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“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

With much fanfare the Obama administration tightened the rules on targeting journalists after their surveillance of James Rosen caused a flap. They didn't change the rules on using NSL's to target journalists, however, creating a nifty work around for the Orwellian police state.

Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy for the FBI to Spy on Journalists

Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures.

The classified rules, obtained by The Intercept and dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of National Security Letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form. ...

The rules stipulate that obtaining a journalist’s records with a National Security Letter (or NSL) requires the sign-off of the FBI’s general counsel and the executive assistant director of the bureau’s National Security Branch, in addition to the regular chain of approval. Generally speaking, there are a variety of FBI officials, including the agents in charge of field offices, who can sign off that an NSL is “relevant” to a national security investigation.

There is an extra step under the rules if the NSL targets a journalist in order “to identify confidential news media sources.” In that case, the general counsel and the executive assistant director must first consult with the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

But if the NSL is trying to identify a leaker by targeting the records of the potential source, and not the journalist, the Justice Department doesn’t need to be involved.

Obama just made it much easier for the public to access government records

Nearly a half-century to the day after President Lyndon B. Johnson reluctantly signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, granting the public the right to access federal government records, President Barack Obama signed into law a historic FOIA reform bill that aims to make it easier for the public to file FOIA requests and obtain government documents.

This means that Obama will leave office ensuring that the federal government is, in theory, the most transparent it has ever been when Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is sworn into office — both of whom have proven hostile to transparency. And by signing the FOIA reform bill into law, Obama can continue to boast that he had the most transparent administration in history even though his administration's record on openness over the past seven years has been horrendous.

American Journalist in Rebel-Held Syria Reports Barely Dodging a Missile Strike

An American journalist and documentary filmmaker reporting from Syrian rebel-controlled territory near Aleppo says he was nearly killed in what he suspects was a drone strike last Sunday. Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen originally from New York, was sitting in a car with his driver outside the village of Khan Touman, he reports, when a missile struck nearby the vehicle. ...

He says this is the fourth airstrike that has nearly hit him in the past month. Given the frequency of the near-misses, Abdul Kareem believes he is being targeted. “Locals had told me that I was being targeted by someone, but I hadn’t believed it before,” he says. “I just chalked it up to being in a war zone — bad things happen — but now it seems clear that someone is targeting me.”

Abdul Kareem is one of the last Western journalists covering the conflict in Syria from rebel-controlled territory. Earlier this year, he helped produce a series of exclusive CNN reports from Syria with journalist Clarissa Ward. His reporting has also been featured on the British outlets Channel 4 and Sky News.

Abdul Kareem’s reporting, much of it broadcast on his independent YouTube program Face the Truth, provides a unique perspective on the conflict in Syria. Episodes of the program have featured interviews with Syrian civilians living under government bombardment, leaders of the armed uprising, and even Western foreign fighters who have joined the conflict from abroad. At great personal risk to himself, Abdul Kareem’s reporting today stands as one of the only independent sources of information about life in rebel-held areas of the country.

New documents were released in the ongoing saga of Khaled el-Masri attempting to get the US to admit to torturing him and apologize.

CIA knew it had the wrong man, but kept him anyway

The embarrassing, and horrifying, case of Khaleed al Masri is hardly new. It has been known for a decade as a colossal example of CIA error in the agency’s pursuit of terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush.

But the recently released internal report makes it clear that the CIA’s failures in the Masri case were even more outrageous than previous accounts have suggested.

The report is heavily redacted – whole pages are blank – and the names of those involved have been removed. But enough is there to give a good understanding of what happened and what went wrong.

Adding to the sense of injustice: Even though the agency realized early on that Masri was the wrong man, it couldn’t figure out how to release him without having to acknowledge its mistake. The agency eventually dumped him unceremoniously in Albania and essentially pretended his arrest and detention had never happened.

The release of the report, which is 90 pages long and was written in July 2007, came in June after a Freedom of Information Act suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Masri in his decade-long attempt to get an official apology from the United States.

None of the Americans involved in Masri’s detention has been held to account, notes Masri’s attorney, Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program. Indeed, the two men most responsible for the errors were promoted. Meanwhile, Dakwar said, Masri is haunted to this day by the psychological torture inflicted by his detention in the CIA’s secret Afghan holding center and by the stigma of having been snatched in a CIA anti-terror investigation.

The tale has important lessons for the country, where one of the two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump, has promised to reinstate the use of torture against terrorism suspects and the Obama administration has declined to punish anyone for the excesses of the Bush-era rendition program.

Donald Trump's anti-terror policies sound a lot like war crimes

Instead of tacking to the center like a lot of pundits thought he would when he became the Republican nominee, Donald Trump seems intent to double down on his moral depravity, calling for outright war crimes in his quest to become US president.

On Wednesday he told a crowd of supporters that to defeat Isis, the US needs to “fight fire with fire”. As NBC News put it, this “seemingly [made] the case for using similarly brutal tactics as terror groups like Isis have in the past.” He once again declared the US should return to waterboarding terror suspects, a tactic that is obviously torture (and was once prosecuted as such after the second world war). And he has repeated his calls for inventing “interrogation” techniques that are “worse” than waterboarding as well.

Trump, as you will remember, spent much of the GOP primary spouting all sorts of nonsense about how waterboarding “works” (even though we know it doesn’t), that he would happily bring back torture in the “war on terror” fight (even though it’s blatantly illegal) and that he would kill the family members of suspected terrorists (despite the general agreement across the political spectrum that that is a war crime as well). ...

The amount of damage an unchecked Trump could do with the national security infrastructure in place – the CIA drone program, NSA warrantless spying, the ability to conduct unilateral war with no congressional approval, etc – is truly extraordinary. ... But instead of “Trump proofing” our national security apparatus, Congress is in the midst of attempting to expand it. Democrats want to expand and entrench the secret and due process-free terror watch list, and Republicans are attempting to dramatically expand the FBI’s ability to to conduct electronic surveillance completely free of any court oversight.

Trump’s statements should be yet another reminder of the terrifying powers of the US president, and we should be doing everything we can to curtail that power, rather than expand it.

Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy

Retired US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.

Obama defied political pressure from hawks in Congress and the military to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government, fearing that doing so would increase the bloodshed and provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with the justification for deeper incursions into the country. ...

Breedlove attempted to influence the administration through several channels, emailing academics and retired military officials, including former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark, for assistance in building his case for supplying military assistance to Ukrainian forces battling Russian-backed separatists. ...

“Phil, can’t we get a statement to counteract the Russians on use of force? what can I do to help? If the Ukrainians lose control of the narrative, the Russians will see it as an open door,” wrote retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who forwarded on his messages with Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. He also passed along concerns from the Bulgarian president that Bulgaria might be Russia’s next target. ...

The emails were released by D.C. Leaks, a database run by self-described “hacktivists” who are collecting the communications of elite stakeholders such as political parties, major politicians, political campaigns, and the military. The website currently has documents revealing some internal communications of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, among others.

US ready to work with Russia to fight Syria's Islamic extremists

The US is seeking closer cooperation with Russia in the fight against Islamic State and al-Qaida’s Syrian branch in the hope that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, will stop attacking the mainstream rebels who are fighting to overthrow him.

US officials said the plan under discussion would also require western and Arab-backed opposition forces to distance themselves from Jabhat al-Nusra, linked to al-Qaida, to avoid being hit in airstrikes. Both Jabhat al-Nusra and Isis are proscribed by the UN and seen as legitimate targets by Washington and Moscow. ...

News of the latest US initiative, reported by the Washington Post, came as the UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, admitted that conditions were still not ripe to reconvene the suspended Geneva peace talks before a 1 August deadline for the start of a “political transition” in Damascus.

The paper said the Obama administration had submitted a proposal that includes “enhanced information sharing”, though no decisions had been made. Russia is also being asked to pressure Assad to halt the bombing of armed rebel groups that are supported by the US.

The US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, said that if Russia would “do the right thing in Syria – that’s an important condition – as in all cases with Russia, we’re willing to work with them.”

Syria Strategy: US seeks new partnership with Russia on fighting terrorists

Assad: West Cooperating With Syria Against ISIS

Speaking today in an interview for Australia’s SBS Network, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad confirmed that several Western nations, including Australia, have been directly, albeit secretly, cooperating with his government on the war against various Islamist factions.

“They attack us politically and then they send officials to deal with us under the table, especially the security,” Assad noted, adding that they “only repeat what the United States want them to say.”

Assad’s comments aren’t a complete shock, as several reports to this effect, including one in December by Sy Hersh, have been making the rounds throughout the war, suggesting that some in the US, particularly the Pentagon, have been keen to use allies as a back-channel way to share intelligence against ISIS and al-Qaeda with Assad.

Al-Qaida leader: 'grave consequences' for US if Boston bomber executed

Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has warned the US of the “gravest consequences” if Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or any other Muslim prisoner is executed.

Tsarnaev, named in Zawahiri’s online video message, was sentenced to death by lethal injection last year for the 2013 bomb attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Tsarnaev committed the bombing with his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police in the manhunt that followed it.

“If the US administration kills our brother the hero Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or any Muslim,” Zawahri said in an online video, “[it] will bring America’s nationals the gravest consequences.” ...

Zawahri urged Muslims to take captive as many westerners as possible, especially those whose countries had joined the “Crusaders’ Campaign led by the United States”.
The Egyptian-born militant, sitting in front of green drapes, urged sympathizers to hold “crusaders” hostage in order to bargain for Muslim prisoners’ release. He said that western nations “only understand the language of force”. ...

Tsarnaev is being held at a high-security prison in Florence, Colorado, while his attorneys appeal the death sentence.

Former US drone technicians speak out against programme in Brussels

Former military technicians Cian Westmoreland and Lisa Ling both worked on the high-tech infrastructure on which the drones flying in Afghanistan rely. They have now come forward as critics of the US drone programme.

At an event in Brussels this week, they spoke about strategic flaws in the drone programme and the risks of civilian casualties in drone warfare. On Thursday, they attended the parliamentary hearing where campaigners spoke of the impact of drones on civilian populations and the lack of compensation or recognition of their losses for the families of those killed and wounded. ...

Westmoreland told the Guardian he was driven to speak out after being given a performance award congratulating him because the signals relay station in Kandahar he had helped build had contributed to 2,400 missions and 200 “enemy kills”. This made him feel “horrible”, he said.

Adding to his queasiness, drone operators in Kandahar revelled in showing colleagues “drone porn” – footage of strikes – he said. “That never really sat well with me.” ...

To Ling, the hearing seemed to be “the first stages of where the EU is going as a whole” on drones, she said. “I feel like they are exploring issues of what does participation in the drone war or extrajudicial killing actually look like.” Ling said she had been amazed by “how little the public knew” about the US drone programme and its consequences. The narrative around drones had been “sanitised”, she said.

Official Tally of Wiretaps Belies Government Scare Stories About Encryption

Despite Obama administration claims that encryption is increasingly obstructing law enforcement investigations, the authoritative annual Wiretap Report from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts released on Thursday found that encryption was less of a problem in 2015 than the year before.

The report’s figures include all court-ordered wiretaps, but not those conducted without a warrant for “foreign intelligence” purposes by the National Security Agency and others.

Despite a 21 percent increase in wiretaps authorized by state courts overall between 2014 and 2015, the number of cases where law enforcement encountered encryption decreased from 22 to seven.

And out of 1,403 wiretaps authorized by federal judges, only six encountered encrypted communication. Two of those were decrypted by law enforcement, leaving only four that could not be deciphered.

That means that in 2015, out of 4,148 total wiretaps, only 11 encountered a form of encryption law enforcement could not break. That’s about one quarter of one percent.

Puerto Rico Debate: Is Debt Bill Dangerous Colonialism or Vital Protection from Wall St?

Major New Brazil Events Expose the Fraud of Dilma’s Impeachment — and Temer’s Corruption

From the start of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification was that she used a budget trick known as pedaladas (“peddling”: illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt. But this week, as the Senate conducts her impeachment trial, that accusation was obliterated: The Senate’s own expert report concluded there was “no indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any such budgetary maneuvers. As the Associated Press put it: “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” In other words, the Senate’s own objective experts gutted the primary claim as to why impeachment was something other than a coup. ...

But so obviously, impeachment was never about any alleged lawbreaking by Dilma — that was just the excuse to remove a democratically elected president for ideological reasons — which is why the destruction of the primary legal charge against her has barely dented the impeachment momentum. Even the vehemently anti-Dilma paper Estadão documented how leading impeachment advocates this week instantly shifted their rationale: from claiming that pedaladas requires her impeachment to proclaiming that it was never actually important in the first place. Those are the actions of people devoted to an end without caring about the justification: They are determined to impeach Dilma for ideological reasons, so the destruction of the legal case against her makes no difference. ...

As glaring as [Dilma’s installed replacement, Michel] Temer’s corruption and the fraud of Dilma’s impeachment already were, two new events this week bolster it even further. First, Temer had dinner with two members of Brazil’s Supreme Court — the body presiding over the corruption investigation and impeachment proceedings. ... Second, at the same time that Temer is privately meeting with key judges, reports have surfaced that he is working hard on an agreement to “save the skin” of [president of the lower House, Eduardo] Cunha, one of the country’s most corrupt politicians. Temer met at night with Cunha just this week. One plan being actively discussed would allow Cunha to resign and then have his criminal case assigned to favorable judges. Another provides that Cunha merely resign his presidency to maximize the chances that he will not be expelled from the House altogether. ...

Just think about what has happened when it comes to control over the world’s fifth most populous (and very oil-rich) country. The democratically elected president was impeached despite no allegations of personal corruption — by politicians who are knee-deep in bribery and kickback scandals. The primary pretext used to impeach her has just been debunked by the Senate’s own independent expert report. The corruption-plagued man they installed in her place — who currently has a 70 percent disapproval rating, and whom 60 percent of the country wants impeached — is now secretly meeting with the very judges whose supposed independence, credibility, and integrity were the prime argument against calling this a “coup,” all while he plots to save his bribery-enriched fellow party member. And while all this happens, they are blithely proceeding to impose a right-wing agenda of austerity and privatization that democracy would never allow.

Adnan Syed to get a new trial after 'Serial' podcast

A Maryland judge on Thursday ordered a new trial for Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction was put into question by the 2014 podcast Serial.

Syed, now 36, is serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee, 18. His lawyers had sought a new trial amid questions about the fairness of the case that were raised by the podcast.

Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Martin Welch ordered Syed's conviction vacated because of ineffective legal help.

"Petitioner's request for a new trial is hereby granted," Welch wrote in his order.

Brexit cannot be cancelled or delayed, says François Hollande

The French president, François Hollande, has stepped up the pressure on the UK over its timetable to leave the EU. ...

“The decision has been taken; it cannot be delayed and it cannot be cancelled. Now [the British] have to face the consequences,” Hollande told reporters.

“Being in the European Union has advantages. And that’s … what the British are starting to understand,” added the president, alluding to voters who opted to leave but had since expressed regrets. “Those who were tempted by the Brexit are starting to think it over.”

Hollande said a speedy Brexit “would avert all the uncertainties and instability, especially in the economic and financial domains. The faster it goes, the better it will be for them.”

His timetable is in stark contrast to those of Michael Gove and Theresa May, the leading candidates to replace Cameron as Conservative party leader and prime minister, who have said they would not trigger the article 50 process until the end of the year.

But it was echoed in Bratislava by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission, which wants the process to be triggered as soon as a new Conservative leader is elected in September, though it cannot force the UK to do so.

Meet the Two Trans Women Making History as First to Win Major-Party Primary Elections

Wow, looky, there's a country where they are unwilling to accept rigged elections.

Austrian presidential election result overturned and must be held again

Austria’s Freedom party will get another go at providing the first far-right president in the European Union, after the country’s constitutional court annulled the result of May’s presidential election.

The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the run-off vote, in which Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party (FPÖ) narrowly lost to Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen, would have to be repeated across the whole country after an investigation revealed irregularities in the count of the vote in several constituencies.

The unprecedented ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office. Hofer had lost out to his rival in a knife-edge election on 22 May by only 30,863 votes. ...

The Freedom party contested the outcome of May’s vote after claiming to have detected formal irregularities in 94 out of 117 constituencies, submitting a 150-page formal complaint to the constitutional court.

Over the course of the investigation, it emerged that several counting centres had begun to process postal votes on the eve of the election rather than on the day after, as Austrian electoral law requires.

Interviews with more than 60 witnesses revealed that officials responsible for counting votes had often paid little regard to official guidelines, starting to count without election observers present in the room. Some election observers, in turn, signed off protocols they hadn’t read.

Austria elections: court annuls presidential election result

Wow. Americans Really, Really Don't Like Trump or Clinton

Via a new Gallup poll, more evidence comes Friday that the nation's electorate really doesn't like this year's leading presidential candidates.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has the dubious distinction of being the most unfavorably viewed of any candidate over the past seven decades—displacing 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater from the bottom spot.

The poll offers no smug moment for Clinton: her scores put her among the bottom four presidential candidates, with scores barely better than those of Goldwater. ...

Trump's highly favorable rating is just 16 percent, and his highly unfavorable rating is 42. Goldwater's highly favorable rating was 17, for comparison, and his highly unfavorable rating was just 26 percent.

Clinton, for her part, has a highly favorable rating of 22 percent and a highly unfavorable rating of 33 percent.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in May showed voters choosing to vote against Trump or Clinton, rather than for one of the candidates. 

And an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll also released in May showed that 60 percent of respondents said they "dislike" or "hate" Clinton, and 63 percent felt that way about Trump.

Mass Arrests Expected at Republican and Democratic Conventions

Loretta Lynch to follow FBI guidance in Hillary Clinton email investigation

The US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, intends to accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and federal agents make in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, a justice department official said on Friday.

“The attorney general expects to receive and accept the determinations and findings of the department’s career prosecutors and investigators, as well as the FBI director,” the official told the Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. ...

Lynch was expected to discuss the matter further at a summit on Friday in Aspen, Colorado.

This revelation comes amid a controversy surrounding an impromptu private discussion that Lynch had aboard her plane on the tarmac at a Phoenix airport on Monday with Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton. That get-together has been criticized as inappropriate by Republicans and some Democrats at a time when the justice department has been investigating whether classified information was mishandled through Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

An excellent article worth a full read. Here's a taste to get you started:

The Roots of Hillary's Infatuation with War

In the early 1970s, Hillary Clinton was a familiar face in the left-liberal milieu she had cast her lot with: a volunteer for the Yale Law School watchdog committee to monitor fairness in the trial of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale; a worker for Marian Wright Edelman’s Washington Research Project (the precursor of the Children’s Defense Fund); a member of the legal staff of the Nixon impeachment inquiry. In one cause, however, she was mostly absent and unaccounted for: the protest against the Vietnam War. A friend of the Clintons, Greg Craig, told the New York Times reporter Mark Landler that while others in their circle were “heavily involved” in antiwar activism, “I don’t remember Hillary having much to do with that.” Clinton gave two pages to the war in her memoir Living History. She sympathized there with the burden of responsibility borne by President Johnson for “a war he’d inherited,” which turned out to be “a tragic mistake.” Johnson is her focus: the man of power who rode a tiger he could not dismount. On a second reading, “mistake” may seem too light a word to characterize a war that destroyed an agrarian culture forever and killed between one and three million Vietnamese. “Mistake” is also the word that Hillary Clinton has favored in answering questions about her vote for the Iraq War.

As World Burns, Richest Nations Can't Decide When to End Fossil Fuel Handouts

The world's richest nations have failed to agree on a deadline to phase out fossil fuels subsidies—a commitment energy ministers made in 2009—stirring new fears over the impact of the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that go toward keeping dirty energy afloat every year.

Energy ministers from the Group of 20 (G20) met in Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss bringing those subsidies to a close after the Group of 7 (G7), the world's seven wealthiest economies, last month committed to eliminate "inefficient" fossil fuel handouts by 2025. A report published in 2015 by the climate group Oil Change International found that the combined G20 subsidies for oil, gas, and coal production amounts to roughly $444 billion a year.

But despite ambitious pledges during the COP21 summit in Paris last year and long-term campaigning from climate groups, who urged an even earlier phase-out deadline of 2020, officials could not agree on a target date.

According to the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua, as the two-day meeting wrapped up without a firm plan in place, ministers released a communique and three other draft plans that reportedly "encouraged" G20 members to "formulate development strategies and action plans to boost renewable energy investment and consumption."

Fracking-Affected Families Plead with President Obama: 'We Need Help.'

More than 100 families personally affected by the fracking industry have written to President Barack Obama demanding that he meet with them—as he often does with fossil fuel executives—ahead of the Democratic National Convention later this month.

The letter (pdf), organized by the Pittsburgh-based, all-volunteer group Friends of the Harmed, asks Obama and ranking Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials "to meet with our families to hear the personal testimonies—how they have been harmed by the oil and gas industry, and how they have been abandoned by local, state, and federal agencies and officials."

It is signed by people like Edwin and Karen Atwood of Warren, Pennsylvania, who say their "water well was contaminated by both drilling and hydrofracking;" Debaura James of Silver City, New Mexico, which she calls "a sacrifice zone" to fossil fuels; and Randolph Hurst of Slate Hill, New York, who says, "My wife and I both have health issues and all of our concerns and objections to the construction of a fracked gas power plant near our home have been dismissed by local, state, and federal officials."...

Indeed, said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, which is backing the letter: "Pennsylvania, the host state of the DNC, has been ravaged by fracking, yet President Obama and the Democratic establishment continues to ignore the negative impacts it has on people there and across the country. We need our federal and state agencies to stop sweeping fracking harms under the rug."

As such, Obama, who will attend the convention, has an opportunity to "provide bold leadership and acknowledge that fracking comes at a cost to families and to communities," said Dana Dolney, director of Friends of the Harmed and publisher of Shalefield Stories. That leadership, the letter notes, would surely "amplify this message to the DNC on our behalf."

Victory in Canada as Court Strikes Down Northern Gateway Pipeline

Environmentalists and Indigenous rights advocates celebrated on Thursday after a judge struck down the Canadian government's 2014 approval of a controversial pipeline project in a landmark ruling.

The court found (pdf) that the government had not done enough to consult with First Nations communities that would be impacted by the building of the Northern Gateway pipeline, approved under then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. ...

The pipeline would have transported tar sands crude from Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia. Opponents have long warned that it would expand the use of dangerous fossil fuels, delay the implementation of clean energy, and increase dangers faced by the environment and impacted communities, including possible violation of First Nations treaty rights.

Critics have also pointed out that Northern Gateway's parent company, Enbridge, has a history of environmental destruction, including a massive pipeline rupture that spilled close to one million gallons of crude oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek in 2010—eventually forcing the company to pay $75 million in cleanup costs.

Karen Wristen, executive director of Living Oceans Society, one of the plaintiffs in the legal challenge, said Thursday, "We know from Enbridge's own shoddy public safety record that tar sands oil spills have devastating consequences. Today's decision is a victory across the board: for the wildlife living in this marine environment, and for the communities living at its shores."

Also of Interest

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

In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears

Most of what you do online is illegal. Let's end the absurdity

Iraq: Fallujah is liberated, now what?

Why Is the United States Still Backing Saudi Arabia in Yemen?

A Little Night Music

Angela Strehli, Stevie Ray & Jimmie Vaughan - You were Wrong

Angela Strehli - You Don't Love Me

Angela Strehli - Blue Highway

The Blues Broads - Two Bit Texas Town

Angela Strehli - The Sun Is Shining

Stevie Ray Vaughan & Angela Strehli - Feel So Good

Angela Strehli Band - Soul Shake