Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. Enjoy!

"The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam."

-- Salman Rushdie

News and Opinion

Guantanamo prisoner says Saudi 'royal' involved in terrorism

An accused al-Qaida bomb-maker who went to college in Arizona told military officials at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he believed an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family was part of an effort to recruit him for violent extremist acts before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a newly released transcript.

Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi said a religious figure in Saudi Arabia used the term "your highness" during a telephone conversation with a man, just before urging al-Sharbi to return to the U.S. and take part in a plot against the U.S. that would involve learning to fly a plane. ...

Al-Sharbi described the conversation in June to the Periodic Review Board, which assesses whether Guantanamo prisoners can be released. The Pentagon on Thursday posted a transcript, with parts blacked out, on the website of the board, which includes representatives from six U.S. agencies and departments.

The statement is convoluted and lacks important details, such as whether the "religious figure" might be close to any Saudi officials. It does not indicate who the Saudi royal might be. The term can be used for thousands of members of the Saudi royal family; al-Sharbi did not say he met the man. ...

Saudi Arabia has battled with al-Qaida over the years, but there have been consistent allegations, including by Guantanamo prisoners, of financial and other support by officials and members of the royal family for al-Qaida-linked charities, said terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann, who reviewed the 28-page transcript at the request of The Associated Press.

"The Saudi royal family is quite large and diverse, and it is no secret that various members were once reputed for their patronage of Islamist causes and charities," Kohlmann said. "In that light, it is hardly ridiculous that al-Sharbi would have encountered a Saudi royal who sympathized with al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden." ...
When captured, the FBI found a buried a cache of documents nearby, including an envelope from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that contained al-Sharbi's flight certificate.

‘Unbelievable that US strike on Syrian army was mistake' – fmr MI5 agent

Russia says ceasefire at risk after US bombing of Syrian troops

Russia has warned there is a “very big question mark” over a precarious ceasefire in Syria less than a week old after the US bombing of Syrian army positions in the east of the country.

The US has offered condolences and insisted that the airstrikes were a mistake. It said it had targeted Tharda mountain where a Syrian government offensive was seeking to capture Isis positions overlooking the Deir ez-Zour military airport. It said it would carry out an investigation.

Russia’s military said it was told by the Syrian army that at least 62 soldiers had been killed in the Deir ez-Zour air raid and more than 100 wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 90 soldiers were killed in the strike.

An Australian defence department statement said its jets, part of the US-led anti-Isis coalition, had targeted what had been thought to be Islamic State (Isis) fighters. “Overnight, coalition aircraft were conducting airstrikes in eastern Syria against what was believed to be a Daesh [Isis] fighting position that the coalition had been tracking for some time,” the statement said. ...

Russia’s foreign ministry said in a strongly worded statement that the strikes were “on the boundary between criminal negligence and direct connivance with Islamic State terrorists”. ...

Damascus claimed it had succeeded in taking Tharda despite the US bombing, and rejected Washington’s insistence that it had hit Syrian troops in error. A foreign ministry statement said that Syrian positions had been repeatedly attacked in strikes that were “on purpose and planned in advance”.

'US should be ashamed of Deir ez-Zor strike, it's really disgraceful' - Assad's adviser

ISIS Overruns Syrian Army Base After US Bombings

In the defense of the Deir Ezzor Airport, the Syrian military has long depended on an army base in Jebel Tharda to repel ISIS advances. That base has been lost this weekend, after a disastrous series of US-led airstrikes killed a large number of Syrian troops defending the base, and ISIS quickly overran what was left.

For over 20 minutes, the coalition warplanes attacked the base. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the attack killed at least 83 Syrian troops and wounded 120 others. The US Central Command claimed they thought the base belonged to ISIS.

It does now. With the forces decimated by the US attack, ISIS quickly overran the base. Syrian state media claimed an ongoing effort to recover the site, but it does not appear to have been successful yet, as ISIS managed to shoot down a Syrian warplane, flying out of Deir Ezzor Airport, over Jebel Tharda.

Syria: Truce failing as US air strike "meant to hit IS group" kills dozens of regime soldiers

More US Troops Arrive at Iraqi Airbase South of Mosul

Reports out of the area around Qayara say that hundreds of additional US ground troops have arrived at the Qayara Air Base, to join several hundred troops already there. The troops are expected to provide “logistic support” for the Mosul invasion. ...

Though the Pentagon has long warned that it is unlikely the Iraqi military is really ready to take the enormous city of Mosul, US officials have suggested that the invasion could begin as soon as October. Kurdish forces have been seizing ISIS territory north of Mosul and annexing it into their territory, which has Iraq eager to secure as much territory as possible, setting up what are likely the battle lines for the next war in the region.

Iraqi families begin returning to Falluja after city declared free of Isis

Families have begun returning to Falluja three months after the Iraqi city was declared fully liberated from Islamic State (Isis).

Forty families were cleared to return after they passed background checks and their neighbourhoods were deemed safe, said Suhaib al-Rawi, the governor of the western Anbar province.

In total 236 families returned on Saturday to Falluja and surrounding suburbs, he added. Falluja, 40 miles (65 km) west of Baghdad, had a pre-conflict population of more than 300,000 people.

Bolstering Calls to Stop Arming Saudis, Data Confirms Targeting of Civilian Sites

Amid "unrelenting attacks on civilians and on civilian infrastructure" and as a new campaign aims to block the Obama administration from selling $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, new reporting sheds further light on the devastation the kingdom's military coalition, backed by the U.S. and U.K., has wrought on Yemen's population.

Over one-third of all the coalition's air strikes in Yemen have hit civilian targets like schools and hospitals, the Guardian reports Friday.

In fact, there have been "repeated strikes on school buildings and hospitals."

In five of the past 18 months, the Guardian continues, "the Saudi-led coalition hit more non-military sites than military."

Turkey blocks Syrian refugees from resettlement in the US – for having degrees

More than 1,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey have been blocked from resettlement in the US and other countries because they have university qualifications.

The refugees were approved for resettlement by American officials, before being blocked – sometimes just days before their departure date – by the Turkish authorities.

The news further complicates a much-hyped UN summit on resettlement in New York on Monday, where developed countries are being encouraged to resettle more refugees, 86% of whom live in the developing world.

Countries such as Turkey, which hosts more refugees than any other, are keen for western partners to share the responsibility. But this development suggests that they are also unwilling to let countries like the US cherry-pick the most educated refugees, and leave behind the rest.

“We believe that the most vulnerable need to be helped before others,” a senior Turkish official told the Guardian this week.

CDU loses votes in Berlin over migration

Boko Haram left an estimated 5 million people in Nigeria on the brink of famine

Seven years of war waged by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria has left 5 million people "in urgent need of food assistance" and 250,000 children severely malnourished, the International Rescue Committee announced this week.

As aid workers reached areas in recent months that had been inaccessible for years due to the presence of Boko Haram fighters, they have scaled up their efforts in light of the suffering they've encountered.

"What is most upsetting is that this looming famine is entirely man-made," said Sarah Ndikumana, the organization's country director in Nigeria. "We are seeing countless children under 5 on the verge of death because they were given no other option than to be caught in the middle of this war." ...

About 15 percent of children under 5 years old in northern NIgeria are reportedly malnourished, and the United Nations estimates an average of 184 children will die each day as a result of starvation and other health problems linked to the food emergency.

"It's probably one of the biggest health crises in the world right now, possibly the biggest in terms of number of people affected," said Natalie Roberts, an emergency doctor who has been managing the response for international medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.” ...

The Post editors concede that one — and only one — of the programs that Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed — namely, the domestic metadata program, because it “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.” ... But that metadata program wasn’t revealed by the Post, but rather by The Guardian. Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM. ...

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Secret government electronic surveillance documents must be released, judge says

In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government's use of electronic surveillance.

US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys, the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.

A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls.

For decades, court records relating to these documents have typically been sealed in their entirety, including even the docket numbers. Next week's release, which is in response to a three-year-old petition filed by VICE News, will be a crucial first step in learning details about the electronic surveillance orders, and the beginning of a multilayered process that will ultimately lead to the disclosure of thousands of pen register applications dating back at least five years. ...

Orders authorizing the use of a pen register are initially sealed to prevent tipping off the subject of the investigation that their communications are being monitored. However, courts rarely reexamine the need for continued secrecy after the investigation is closed. As a result, virtually all pen register applications and orders have remained hidden from public view years or even decades after the investigation has ended.

Russia stays loyal to Kremlin in election with record low turnout

Russia’s new parliament will be overwhelmingly loyal to the Kremlin, after elections marked by a record low turnout threw up few surprises.

With more than 93% of the votes counted on Monday morning, the United Russia party, backed by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and led by its prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, had won 54% of the vote. The other three parties to clear the 5% barrier required to make it into the Duma are all broadly loyal to the Kremlin line. United Russia will take more than three-quarters of the 450 seats in the Duma.

The communists, and the far-right nationalists of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic party took about 13% of the vote, while the liberal Yabloko party and the opposition Parnas garnered miserly returns. Parnas was the party led by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who was shot dead outside the Kremlin last year. Before the elections, many had criticised the liberal opposition for failing to unite on a single ticket. ...

Turnout in the election was just 47%, the lowest in the history of modern Russia. In major cities, the turnout was even lower, with just 28% of eligible voters making it to the polls in Moscow.

In Crimea, which was voting in the first parliamentary elections since annexation by Russia in 2014, turnout was also low. Only 40% of Crimeans had cast their ballots with two hours of voting remaining, and the turnout was on course to be lower than the last time Crimeans voted in Ukrainian parliamentary elections.

FEC Republicans Kill Attempt to Block Foreign Money in U.S. Elections

A proposal to begin writing new regulations to staunch the flow of money from foreign-owned corporations into U.S. elections is the latest victim of the Federal Election Commission’s chronic deadlock when it comes to anything remotely like a reform measure. ...

At Thursday’s meeting, the GOP commissioners’ opposition was so categorical they declined even to support beginning the process of writing new FEC regulations to prevent corporations that are wholly-owned by foreign governments from putting unlimited money into the U.S. political process. (They did allow that they might consider such a proposal in the future.)

The main proposal on foreign money discussed at the meeting came from one of the FEC’s Democratic members, Ellen Weintraub, and was intended to address a peculiar loophole created by the 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

Retiring NYPD Commissioner William Bratton Claims Police Will Reform From Within. Why Haven’t They?

On his last day at the helm of the largest police force in the country, Commissioner William Bratton ended his 46 years as a police officer with a parting thought: Police reform will happen from within.

His words, coming at a time when the public’s confidence in the police officers sworn to protect them is at a historic low and advocates in New York and across the country are demanding faster, more radical transformations to police departments, couldn’t have sounded more tone-deaf and reactionary.

In a New York Times op-ed he opened by billing himself a “reformer,” Bratton shut down the growing chorus of critics demanding more police regulation and oversight:

There are police reformers from outside the profession who think that changing police culture is a matter of passing regulations, establishing oversight bodies and more or less legislating a new order. It is not. Such oversight usually has only marginal impact. What changes police culture is leadership from within.

In other words, only cops can change cops. Except so far they haven’t.

“If police departments could reform themselves from within, we wouldn’t be in a national crisis of police abuse and lack of accountability of which New York is ground zero,” Monifa Bandele, a member of the New York-based Communities United for Police Reform, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “He is no reformer but is part of the problem because of his inability to acknowledge the harm done by his policies and under his leadership, or have any perspective on experiences outside of his own.”

Don't Celebrate Just Yet: Median Household Income In a 20-Year Decline

Hundreds of Thousands March in Germany Against TTIP, CETA

Hundreds of thousands took to city streets across Germany on Saturday as they marched against a pair of corporate-backed trade deals they say will undermine democracy, attack workers and local economies, and accelerate the threats posed by corporate hegemony and global warming.

Taking aim at both the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), European Union deals with the United States and Canada respectively, opponents say the agreements are not really concerned with expanding trade but rather increasing corporate power.

"CETA and TTIP threaten environmental and consumer protection for millions of people in Europe and North America," said Jennifer Morgan, co-executive director of Greenpeace International. "These agreements will weaken food safety laws, environmental legislation, banking regulations and undermine the sovereign powers of nations."

#StopCetaTTIP: Hamburg: 65.00, Köln: 55.000, Berlin: 70.000, München: 25.000, FFM: 50.000, Stuttgart: 40.000, Leipzig: 15.000 WAHNSINN!

— TTIP & CETA stoppen! (@TTIP_Demo) September 17, 2016

Tolle Bilder aus #Stuttgart – 40.000 protestieren für einen gerechten Welthandel! Vielen DANK Euch! #StopCetaTTIP pic.twitter.com/xt1p7CeyCD

— campact (@campact) September 17, 2016

An interesting article, worth a peek:

A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell

Most of us have wondered what we might do if we didn’t need to work – if we woke up one morning to discover we had won the lottery, say. We entertain ourselves with visions of multiple homes, trips around the world or the players we would sign after buying Arsenal. For many of us, the most tantalising aspect of such visions is the freedom it would bring: to do what one wants, when one wants and how one wants.

But imagine how that vision might change if such freedom were extended to everyone. Some day, probably not in our lifetimes but perhaps not long after, machines will be able to do most of the tasks that people can. At that point, a truly workless world should be possible. If everyone, not just the rich, had robots at their beck and call, then such powerful technology would free them from the need to submit to the realities of the market to put food on the table. ...

The digital revolution has helped supercharge globalisation, automated routine jobs, and allowed small teams of highly skilled workers to manage tasks that once required scores of people. The result has been a glut of labour that economies have struggled to digest.

Labour markets have coped the only way they are able: workers needing jobs have little option but to accept dismally low wages. Bosses shrug and use people to do jobs that could, if necessary, be done by machines. Big retailers and delivery firms feel less pressure to turn their warehouses over to robots when there are long queues of people willing to move boxes around for low pay. Law offices put off plans to invest in sophisticated document scanning and analysis technology because legal assistants are a dime a dozen. People continue to staff checkout counters when machines would often, if not always, be just as good. Ironically, the first symptoms of a dawning era of technological abundance are to be found in the growth of low-wage, low-productivity employment. And this mess starts to reveal just how tricky the construction of a workless world will be. The most difficult challenge posed by an economic revolution is not how to come up with the magical new technologies in the first place; it is how to reshape society so that the technologies can be put to good use while also keeping the great mass of workers satisfied with their lot in life. So far, we are failing.

Donald Trump threatens to sue New York Times over 'irresponsible intent'

Donald Trump has threatened to sue the New York Times.

In a tweet on Saturday night, the Republican nominee for president wrote: “My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting.” ...

“Irresponsible intent” does not exist under any standard or doctrine found in US law.

It is unclear what prompted Trump’s statement. However, the Times published a detailed investigation earlier on Saturday describing how the real estate developer had relied on nearly $900 million in taxpayer subsidies over the past four decades to build his fortune.

Green Party VP Ajamu Baraka on Human Rights Violations in the United States

An American tragedy: why are millions of trees dying across the country?

A quiet crisis playing out in US forests as huge numbers of trees succumb to drought, disease, insects and wildfire – much of it driven by climate change

JB Friday, a forest ecologist at the University of Hawaii, started getting calls from concerned landowners in Puna, which is on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s big island, in 2010. Their seemingly ubiquitous ohi’a trees were dying at an astonishing rate. The leaves would turn yellow, then brown, over just a few weeks – a startling change for an evergreen tree. ...

“It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem.”

Almost six years later and nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it. ...

But the plight of the ohi’a is not unique - it’s part of a quiet crisis playing out in forests across America. Drought, disease, insects and wildfire are chewing up tens of millions of trees at an incredible pace, much of it driven by climate change. ...

In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys”, rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis.

“We’re talking millions of trees killed, whole mountain sides dying,” Rizzo said. ...

Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.

The outbreak is “something like 10 times bigger than normal, I would argue a lot more than that,” Six said. “Basically a native insect is acting outside of the norm, because of climate change, and become an exotic in forests it’s never been before. ...

In a few decades, Americans might not even recognize forests they see, Rizzo said.

Nurses Union Slams AFL-CIO's Endorsement of Dakota Access Pipeline

Greenwashing Wars and the US Military

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has come in for criticism due to its lack of attention to the detrimental effects of wars and military operations on nature. Considering the degree of harm to the environment coming from these human activities, one would think that the organization might have set aside some time at its World Conservation Congress this past week in Hawaii to specifically address these concerns.

Yet, of the more than 1,300 workshops crammed into the six-day marathon environmental meeting in Honolulu, followed by four days of discussion about internal resolutions, nothing specifically addressed the destruction of the environment by military operations and wars.

The heavy funding the IUCN gets from governments is undoubtedly the rationale for not addressing this “elephant in the room” at a conference for the protection of the endangered planet – a tragic commentary on a powerful organization that should acknowledge all anti-environmental pressures.

At a presentation at the USA Pavilion during the conference, senior representatives of the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy regaled the IUCN audience of conservationists with tales about caring for the environment, including protecting endangered species, on hundreds of U.S. military bases in the United States.

The presenters did not mention what is done on the over 800 U.S. military bases outside of the United States. In the one-hour military style briefing, the speakers failed to mention the incredible amounts of fossil fuels used by military aircraft, ships and land vehicles that leave mammoth carbon footprints around the world. Also not mentioned were wars that kill humans, animals and plants; military exercise bombing of entire islands and large swaths of land; and the harmful effects of the burn pits which have incinerated the debris of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Each military service representative focused on the need for training areas to prepare the U.S. military to “keep peace in the world.” Of course, no mention was made of “keeping the peace” through wars of choice that have killed hundreds of thousands of persons, animals and plants, and the bombing of the cultural heritage in many areas around the world including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

Miranda Ballentine, Air Force Assistant Secretary for Installations, the Environment and Energy, said the U.S. Air Force has over 5,000 aircraft, more than all the airlines in the United States — yet she never mentioned how many gallons of jet fuel are used by these aircraft, nor how many people, animals and cultural sites the aircraft have bombed.

Canada Scrambles to Create National Climate Plan, But May Sign COP21 Without One

Canada's approach to tackling climate change grows ever more confused as the federal government scrambles to sign the Paris climate accord in early November—without actually putting forth a national plan to limit the country's soaring carbon emissions.

"Canada has a consistent history under successive Liberal and Conservative governments of making international carbon-cutting promises that it fails to honour, first under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and then again under the 2009 Copenhagen agreement," CBC reports.

"Ratification by Canada will help build the global momentum for action on climate change. To be taken seriously, however, we need a plan to actually turn those lovely words into deeds," said Keith Stewart, head of Greenpeace Canada's climate and energy campaign.

"We don't want to repeat the Kyoto Protocol experience where a Liberal government signed but then refused to spend any political capital to honour that commitment. Ultimately, the federal government has the policy tools it needs to act on climate and if Canada truly is back in the fight against global climate change then [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau must be prepared to do what is necessary even if it means angering the oil industry and their political allies," Stewart added. ...

Perhaps in an attempt to assuage critics, on Sunday the federal government unilaterally announced a carbon pricing plan. ...

Alberta, the heart of Canada's controversial tar sands industry, already has a climate pricing policy and does not believe it will be affected by the new federal plan—although Canada's Environment Minister gave no specific details about the new policy.

According to Alberta's carbon pricing rule, which is not yet enforced, by 2017 tar sands companies that exceed their emissions targets will have to pay $15 per excessive ton of CO2 into a "technology fund" to go toward researching new technologies to further reduce carbon emissions.

Critics charge that it will be more cost effective for tar sands companies to simply pay the fee rather than seek to reduce their emissions, rendering the goal of reducing emissions moot. The province plans to raise the carbon tax to $30 per ton by 2030.

Meanwhile, Alberta also announced Friday that it had just approved a whopping $4 billion worth of new tar sands projects.

Also of Interest

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

“We Are Adopting Principles of Fascism”

The House Intelligence Committee’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report

New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here Are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose

Secret papers from WWII espionage probe of Tribune could go public

Former Prisoners Are Leading the Fight Against Mass Incarceration

The US and Russia have less influence in Syria than they think

Michael Hudson: Celebrating the One Percent – Is Inequality Really Good for the Economy?

The Debate Is Over: Banking Has Become a Criminal Enterprise in the U.S.

Greece's old reliable: tourism boom helps soothe battered economy

A Little Night Music

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Goin Down to the River

Mississippi Fred McDowell - White Lightnin'

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Baby Please Don't Go

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Highway 61

Mississippi Fred McDowell - John Henry

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Shake 'Em On Down

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Freight Train Blues