This evening's music features Chicago blues singer and mandolin player Johnny Young.

Johnny Young - Stealin'

Here are some stories from the post:

We dream about drones, said 13-year-old Yemeni before his death in a CIA strike

A 13-year-old boy killed in Yemen last month by a CIA drone strike had told the Guardian just months earlier that he lived in constant fear of the “death machines” in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.

“I see them every day and we are scared of them,” said Mohammed Tuaiman, speaking from al-Zur village in Marib province, where he died two weeks ago.

“A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”

Much of Mohammed’s life was spent living in fear of drone strikes. In 2011 an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.

The drone that would kill Mohammed struck on 26 January in Hareeb, about an hour from his home. The drone hit the car carrying the teenager, his brother-in-law Abdullah Khalid al-Zindani and a third man.

“I saw all the bodies completely burned, like charcoal,” Mohammed’s older brother Maqded said. “When we arrived we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t move the bodies so we just buried them there, near the car.”

It’s Time for U.S. and European Allies to Step Back From Ukrainian Conflict

On a weekend when the United States augmented its program of financial aid to beleaguered Ukraine, President Barack Obama himself conceded to the American TV audience (those not watching Super Bowl preparations) that the official U.S. narrative concerning the war in Ukraine is not true. ...

The Russian president, according to Hillary Clinton a year ago, is emulating Hitler by invading and seizing lands with ethnic Russian populations to provide additional “living space” (in Germany’s case) for the homeland (an expression Bush-II America picked up from prewar Germany). But even Friedman found Clinton’s comparison overdone at the time, although he now finds merit in it.

Obama does not. Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria last weekend on CNN, Obama said that “Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Maidan not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protest in the Maidan (in February 2014) and (Ukraine’s then-president Viktor) Yanukovych fleeing after we (the U.S. and the European Union) had made a deal to broker power in Ukraine.” ...

Nuclear war is considered a possibility by both sides, for the first time since 1990. But why? The U.S. and its European allies have been the aggressors in this whole unnecessary confrontation. They are the ones who can call it off. There is zero gain in it.

When you’ve Lost Bernie Sanders: How Netanyahu destroyed the Israel Lobby

Senator Bernie Sanders, the most consistent and prominent progressive in the US Senate, has decided to skip the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Congress on March 3, which was orchestrated by Israel’s ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and Speaker of the House John Boehner in an attempt to derail President Obama’s negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. It is Bibi’s Kanye West moment.

Sanders’s announcement may well signal a turning point in the domestic politics of Mideast policy. ... He, like many on the American left, held up Israel in general as a progressive cause, regardless of the country’s colonial actions in the Palestinian West Bank or its illegal blockade of Gaza ...

The Israel lobbies as a project of Jewish nationalism have long depended primarily on three tactics for their success. 1) They brutally punish those critical of Israeli policy (no matter how justified the criticism) with boycotts, smears and blackballing; 2) They marshal American Jewish groups into unanimity in support of Israel regardless of the latter’s feelings about certain policies, and 3) they use political donations to shape Congressional and general political discourse on Israel in official circles. ...

This stampede of Democratic legislators away from Netanyahu’s speech disrupts principles 2) and 3) above, and makes it difficult for the Israel lobbies to implement 1) consistently. Biden has been close for his entire career to the positions of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for 16,000 smaller lobbies that throw millions into congressional races. He may not have another race to run, and for the lobbies to try to smear or punish him would surely backfire on them. It would also signal to younger politicians that it is dangerous to take their money because they are fickle and intolerant of the slightest dissent. I have argued that for many reasons, Israel is becoming more a Republican Party project than a Democratic one. Many in the GOP agree and hope this development will bring US Jews, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, over to the Republicans. But another development is possible, which is that Jewish Democrats may become less supportive of an increasingly far rightwing Israel.

By overreaching, Netanyahu may be shattering the hammer his partisans in the US have used to destroy critics of his policies in America. And Mideast policy in the US may never be quite the same.

Greece's month of living dangerously: Who will blink first - Alexis Tsipras or Angela Merkel?

“After five years of bailout barbarity, our people cannot take any more.” Anybody hoping for a hint of compromise from Greece’s new leader, Alexis Tsipras, will have been left disappointed by the Syriza leader’s hard-line stance with the nation’s international creditors.

Mr Tsipras’s defiant parliamentary debut as prime minister – underlining a string of spending commitments such as raising the minimum wage in breach of Greece’s two €240bn (£178bn) bailouts –will have had Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel tearing her hair out in Berlin.

But Syriza’s refusal to accept the next €7.2bn payment due from the Troika of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, sets Europe on course for a frantic 18 days of diplomacy before 28 February, when Greece formally leaves the programme and faces the impossible prospect of funding itself in international markets.

Greece’s firebrand government wants a new deal and a bridging loan to get there – but so far the rest of the eurozone is refusing to budge and pressing Greece to honour its commitments. The lack of room for compromise leaves Europe playing the biggest game of “chicken” in decades, with the prospect of savage consequences for Greece and Europe’s still nascent economic recovery. ...

Without an extension of the existing deal or a new programme, the ECB is likely to cut off funds for the Greek banks from the ELA. That leaves Greece’s central bank needing to find other means to support its banking system: the only realistic way of doing that is by pulling out of the euro and issuing its own currency. Without a compromise, or a surrender from Syriza before that, the risk is that Greeks would wake up within days to a system of emergency capital controls to stop cash fleeing out of the country to avoid a devalued “new drachma”.