percent.

Former Tax Lobbyists Are Writing the Rules on Tax Dodging

The lobbyists that help special interest groups and wealthy individuals minimize their tax bills are not only everywhere on K Street, they’re literally managing the bodies that create tax law:

• Barbara Angus, the chief tax counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee, became a staff member in January of this year after leaving her position as a lobbyist with Ernst & Young. Angus, registration documents show, previously helped lobby lawmakers on tax policy on behalf of clients such as General Electric, HSBC, and Microsoft, among other clients.
• Mark Warren, a tax counsel for the tax policy subcommittee of Ways and Means, is a former lobbyist for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade group that includes Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Walgreens, and Unilever. Warren, who joined the committee in November of last year, previously lobbied on a range of tax policies, including tax credits and “tax relief.”
• Mike Evans became chief counsel for the Senate Finance Committee in 2014 after leaving his job as a lobbyist for K&L Gates, where he lobbied on tax policy for JP Morgan, Peabody Energy, Brown-Forman, BNSF Railway, and other corporate clients.
• Eric Oman, the senior policy adviser for tax and accounting at the Senate Finance Committee, previously worked for Ernst & Young’s lobbying office, representing clients on tax policy.

A closer look at France's 'Up All Night' movement

A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows

In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism.

The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it. ...

A subsequent survey that included people of all ages found that somewhat older Americans also are skeptical of capitalism. Only among respondents at least 50 years old was the majority in support of capitalism.

Fourteen to Go: Sanders Set on 'Transforming Nation'

Fourteen.

That's how many Democratic presidential nominating contests remain. From Indiana next week to the District of Columbia on June 14—with delegate prizes as large as 546 in California and small as 12 in Guam to be won in between—14 states and territories have yet to hold their respective caucus or primary.

"That's why we are in this race until the last vote is cast," said Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night, following a win in Rhode Island and losses to rival Hillary Clinton in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. ...

"That is why this campaign is going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible," Sanders continued, "to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free, and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change." ...

According to USA Today on Wednesday, Sanders strategist Tad Devine "said Monday that Sanders will arrive at the convention with enough pledged delegates to file minority reports—or dissents from the majority—at the event, which could prolong it by requiring debates on the issues most important to him if the campaigns don't negotiate their differences. Democratic Party rules allow for minority reports at the request of 25% of members on the convention's Platform, Credentials and Rules committees."

Among the issues Sanders wants to tackle at the convention, according to Devine, are voter participation, campaign funding, and the controversial system of superdelegates.

Jill Stein pens open letter to Bernie: Green Party presidential candidate invites Sanders to “cooperate on political revolution”

While overly presumptive Republican presidential candidates are rushing to announce potential vice presidential running mates, one presidential candidate is openly courting the idea of a bipartisan unity ticket.

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, wrote an open letter to Bernie Sanders, asking the Independent Vermont senator to consider ditching his attempt to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for a real “revolution for people, planet and peace” alongside Stein.

Stein, who has long called on Sanders to join forces with her in the interest of their “shared goals,” wrote to Sanders over the weekend: “I invite you to join me in pushing the boundaries of that system to a place where revolution can truly take root.”

“You’ve proven that in today’s rapidly changing America, a populist progressive agenda covered by the media and the televised debates can catch on like wildfire and shake the foundations of a political establishment that seemed invulnerable just a few short months ago,” Stein wrote to Sanders, asking if “in this wildly unpredictable election where the old rules are giving way one by one, can we think outside the box and find new and unexpected ways to synergize beyond obsolete partisan divides?”

Bernie Sanders Will Lay Off 'Hundreds' of Campaign Staff

Bernie Sanders's campaign will lay off "hundreds" of campaign staffers immediately, he told the New York Times on Wednesday, one day after the Democratic presidential hopeful lost four out of five primary state battles to Hillary Clinton and his chances of winning the nomination slipped further away.

"We want to win as many delegates as we can, so we do not need workers now in states around country," Sanders told the New York Times. "So what we are going to do is allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff."

Sanders' chief spokesperson, Michael Briggs, told Politico that the cuts were merely an acknowledgement of a shifting campaign. "This is a process that we've done before of right-sizing the campaign as we move through the calendar," he said.

The campaign will redirect most of its national operations toward California, the Times reported, the most delegate-rich state in the country. California holds its primary on June 7 and carries 546 delegates.

Slavoj Žižek: 'Trump is really a centrist liberal'

... Perhaps inevitably, it was not long before Žižek turned, in his discussion with the Guardian columnist Gary Younge, from rightwing populism in Europe to rightwing populism in the US, and its unavoidable, totemic figure: Donald Trump.

“Read Trump closely – it is difficult to do, I know – and if you extract his total racist and sexist stupidities, you will see that here and there, where he makes a complete proposal, they’re usually not so bad,” said Žižek. “He said he will not totally dismantle universal healthcare, raise the minimum wage, and so on.”

“Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Visit Remote Indigenous Community in Canada

Justin Trudeau will visit a remote Indigenous reserve in Canada on Thursday as part of an upcoming VICELAND documentary, the first such visit for the Canadian prime minister since he took office.

The visit to Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which is located on a man-made island that sits along the Ontario and Manitoba border, comes amid a nationwide outcry over a rash of suicides and deplorable living conditions on reserves across the country.

Even though Shoal Lake 40 sits on the body of water that's the source of Winnipeg's drinking water, the reserve has been on a boil water advisory for two decades and requires the delivery of bottled water. There is no permanent road by which to access the community of around 250 people, and for most of the year, it's reachable only by a rundown ferry or aircraft.

The reserve embodies many of the ongoing health and socioeconomic crises affecting Indigenous peoples in Canada. There are more than 130 drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves across the country, according to the most recent figures from Health Canada. There are currently 28 active states of emergency declared by First Nations communities in Ontario alone because of issues ranging from suicides among young people to housing conditions.

Hawaii's last sugar harvest paves the way for a fight over the land's future

For more than 150 years, the big agricultural corporations that produce sugar have been top dogs in the Maui’s economic life and its political governance. As the industry winds down, a new generation of activists are dreaming big of replacing sugar not only with a new agricultural model but also a new political settlement.

Tiare Lawrence, a native Hawaiian who grew up next to a sugar mill, is an activist who is instrumental in several campaigns fighting what she calls Big Ag – companies such as HC&S and Monsanto. ... “The big agricultural businesses which grew sugar as a mono-crop overthrew our Hawaiian kingdom and they stole a lot of the lands for their crops and the water for their fields. … A lot of families want to return home and farm but they need water to do that, and HC&S still keep most of the water for themselves.”

Recent controversies over diverting water from rural East Maui’s streams, using pesticides, and burning cane fields, which exacerbate respiratory illnesses, have hung over HC&S. But with 36,000 acres of land in the middle of Maui’s fertile saddle, they aren’t planning on going anywhere soon.

The company says it hopes it can still find a way to profit from their land holdings. ...

The post-sugar agricultural vision for Maui is being hotly debated and Monsanto, which is appealing a moratorium on the production of GMO crops on Maui, is thought to be casting an avaricious eye on the 36,000 acres about to come up for grabs. Despite HC&S claims that they are researching diverse agricultural model to replace sugar, the fear among many who see the island’s future as being organic and closer to the traditional Hawaiian concept of Aina (“that which feeds us”) is that Monsanto will end up leasing the redundant fields and growing GMO corn.

The Coming World of "Peak Oil Demand," Not "Peak Oil"

Sunday, April 17th was the designated moment.  The world’s leading oil producers were expected to bring fresh discipline to the chaotic petroleum market and spark a return to high prices. Meeting in Doha, the glittering capital of petroleum-rich Qatar, the oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with such key non-OPEC producers as Russia and Mexico, were scheduled to ratify a draft agreement obliging them to freeze their oil output at current levels. In anticipation of such a deal, oil prices had begun to creep inexorably upward, from $30 per barrel in mid-January to $43 on the eve of the gathering. But far from restoring the old oil order, the meeting ended in discord, driving prices down again and revealing deep cracks in the ranks of global energy producers. ...

Until very recently, it was assumed that the demand for oil would continue to expand indefinitely, creating space for multiple producers to enter the market, and for ones already in it to increase their output. Even when supply outran demand and drove prices down, as has periodically occurred, producers could always take solace in the knowledge that, as in the past, demand would eventually rebound, jacking prices up again. Under such circumstances and at such a moment, it was just good sense for individual producers to cooperate in lowering output, knowing that everyone would benefit sooner or later from the inevitable price increase.

But what happens if confidence in the eventual resurgence of demand begins to wither? Then the incentives to cooperate begin to evaporate, too, and it’s every producer for itself in a mad scramble to protect market share. This new reality -- a world in which “peak oil demand,” rather than “peak oil,” will shape the consciousness of major players -- is what the Doha catastrophe foreshadowed.

At the beginning of this century, many energy analysts were convinced that we were at the edge of the arrival of “peak oil”; a peak, that is, in the output of petroleum in which planetary reserves would be exhausted long before the demand for oil disappeared, triggering a global economic crisis. As a result of advances in drilling technology, however, the supply of oil has continued to grow, while demand has unexpectedly begun to stall.  This can be traced both to slowing economic growth globally and to an accelerating “green revolution” in which the planet will be transitioning to non-carbon fuel sources. With most nations now committed to measures aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases under the just-signed Paris climate accord, the demand for oil is likely to experience significant declines in the years ahead. In other words, global oil demand will peak long before supplies begin to run low, creating a monumental challenge for the oil-producing countries.

Days of Revolt: Coping with Reality

HEDGES: Well don't we have like 4-5 degrees already in the oceans and the pipeline, even if we stopped all carbon emissions?

DECHRISTOPHER: We have at least 2C which a lot of scientists are saying would push us past the tipping points where then we're on the road to 4 or 5C. Which means that basically we're not limiting climate change to a level where we're still going to save our ice sheets. We're not limiting it to a level where we're still going to be able to protect our coastal cities. We're committed to massive disruptions in weather patterns and ecosystems, and agricultural practices. Massive dislocation of people.

So I kind of look at it in terms of what the human impacts of that are, that we can imagine. I think often we talk about the scientific impacts of this many meters of sea level rise. This degree of precipitation changes. I think we are sort of downplaying it by looking at climate change by looking at scientific impact. Because really climate change is a trigger on the social tensions and injustices that we already have. So I look at the southwest of the U.S. which is a region that I've spent a lot of time in and I've done a lot of work around the Colorado River system which is already drying and is predicted to continue drying up much more rapidly than expected. In the past year, the Department of Reclamation tripled their expected likelihood of Lake Mead going dry or going below the levels of where it produces power by 2020.

HEDGES: Isn't this something we're seeing in every new climate change report is that things are accelerating at a rate that climate scientists did not expect?

DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. Basically every climate science report is more bad news. Saying that things are worst and happening faster. ...

HEDGES: How do we build that consciousness whereas even you had said earlier, we live in a hall of mirrors, an illusion. We fail to confront the reality of not only where we're headed but even what's happening around us.

DECHRISTOPHER: Well I think it comes from those who do see that reality. Being willing to address it honestly. To talk about it honestly. Like a lot of people in the climate movement know that it's too late to stop climate change but say oh well we can't really talk about that publicly. We'll scare people under paralysis or whatever. They so oh we can't talk about adaptation because that'll distract away from the efforts of mitigation.

HEDGES: You mean adaptation to climate change?

DECHRISTOPHER: Right, so like after the Copenhagen failure of 2009, it became clear that we were going to see a degree of climate change that means places like Bangladesh are going to go under water. That was obvious after 2009.

HEDGES: Well I think isn't it pretty certain that most of our large coastal cities are going to go underwater.

DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, but I think once that became clear that the place was going to go underwater then the question became what's going to become of the people? Of the 160 million Bangladeshis about half of whom live at less than 10 meters above sea level and we didn't have that conversation openly. We were told, we weren't supposed to talk about that because people couldn't handle that conversation. But someone was having that conversation because in the couple of years after the Copenhagen failure of 2009 India began building a border fence all the way around Bangladesh. A 1,790 mile partially electrified fence. So somebody made the decision that what we're going to do with those people is we're going to keep them right where they're at so they don't inconvenience the rest of us.

#Climatechange depleting oxygen in oceans https://t.co/UersAHFhVS Alarm bells bells of science ringing loud & clear pic.twitter.com/CuVDGb7teB

— Christiana Figueres (@CFigueres) April 28, 2016

Deoxygenated 'Dead Zones' Threatening Marine Life

Imperiling fish, crabs, squid, sea stars, and myriad other marine creatures, climate change is sapping the oceans of oxygen, according to a new study that warns of widespread deoxygenation within decades.

Using models and maps, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, were able to quantify and differentiate between large-scale changes in oxygen in the oceans due to both natural variability and climate change.

They confirmed deoxygenated "dead zones"—which leave marine creatures struggling to breathe—caused by climate change already exist in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins, and determined that more widespread detection of deoxygenation caused by climate change would be possible between 2030 and 2040.

The findings were funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the American Geophysical Union journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 

"Loss of oxygen in the oceans is one of the serious side effects of a warming atmosphere, and a major threat to marine life," said NCAR scientist Matthew Long, lead author of the study. "Since oxygen concentrations in the ocean naturally vary depending on variations in winds and temperature at the surface, it's been challenging to attribute any deoxygenation to climate change. This new study tells us when we can expect the effect from climate change to overwhelm the natural variability."

Also of Interest

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

9/11 Commission Didn’t Clear Saudis

The Leap Manifesto is a path to jobs and justice

Is the Wall Street Cartel Regrouping? Regulator Fires Warning Shot

How to Open a Closed Political Culture

Sanders Fighting to End of Primary; "Can't Snap" Fingers & Tell Supporters to Back Clinton

Bernie Sanders: ‘We’re taking the campaign to the Convention.’ Media: ‘He just threw in the towel.’

Why Sanders Supporters Should Not Let Democratic Primary Demoralize Them

Cycling is religion in Flanders, Belgium

A Little Night Music

Piano Red - She's Dynamite

Piano Red - Blues, Blues, Blues

Piano Red - The Right String, Baby, But the Wrong Yo-Yo

Piano Red - Diggin' The Boogie

Dr Feelgood (aka Piano Red) - Mr Moonlight

Piano Red - Rock baby

Piano Red - Wild Fire

Piano Red - I'm Nobody's Fool