The Evening Blues - 6-7-17



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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Lee "Shot" Williams

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago soul singer Lee "Shot" Williams. Enjoy!

Lee 'Shot' Williams - The Love You Save

“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

-- John F. Kennedy


News and Opinion

Moon of Alabama has a detailed analysis of the NSA "Russian hacking" story that The Intercept ran the other day. Here is an excerpt, but it is worth reading in full:

Do Not Trust The Intercept or How To Burn A Source

Yesterday The Intercept published a leaked five page NSA analysis about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. Its reporting outed the leaker of the NSA documents. That person, R.L. Winner, has now been arrested and is likely to be jailed for years if not for the rest of her life.

FBI search (pdf) and arrest warrant (pdf) applications unveil irresponsible behavior by the Intercept's reporters and editors which neglected all operational security trade-craft that might have prevented the revealing of the source. It leaves one scratching one's head if this was intentional or just sheer incompetence. Either way - the incident confirms what skeptics had long determined: The Intercept is not a trustworthy outlet for leaking state secrets of public interests. ...

Yesterday's published story (with bylines of four(!) reporters) begins:

Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

The NSA "intelligence report" the Intercept publishes alongside the piece does NOT show that "Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack". The document speaks of "cyber espionage operations" - i.e someone looked and maybe copied data but did not manipulate anything. Espionage via computer networks is something every nation in this world (and various private entities) do all the time. It is simply the collection of information. It is different from a "cyberattack" like Stuxnet which are intended to create large damage.

The "attack" by someone was standard spearfishing and some visual basic scripts to gain access to accounts of local election officials. Thee is no proof that any account was compromised. Any minor criminal hacker uses similar means. No damage is mentioned in the NSA analysis. The elections were not compromised by this operation. The document notes explicitly (p.5) that the operation used some techniques that distinguish it from other known Russian military intelligence operations. It was probably -if at all- done by someone else.

The Intercept puts out a far from satisfying statement about the arrest of Reality Winner. One might hope that they would be more forthcoming in light of the fact that there is the appearance that somebody at The Intercept burned a source.

Statement on Justice Department Allegations

On June 5 The Intercept published a story about a top-secret NSA document that was provided to us completely anonymously. Shortly after the article was posted, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old government contractor in Augusta, Georgia, for transmitting defense information under the Espionage Act. Although we have no knowledge of the identity of the person who provided us with the document, the U.S. government has told news organizations that Winner was that individual.

While the FBI’s allegations against Winner have been made public through the release of an affidavit and search warrant, which were unsealed at the government’s request, it is important to keep in mind that these documents contain unproven assertions and speculation designed to serve the government’s agenda and as such warrant skepticism. Winner faces allegations that have not been proven. The same is true of the FBI’s claims about how it came to arrest Winner.

We take this matter with the utmost seriousness. However, because of the continued investigation, we will make no further comment on it at this time.

Reality Winner: NSA contractor and environmentalist repulsed by Trump

When Reality Winner got out of the US air force last December, she was despondent. The 25-year-old vegan yoga enthusiast, who enjoyed adopting abandoned pets and sending shoeboxes full of gifts to Afghan children, was repulsed by the US president-elect, her polar opposite. A passionate environmentalist, Winner grew heavy-hearted as Donald Trump quickly gave the go-ahead for construction of the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.

“I’m losing my mind,” she wrote in a Facebook post on 9 February. “He’s lying. He’s blatantly lying.” Four days later, Winner arrived for her first day of work as a contractor at Trump’s National Security Agency.

Trump’s administration now alleges that Winner used that job, at the NSA’s campus in Augusta, Georgia, to take and leak a top-secret document on Russia’s alleged efforts to swing the presidential election in his favour.

According to court filings, Winner admitted to FBI agents that she printed out the classified report on 9 May and then mailed it to reporters at the online news outlet, which focuses on national security. She was arrested and detained after appearing in a federal courtroom on Monday afternoon. The first person to be charged by the young administration with violating the Espionage Act, Winner now faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Hmmm... hard to believe that this sort of thing didn't get the attention of "Reality Winner's" employer...

The 25-year-old accused of leaking top-secret NSA document talked of 'standing' with Iran in hypothetical war with US

Reality Winner, the 25-year-old Air Force veteran and federal contractor being charged with espionage on suspicion of leaking a top-secret NSA document to The Intercept, had apparently been vocal about opposing President Donald Trump and said she would "stand" with Iran in a hypothetical war with the US.

Winner publicly offered support to Iran after Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted a video defending Iran's ballistic-missile program, which US officials under Trump and former President Barack Obama, as well as former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, had condemned as a violation of the spirit of the Iran deal.

Replying to Zarif's video on February 7, Winner tweeted: "There are many Americans protesting US govt aggression towards Iran. If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!" She began her job as a federal contractor with top-secret clearance on or close to February 13, according to the Justice Department.

Edward Snowden on Trump administration's recent arrest of an alleged journalistic source

The Justice Department released an indictment of twenty five year-old NSA contractor Reality Winner yesterday, just a few hours after the Intercept posted a story based on a top secret document that described how the NSA believes Russian actors tried to hack into US voting infrastructure. Much is unknown, as the public is made to depend upon the potentially unreliable claims of government prosecutors, while Winner is held in jail without any contact with the public.

What we do know is clear: Winner is accused of serving as a journalistic source for a leading American news outlet about a matter of critical public importance. For this act, she has been charged with violating the Espionage Act—a World War I era law meant for spies—which explicitly forbids the jury from hearing why the defendant acted, and bars them from deciding whether the outcome was to the public's benefit. This often-condemned law provides no space to distinguish the extraordinary disclosure of inappropriately classified information in the public interest—whistleblowing—from the malicious disclosure of secrets to foreign governments by those motivated by a specific intent to harm to their countrymen.

The prosecution of any journalistic source without due consideration by the jury as to the harm or benefit of the journalistic activity is a fundamental threat to the free press. As long as a law like this remains on the books in a country that values fair trials, it must be resisted.

No matter one's opinions on the propriety of the charges against her, we should all agree Winner should be released on bail pending trial. Even if you take all the government allegations as true, it's clear she is neither a threat to public safety nor a flight risk. To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all.

Mark Warner cranks up the fear machine:

Sen. Mark Warner Says Russian Hacking Was “Much Broader Than Has Been Reported So Far”

Russian government attempts to hack into U.S. election infrastructure were “much broader” than what was laid out in a report Monday in The Intercept, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told USA Today in an interview Tuesday.  ...

“The extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far,” Warner said, referring to the report in The Intercept. “I don’t believe they got into changing actual voting outcomes,” he said, adding that he was pressuring intelligence agencies to declassify which states were hit, with the goal of helping them shore up their systems ahead of 2018 and 2020.

“None of these actions from the Russians stopped on Election Day,” he said. “I really want to press the case. This is not an attempt to embarrass any state. This is a case to make sure that the American public writ large realizes that if we don’t get ahead of this, this same kind of intervention could take place in 2018 and definitely will take place in 2020.”

James Clapper says Watergate 'pales' in comparison with Trump Russia scandal

The former US director of national intelligence James Clapper says events in Washington now are more serious than the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, and that it is imperative investigators get to the bottom of the Trump administration’s links with the Putin regime.

Clapper used a speech to Australia’s National Press Club on Wednesday to launch a critique of the US president, Donald Trump, describing his decision to cultivate Russia and share intelligence with the Putin regime as “very problematic”. He described Trump’s firing of the FBI chief Jim Comey as “egregious and inexcusable”. ...

The former intelligence director was asked how current events compared to Watergate and he said the behaviour under scrutiny now was more serious. “I think you compare the two, that Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now.” ...

Clapper insisted that, whatever Trump’s intentions, there was no way the US and Russia could be allies, because Russia was “opposed to our democracy and values and see us, particularly the United States, as the cause of all their problems and frustrations”. He said he had a “real hard time reconciling the threat the Russians pose to the United States and, by extension, western democracies in general” with the solicitousness of the Trump administration towards Moscow. “The Russians are not our friends,” he said.

FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley unloads about Mueller and Comey. There's a lot of detail worth paying attention to. Here's a small taste:

Russia-gate’s Mythical ‘Heroes’

Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective. Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.

TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11. Although he bore no personal responsibility for intelligence failures before the attack, since he only became FBI Director a week before, Mueller denied or downplayed the significance of warnings that had poured in yet were all ignored or mishandled during the Spring and Summer of 2001. ...

I wanted to believe Director Mueller when he expressed some regret in our personal meeting the night before we both testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He told me he was seeking improvements and that I should not hesitate to contact him if I ever witnessed a similar situation to what was behind the FBI’s pre 9/11 failures. A few months later, when it appeared he was acceding to Bush-Cheney’s ginning up intelligence to launch the unjustified, counterproductive and illegal war on Iraq, I took Mueller up on his offer, emailing him my concerns in late February 2003. Mueller knew, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims connecting 9/11 to Iraq were bogus yet he remained quiet. He also never responded to my email. ...

For his part, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, too, went along with the abuses of Bush and Cheney after 9/11 and signed off on a number of highly illegal programs including warrantless surveillance of Americans and torture of captives. Comey also defended the Bush Administration’s three-year-long detention of an American citizen without charges or right to counsel. Up to the March 2004 night in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room, both Comey and Mueller were complicit with implementing a form of martial law, perpetrated via secret Office of Legal Counsel memos mainly written by John Yoo and predicated upon Yoo’s singular theories of absolute “imperial” or “war presidency” powers, and requiring Ashcroft every 90 days to renew certification of a “state of emergency.”

What’s not well understood is that Comey’s and Mueller’s joint intervention to stop Bush’s men from forcing the sick Attorney General to sign the certification that night was a short-lived moment. A few days later, they all simply went back to the drawing board to draft new legal loopholes to continue the same (unconstitutional) surveillance of Americans. The mythology of this episode, repeated endlessly throughout the press, is that Comey and Mueller did something significant and lasting in that hospital room. They didn’t. Only the legal rationale for their unconstitutional actions was tweaked.

Speaking of James "Mr. Integrity" Comey...

Did the FBI have evidence of a breach larger than Snowden? A lawsuit says yes.

A former U.S. intelligence contractor tells Circa he walked away with more than 600 million classified documents on 47 hard drives from the National Security Agency and the CIA, a haul potentially larger than Edward Snowden's now infamous breach.

And now he is suing former FBI Director James Comey and other government figures, alleging the bureau has covered up evidence he provided them showing widespread spying on Americans that violated civil liberties.

The suit, filed late Monday night by Dennis Montgomery, was assigned to the same federal judge who has already ruled that some of the NSA's collection of data on Americans violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, setting up an intriguing legal proceeding in the nation’s capital this summer. Montgomery says the evidence he gave to the FBI chronicle the warrantless collection of phone, financial and personal data and the unmasking of identities in spy data about millions of Americans. ...

The suit did not offer specifics of any illegal spying, but it accused the bureau of failing to take proper actions to rectify Montgomery’s concerns. “Plaintiffs were assured that the FBI, under Defendant Comey, would conduct a full investigation into the grave instances of illegal and unconstitutional activity set forth by Montgomery. However, the FBI, on Defendant Comey’s orders, buried the FBI’s investigation because the FBI itself is involved in an ongoing conspiracy to not only conduct the aforementioned illegal, unconstitutional surveillance, but to cover it up as well,” the suit added.

Attackers in Tehran Kill 12 & Injure Dozens More as U.S. Deliberately Worsens Iran-Saudi Relations

Iranian Revolutionary Guard blames Saudi Arabia for Tehran attack

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia for twin attacks on Iran’s parliament and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini on Wednesday morning which left 12 people dead. The attacks, which took place a few kilometres south of the capital, were the first in the country to be claimed by the Islamic State group.

"This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the US president (Donald Trump) and the (Saudi) backward leaders who support terrorists," said the IRGC in a statement, published by Iranian media. "The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack."

A security guard was killed when four gunmen burst into Tehran's parliament complex, while a gardener was reported dead when several armed assailants entered the grounds of Khomeini's mausoleum in the south of the city, according to the ISNA news agency. "Fighters from Islamic State attacked Khomeini's shrine and the Iranian parliament in Tehran," IS's news agency Amaq said.

Trump Takes Credit for Gulf Split With Qatar, a Key US Ally

The Saudi Arabia-led regional split with Qatar is wildly inconvenient, not just for Qatar, but for the United States. America’s largest military base in the region is in Qatar, and the Pentagon and the State Department have both made clear they support Qatar, and expect this incident to blow over pretty quickly.

Apparently nobody told President Trump, however, as in his latest series of Twitter screeds he not only cheered the Saudi move against Qatar, but personally took credit for the incident, which again is wildly inconvenient to America’s Middle East policy.

Trump insisted that his push against “radical ideology” had caused everyone to turn on Qatar, saying it meant his recent visit to Saudi Arabia was “already paying off.”

Trump backtracks on Qatar after series of tweets pointing at emirate for financing terrorism

US officials scramble to limit Donald Trump's diplomatic damage over Qatar tweets

The US state and defence departments have scrambled to limit the diplomatic damage done by Donald Trump’s morning tweets lambasting Qatar, which is the hub for US military air operations across the Middle East. Trump started the day by taking sides in a bitter row among the Gulf monarchies, in which Saudi Arabia and its allies have sought to isolate Qatar.

The US president visited the region last month and claimed to have helped bring unity to the Islamic world in the battle against extremism. While in Riyadh, Trump met regional leaders, including the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. He said the US and Qatar had been “friends for a long time” and that the two leaders discussed the Qatari purchase of “lots of beautiful military equipment.”

Just more than two weeks later, however, after Riyadh cut ties with Qatar, Trump tweeted support for the move, claiming that when it came to funding radical ideology, “leaders point to Qatar”. US relations with Qatar have long been complicated by Doha’s promotion of a conservative and austere form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, from which many extremist groups claim to draw inspiration, and its backing of extremist groups elsewhere in the region.

However, the same issues have clouded the relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Civilian deaths from US-led strikes on Isis surge under Trump administration

Civilian casualties have increased sharply in the US-led military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, with nearly 60% of the officially acknowledged deaths from the three-year war being reported in the first three months of the Trump administration.

US Central Command (Centcom) admitted to 484 civilian deaths up to the end of April as a result of coalition strikes as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, which began in August 2014. That compares with a cumulative total of 199 announced at the beginning of February.

The tallies are limited to those incidents that the US military has been able to investigate and confirm. The true death toll is likely to be much higher, as the battle to wrest control of densely populated west Mosul in Iraq from Isis continues, and the battle gets started for the Isis stronghold in Syria, in Raqqa.

Airwars, a UK-based watchdog group, estimates the civilian death toll from coalition airstrikes at over 3,800.

US Bombs Pro-Government Forces In Syria Yet Again

The United States is already presently at war with Syria. The American people by and large do not realize this, and the notion of yet another costly regime change invasion in yet another Middle Eastern nation is still largely unpopular with most US citizens, but that regime change invasion has already happened, and war is underway. The Pentagon is just going about it a little differently this time.


Nearly all of the corporate media headlines I’ve been seeing in the hours following America’s third deliberate attack on the pro-Assad military in Syria go out of their way to communicate to their readers that this was a bombing carried out in self-defense. “After warnings, US wages new strike on pro-Syria government forces” says Reuters, scrambling to tell the reader that America is the real victim here within the first two words of their headline. “US conducts new strikes on pro-Syrian government forces threatening US Special Operations base” screams the headline of the CIA-funded Washington Post.

What is actually happening, however, is that America has been amassing troops in Syria without the permission of Syria’s legitimate government under the pretense of fighting ISIS, and is now bombing Syrian government coalition forces with increasing regularity. The first time it was a missile strike upon a Syrian airbase on April 7, purportedly in retaliation for the government’s alleged gratuitous use of sarin gas on a bunch of children in Idlib. The second and third have been suspicious in a different way, with a deadly strike on May 18 and another just hours ago reportedly occurring because pro-Assad forces got too close to the occupying US invaders and ignored “warnings”.

These are provocations, and they are happening more and more often. All the US coalition has to do now is keep taking up space under the pretense of humanitarian peacekeeping, and eventually someone will wander a little too close, at which time they can be attacked. All they have to do is launch enough of these attacks to force the Syrian government to retaliate, and then they’ve got their Pearl Harbor. They’ll have the photos of dead US soldiers that they can parade in front of corporate media cameras all day, every day, whose names the president can solemnly read from a teleprompter while explaining the need for increased military aggression against the Syrian government. Public support will have been manufactured, enabling America’s unelected power establishment to take control of a key strategic region they’ve been trying to capture for a long, long time.

US Aid Coordinator in Yemen Had Secret Job Overseeing U.S. Commando Shipments

An American kidnapped two years ago in Yemen while helping coordinate aid for Unicef and the Red Cross also had a second, secret role: He was shipping materials for elite military commandos under a clandestine contract his employer had with the Pentagon. The arrangement with Special Operations forces has never been made public.

The former hostage, Scott Darden, was the Yemen country director for Transoceanic Development, a New Orleans-based logistics company that specializes in transporting cargo to the world’s most dangerous hot spots. It belongs to a small group of firms that provide humanitarian aid to famine-stricken women and children at the same time that they help set up safe houses and supply networks for the military’s secret kill-or-capture commando units.

Mr. Darden’s work offers a rare look into the shadowy world of military contractors that operate in lawless war zones like Yemen, Somalia and Libya. But arrangements like the one Transoceanic had with Special Operations forces can cast suspicion over aid workers, potentially putting them in harm’s way, and can jeopardize humanitarian efforts in countries that depend on relief organizations. ...

This secretiveness has prompted some lawmakers to call for greater scrutiny of the military’s clandestine units. “There is not enough oversight, certainly from Congress,” said Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, who is a former Marine officer and served four tours in Iraq.

Canada wants to be a greater imperial power now.

Canada to rely less on US defense in major policy shift

Canada will increase defense spending and rely less on the United States, the country’s foreign minister said Tuesday, in a major foreign policy shift toward a bigger role on the world stage.

The change will cost billions of dollars in investment, top diplomat Chrystia Freeland told lawmakers in a speech that did not mention US President Donald Trump by name but left little doubt of her concerns.

“International relationships that had seemed immutable for 70 years are being called into question,” Freeland said, adding that Trump supporters had voted “to shrug off the burden of world leadership.”

As a consequence, Canada will have to develop its own “hard power” military capabilities to support diplomatic and development efforts abroad.

Details are expected in a defense policy announcement Wednesday.

Reporter Indicted Following Inaugural Protest Coverage

Aaron Cantú, a staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he participated in a riot while working as a journalist during protests in Washington, DC on Inauguration Day.

Cantú faces eight felony counts—including inciting a riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot and five counts of destruction of property. The grand jury handed up the indictment last week.

On January 20, a collection of DC police and federal law enforcement officers arrested more than 200 people in connection with a rally that began as a protest, but turned destructive as several people broke the windows of businesses, damaged vehicles and allegedly caused a police officer to break his wrist.

Cantú was not named specifically by prosecutors as the cause of any of the destruction, as some defendants were. Instead, the indictment named him as being present while the damage happened. The arrests have been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, other civil rights groups and newspapers as overly broad and lacking hard evidence.

Trump tweets pick to lead FBI: former DoJ official Christopher Wray

Donald Trump plans to nominate Christopher Wray to be the next director of the FBI, he announced on Twitter on Wednesday.


... Wray, 50, was the assistant attorney general overseeing the criminal division under George W Bush, in charge of investigations into corporate fraud.

Wray more recently represented the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, during the investigation into the George Washington Bridge lane-closing case, in which two of Christie’s former aides were convicted of plotting to close lanes of the bridge to punish a Democratic mayor who would not endorse the governor. Christie, who has informally advised the president, was not charged in the case. ...

Wray works as a litigation partner at King and Spalding, an Atlanta-based law firm, where he oversees the company’s government investigations practice, representing a number of Fortune 100 financial institutions. The unit represents companies and clients in a variety of white-collar criminal and regulatory enforcement matters.

Prior to joining the firm, Wray served from 2003 to 2005 as assistant attorney general in charge of the US Department of Justice’s criminal division, under Comey, then the US deputy attorney general. The Senate confirmed Wray to that post by unanimous consent – a feat that may be difficult to achieve again amid the current polarization in the chamber.

UK Election Polls: Can Corbyn Win?

Daily Mail devotes 13 pages to attack on Labour 'apologists for terror'

The pre-election edition of the Daily Mail devoted 13 pages to attacking Labour, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell under the headline: “Apologists for terror.”

The tabloid urged readers to support the Conservatives in an editorial on its first and second pages but concentrated its fire on Labour’s leadership, compiling hostile anecdotes dating to the 1970s.

The Mail’s leading article said it had no doubt Corbyn’s “expressions of horror” over the recent terrorists attacks in Britain were genuine, but added “the ineluctable truth is that the Labour leader and his closest associates have spent their careers cosying up to those who hate our country, while pouring scorn on the police and security services and opposing anti-terror legislation over and over and over again”.

Other attack articles in the Mail included a collection of quotes from Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott that the newspaper said was “proof Corbyn and Co are unfit to rule”, a story headlined “Revealed: Labour plan to crash house prices” and criticism of the BBC’s coverage of the election.



the evening greens


Rare US floods to become the norm if emissions aren't cut, study warns

US coastal areas are set to be deluged by far more frequent and severe flooding events if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slashed, with rare floods becoming the norm for places such as New York City, Seattle and San Diego, new research has found. The study, undertaken by researchers from Princeton and Rutgers universities, found that along all of the US coastline, the average risk of a 100-year flood will increase 40-fold by 2050.

Such floods are statistically expected to occur only once every 100 years because of their severity, although this doesn’t mean these sort of floods never happen in consecutive years. The annual chance of such a flood is around 1%. The research found that if emissions are not curbed, San Francisco and Seattle would both get a 100-year flood every year by 2050, while San Diego would expect 10 such events annually and Key West in Florida would be hit 11 times a year. Some of the worst affected areas would be in Hawaii, with Mokuoloe island, situated off Oahu, forecast to be deluged by 130 floods a year that are currently considered to be 100-year events.

Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist and co-author of the paper, added that New York City is set to get a 100-year flood every 20 years by 2050 but this frequency would leap to a large flood every other month by 2100.

The day after withdrawing from Paris, Trump declared a flooding disaster in Missouri

While President Trump’s pulling from the Paris treaty was worldwide news, what was not covered as well was his declaration the very next day that the state of Missouri is a disaster area because of flooding.

Why is flooding a symptom of warming? As air warms, it holds more moisture - it’s more humid. As the Earth warms, it means that the atmosphere holds more moisture year round. That moisture falls during storms as rain. What’s interesting is that the result is more of the most severe rains. That is, when it rains, it’s raining harder. Consequently, more flooding occurs. And we are seeing that across our nation. If you look at the trends in the most severe downpours, they are increasing – everywhere.

One example are the recent floods in Missouri, which occurred during the month of May. On or around May 24th, 2017, the Missouri governor requested disaster aid for 45 counties in the state. The president granted the aid on June 2nd. The federal aid will help the state recover from approximately $28 million in residential losses and $58 million in municipal damage. Images from the flood have been widely available online for people to witness the disaster.

This flood isn’t a single event. There has been much recent reporting on other floods in Missouri and elsewhere throughout 2015 and 2016. For instance, here describes flooding in August 2016 and the infamous December flood in 2015, which killed at least 13 people. The kinds of extreme weather we are seeing now will continue to get worse and cause far more damage in the future. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

'Spectacular' drop in renewable energy costs leads to record global boost

Renewable energy capacity around the world was boosted by a record amount in 2016 and delivered at a markedly lower cost, according to new global data – although the total financial investment in renewables actually fell. The greater “bang-for-buck” resulted from plummeting prices for solar and wind power and led to new power deals in countries including Denmark, Egypt, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates all being priced well below fossil fuel or nuclear options.

Analysts warned that the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement, announced last week by Donald Trump, risked the US being left behind in the fast-moving transition to a low-carbon economy. But they also warned that the green transition was still not happening fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, especially in the transport and heating sectors.

The new renewable energy capacity installed worldwide in 2016 was 161GW, a 10% rise on 2015 and a new record, according to REN21, a network of public and private sector groups covering 155 nations and 96% of the world’s population. The new record capacity cost $242bn, a 23% reduction in investment compared to 2015, and renewables investment remained larger than for all fossil fuels. Subsidies for green energy, however, are still much lower than those for coal, oil and gas. ...

“A global energy transition [is] well under way, with record new additions of installed renewable energy capacity, rapidly falling costs and the decoupling of economic growth and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions for the third year running,” said Arthouros Zervos, chair of REN21.

Demand for elephant skin, trunk and penis drives rapid rise in poaching in Myanmar

Reported cases of killed elephants in Myanmar have increased dramatically since 2010, with a total of 112 wild elephant deaths, most of them in the past few years. In 2015 alone, 36 wild elephants were killed, according to official figures from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The figures for 2016 are feared to be even worse.

Neighbouring China is the main destination for elephant products. Despite the ivory ban imposed by the Chinese government earlier this year, ivory is still the most valuable part of the elephant. But worryingly conservationists are now seeing a growing demand for other parts of the animal; trunks, feet, even the penis, to be used in traditional medicine. The hide or skin, which is believed to be a remedy for eczema, is particularly in demand.

Most elephants are killed in Pathein and Ngapudaw townships in Irrawaddy division – which is a major habitat for wild elephants – but recent killings have also been reported on both sides of the Bago mountain range in central Myanmar, as well as in Mandalay division. ...

The hunters shoot elephants with arrows dipped in poison, and then follow the animal around as it meets its slow and agonising death, before skinning it and hacking off the saleable parts. The poachers operate in small gangs, often persuading local villagers to work as their guides or helpers. ...

So far this year, at least 20 elephant corpses have been found stripped of their skin, the World Wildlife Fund told AFP. “Previously they would be hunted for their tusks, but as the male elephant population decreases the poachers will now kill any elephant they can find and sell other parts: the skin, the trunk, the feet or the penis, all of which is in demand in the Chinese market,” says Saw Htoo Tha Po, senior technical coordinator at WCS.

Call of the wild? Environmentalists livid over cellphone plan for national park

They already paved Paradise and put up a parking lot. Now the famous site on the south slope of Mount Rainier National Park’s 14,410ft-tall volcano could be wired for cellular service.

The park, which encompasses 230,000 acres of the Cascades mountain range in Washington state, has prepared an environmental assessment for a proposal to allow Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T to affix a wireless antenna to the park’s Jackson visitor center. The antenna would extend coverage around Paradise, a popular destination for visitors known as one of the snowiest places on Earth, but not to the top of the mountain. The proposal has sparked a contentious debate about whether access to smartphones enhances or diminishes the great outdoors.

Just 100 miles south of Seattle, the park is nevertheless remote: 97% is designated wilderness. The park received 492 comments on the proposal during an earlier stage of the planning process, and received 249 in favor and 241 opposed. Proponents of cell service argue that it would improve safety in a park that conducts 40 to 50 search and rescue missions each year. One potential benefit is that the park could send real-time information about weather or other hazards to visitors.

For opponents of the plan, cellular service is an invisible but unwelcome desecration of nature. “The point of wilderness is that it’s supposed to be free from the accoutrements of civilization,” said Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which has campaigned against cell towers in national parks across the country. “They are extending the electronic tendrils of commercialization deep into designated wilderness.”

The park is soliciting public comment on the proposal until 19 July.


Also of Interest

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

Intercepted Podcast: The Woman Democrats Love to Hate

Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret

McMaster Urges Another Afghan ‘Surge’

Austerity has strangled Britain. Only Labour will consign it to history

Paris Sorts Sheep from Wolves


A Little Night Music

Arlene Brown and Lee "Shot" Williams" - Impeach Me Baby

Lee Shot Williams - I'm Tore Up

Lee Shot Williams - Mark My Words

Lee Shot Williams - When You Move You Lose

Lee "Shot" Williams - Hold Me, Hold Me, Hold Me

Lee Shot Williams - Our Thing Is Through

Lee Shot Williams - Love Now Pay Later

Lee Shot Williams - You're welcome to the club


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enhydra lutris's picture

surreal, and doesn't pass the smell test as it stands. Of course, these days very little does.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@enhydra lutris

these days everything i read or watch feels like a psy-op. robert lockwood had a good idea:

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enhydra lutris's picture

@joe shikspack

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

mimi's picture

of my favorite news sources and sites are all gone to the dark side? I think I need a flash light, as I am stumbling through the dark and lost my orientation. I don't believe in nothing. So. There.
I definitely felt I needed several whiskeys after reading the Moon of Alabama article. What is a poor woman, who doesn't drink, going to do? Despair? Give up? Become an "Insane Progressive"?

I give up. For today. Good Night.
[video:https://youtu.be/qMFddEqepr0]

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enhydra lutris's picture

@mimi
to Moon of Alabama, not in the least since I've been humming and whistling it since I saw that article.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

joe shikspack's picture

@mimi

heh, i know how you feel. i don't really drink much, but looking for the next whiskey bar suddenly sounds like a mildly appealing idea. Smile

i'm not ready to give up on the intercept just yet. there's an awful lot about this whole episode that is just too fishy, and it wouldn't be prudent to jump to conclusions. i'm willing to wait for some more cards to fall.

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young people registering

Record numbers of people signed up to vote on deadline day before registrations closed, with more than 600,000 names added to the electoral roll in the final 24 hours.

On the last day that new voters could register, a total of 622,398 applications were received by the Government’s Individual Electoral Registration digital service.

That exceeded the previous record of 525,254 applications on a single day, set before the EU referendum on 7 June 2016 – a spike of around 20 per cent.

The figures point to a sharp increase in young voters adding their names to the register, with around two-thirds – 453,000 – of the new voters to sign up on deadline day aged between 18 and 34.

A late surge in young voter registrations will be seen as good news for Labour, whose election day hopes have historically hinged on a high turnout among young people.

and this

An extra one million voters have joined the electoral roll ahead of Thursday's general election.

Official data released by councils to the BBC, Press Association and ITN shows some areas have seen the voter register increase by more than 10%.

There was a surge in interest after the election was called on 18 April, with 150,000 applications made on that day.

A total of 46.9 million people will be able to vote, up from 45.8m in December 2016.

It is higher than the last general election in 2015, when there were 46.4m registered voters.

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joe shikspack's picture

@gjohnsit

that is great news! i really hope that they give the tories the boot and settle the hash of the neoliberal faction of labour at the same time.

i've read a bunch of analysis of polls and what i've been reading leaves me cautiously optimistic that labour is going to make at least a good showing.

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detroitmechworks's picture

Drones, Mercenaries, Government that won't accept responsibility for the chaos they are creating...

It just feels very... familiar.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C6GZQ7UNaU]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

joe shikspack's picture

@detroitmechworks

i agree, it does feel familiar. it feels like it is on a larger scale this time, though.

i can't decide whether this time the prize is oil, global domination, depletion of the surplus population or two of the above or all three.

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joe shikspack's picture

Turkey throws support behind Qatar in rift with Gulf Arabs

Turkey threw its support behind Qatar on Wednesday, with officials saying it could fast-track troop deployment and provide crucial food and water supplies to the Gulf Arab country facing isolation from some of the biggest Middle Eastern powers. ...

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said isolating Qatar would not resolve any problems. Erdogan, who has long tried to play the role of a regional power broker, said Ankara would do everything in its power to help end the regional crisis.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is visiting the region to discuss the stand-off.

Lawmakers from Erdogan's ruling AK Party and the nationalist opposition MHP on Wednesday proposed bringing forward approval of a draft bill that will allow Turkish troops to be deployed to Turkey's military base in Qatar, party officials told Reuters. ...

The Turkish parliament was also set to bring forward approval of a draft accord between the two countries on military training cooperation, the officials said.

Both bills, which were drawn up before the spat erupted, are expected to be approved by the Ankara parliament on Wednesday.

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lotlizard's picture

The Intercept’s article ends up once again pushing readers in the direction of the “accident” theory. To me, that looks and sounds like part of the 50-year long, ongoing public-relations coverup.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/04/still-waiting-for-uss-libertys-truth/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/09/leaving-the-crew-of-the-uss-liber...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-liberty_tuesoct02-story.html

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joe shikspack's picture

@lotlizard

agreed. i have never found the accident theory compelling.

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