Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Chicago blues singer and mandolin player Johnny Young. Enjoy!
Johnny Young & Big Walter Horton - Stockyard Blues & Strange Girl
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
-- C. S. Lewis
News and Opinion
Is Your Child a Terrorist? U.S. Government Questionnaire Rates Families at Risk for Extremism
Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept. ,,,
The rating system, part of a 36-page document dated May 2014 and titled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts,” suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as: “Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,” “Talk of Harming Self or Others,” and “Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity).” The ranking system is supposed to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies. ...
“The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical and social service employees to rate the communities, individuals and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. German called the criteria used for the ratings “subjective and specious.”
Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University, said that enlisting communities in the way the administration suggests in the guide, “leads a range of non-policing professionals to cast particular suspicion on Muslim populations and profile them for behaviors that have no real connection to criminality.”
Kundnani also questioned the science behind the rating system. “There’s no evidence to support the idea that terrorism can be substantively correlated with such factors to do with family, identity, and emotional well-being,” he said.
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.”
Guantánamo Bay: wheels of justice turn slowly – at $7,600 a minute
The Guantánamo Bay war court is now costing US taxpayers over $7,600 per minute, according to new Pentagon figures.
Carting the necessary personnel and support to the remote Cuban base has escalated costs for the military commissions, a memo from the top Pentagon commissions official indicated. The controversial tribunals at Guantánamo have attracted criticisms over their inefficiency from their inception, in addition to international concerns about their capacity to distribute justice. ...
Vaughn Ary, the retired marine two-star general who oversees the commissions as the chief convening authority, declared his dissatisfaction with the tempo and cost of the tribunals in a December memo.
Crunching the numbers behind the commissions’ performance in 2014, Ary found that the tribunals met for only 34 days last year, sitting in session for an average of five hours per day and costing $78m.
Robert Work, the deputy defense secretary, has ordered judges in the few ongoing commissions to relocate to Guantánamo for the duration of their judgeship to expedite the process. But travel is not the only issue slowing the process; there is a vast backlog of pre-trial hearings, and unexpected issues derail the procedures, such as concerns around the FBI’s apparent attempted infiltration of the defense counsel or the CIA’s ability to remotely mute court proceedings.
The Democrats’ Dick Cheney
In October of 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney issued one of his regular dire warnings that terrorists could use a weapon of mass destruction, including a nuclear bomb, to kill thousands of Americans. “You have to get your mind around that concept,” Cheney said.
One person who didn’t need persuading was Ashton Carter, President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense. Three years after Cheney’s comment, Carter co-authored a policy paper titled: “The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in an American City.” ...
As a young Pentagon official in the mid-1990s, Carter fixated on the danger of an accidental nuclear war, fighting — and badly losing — a bureaucratic battle to reduce that terrifying prospect. Later he turned to the threat of catastrophic terrorism and its potential effects on American society years before Sept. 11. More recently, he has fretted about the effect of invisible gamma rays on crucial electronics.
He’s the Democrats’ Dr. Doom.
In 2006 he publicly urged President George W. Bush to consider a surgical strike on a North Korean missile platform before that country could test an intercontinental missile that might one day be fitted with a warhead that could target America. (“It undoubtedly carries risk,” Carter wrote, along with former Defense Secretary William J. Perry. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater.”) ...
Some critics worry about the implications of Carter’s doomsday expertise. “He has a little bit of a fixation on the 1 percent threat, if you will,” said Michael Cohen, a fellow at the Century Foundation. During the Bush White House years, Cheney argued that threats with potentially disastrous consequences — but a probability as low as 1 percent — had to be treated as likely. “Cheney is very much of the same mindset,” Cohen said, adding that such thinking exaggerates danger and warps policy and budget priorities.
Playing with Fire? A Debate on U.S. Arming Ukraine & NATO Expansion to Russia’s Border
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.
CNN slammed for declaring Ukraine forces 'Pro-US'
Gen Allen: Iraq’s Anti-ISIS Ground Offensive to Begin Within Weeks
After several months of sort of spinning its wheels in the war against ISIS, retired Gen. John Allen, who’s become sort of the global ambassador to the war, says the Iraqi “ground offensive” will begin in a matter of weeks.
Gen. Allen, whose comments were made to Jordan’s state media, said the coalition intends to provide “major firepower” for the offensive, and that the goal is to “take back Iraq.”
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.
What Was Netanyahu Thinking? Criticism Swirls over Pre-Election Speech to U.S. Congress on Iran
Citizenfour Filmmaker Laura Poitras Wins Dual Top Honors
Filmmaker Laura Poitras was awarded two top honors on Sunday for her feature Citizenfour, which chronicles NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's efforts to expose the U.S. government's massive spying campaign.
Sunday evening in Los Angeles, the filmmaker was honored with the Director's Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. In London, Citizenfour won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Documentary of 2014.
The accolades come just weeks after the filmmaker and journalist was given the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. "Her films address complex political realities through deeply moving personal stories, allowing viewers to connect emotionally to otherwise abstract issues," the nominating committee wrote."Her trademark is meticulous research and extensive filming."
Jim Crow lynchings more widespread than first thought, report concludes
Equal Justice Initiative report reveals history of racial violence and finds at least 700 more lynchings than previously recorded in southern states
In 1919, a black soldier returned home to Blakely, Georgia, having survived the horrors of the first world war only to face the terrors of a white mob that awaited him in the Jim Crow-era south. When the soldier, William Little, refused to remove his army uniform, the savage mob exacted their punishment.
Little was just one of 3,959 African Americans who were brutally and often publicly killed across the southern states between the end of the Reconstruction era and the second world war, which is at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously recorded, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). The authors’ inventory of the nearly 4,000 victims of what the report calls “terror lynchings” reveals a history of racial violence more extensive and more brutal than initially reported.
The report, titled Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, is the result of nearly five years of investigation by EJI, a nonprofit organisation based in Montgomery, Alabama, into lynchings that occurred in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950. It explores how the legacy of racial inequality in America was shaped and complicated by these violent decades, which saw thousands of African American men, women and children killed by “terror lynchings”, horrific acts of violence inflicted on racial minorities.
The sites of nearly all of these killings, however, remain unmarked in what the report calls an “astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss or address” the violence that occurred. The authors make the case that the country cannot fully heal from this painful chapter of its history until it acknowledges the devastation that this era created and the residual effects of these acts.
Bryan Stevenson, the director of EJI, said the organization plans to erect monuments, memorials and markers in the communities where the lynchings took place, as a way of piercing the silence and starting a conversation.
Ferguson Residents Challenge "Modern Debtors’ Prison Scheme" Targeting Blacks with Fines, Arrests
St. Louis Suburbs Ferguson and Jennings Sued Over ‘Debtors Prisons’ Criminalizing Poverty
Two class action lawsuits filed on behalf of residents of St. Louis County on Sunday accuse the cities of Ferguson and neighboring Jennings of profiting off of poverty by running the modern-day equivalent of "debtors prisons."
Eleven county residents sued the City of Ferguson and nine sued the City of Jennings, each lawsuit seeking class status on behalf of all persons jailed for non-payment of debt and fees from traffic violations and minor offenses. The plaintiffs claimed that they were held in jail indefinitely, denied court hearings, and not informed of their right to a lawyer or provided one while detained.
Both lawsuits were filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri by the ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit organization serving the homeless and working poor, professors at St. Louis University Legal Clinic, and the DC-based group Equal Justice Under Law.
"The City's modern debtors' prison scheme has been increasingly profitable… earning it millions of dollars over the past several years," the lawsuits claim about Ferguson and Jennings. "It has also devastated the City's poor, trapping them for years in a cycle of increased fees, debts, extortion, and cruel jailings."
"The families of indigent people borrow money to buy their loved ones out of jail at rates arbitrarily set by jail officials, only for them later to owe more money to the City… from increased fees and surcharges," the complaints add.
Ferguson police arrest wheelchair user at Michael Brown anniversary protest
Police arrested a videographer in a wheelchair in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday night during a small demonstration to mark six months since an officer shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Heather De Mian, who has livestreamed the months of protests after Brown’s death, was among seven people detained by officers outside the Ferguson police department, according to observers.
Earlier in the evening De Mian had been broadcasting via UStream live from Canfield Drive, the residential side-street about two miles from the police department where Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson following an altercation on 9 August.
People gathered at the station in support of De Mian, who was later released and gave her version of events.
FBI monitored and critiqued African American writers for decades
Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.
Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay. The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.
Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each. ...
Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press. It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”. ...
“What did the FBI learn from these dossiers? Several things,” said Maxwell. “Where African American writers were travelling, especially during their expatriate adventures in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What they were publishing, even while it was still in press.” In the 1950s, he said, the FBI aspired to “a foreknowledge of American publishing so deep that literary threats to the FBI’s reputation could be seen before their public appearance”.
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”.
EU Sources: EU-Greek Relations Soured by Leaks; Sides Further Apart
The carefully orchestrated dance between the new Greek government and its European creditors appeared to crack Tuesday, with top Brussels officials infuriated by what they see as wildly misleading claims coming from Athens.
Apparent claims from Athens officials to other governments and media suggesting that the U.S. Treasury supports a plan by the Syriza-led government to alleviate Greece’s debt, and that the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker either backed the plan or had an alternative himself, have enraged senior economic officials in Brussels.
A senior European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the situation as “berserk” and said, “there is no plan.”
He added that the European Commission and U.S. Treasury were both perturbed at the way they had apparently been represented externally by Greek officials. A team from the U.S. Treasury led by Daleep Singh, deputy assistant secretary for Europe & Eurasia, was in Athens late last week.
“The Greeks are digging their own graves,” the EU official said.
US prosecutors weigh criminal charges against HSBC as Warren turns up the heat
The US Department of Justice is considering bringing criminal charges against HSBC and its executives as part of its investigation into whether the bank’s Swiss subsidiary helped US clients evade taxes.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren called on prosecutors to “come down hard” on HSBC if the bank is found to have colluded with tax evaders on Tuesday. ...
“The government comes down hard on individuals who break the law time after time, and it should do the same for large financial institutions,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday.
“The new allegations that HSBC colluded to help wealthy people and rich corporations hide money and avoid taxes are very serious, and, if true, the Department of Justice should reconsider the earlier deferred prosecution agreement it entered into with HSBC and prosecute the new violations to the full extent of the law.”
Warren’s intervention will further stoke the scandal in Washington, where members of the Senate banking committee are preparing to grill a representative of the Federal Reserve on Tuesday over how much regulators knew about US tax evasion connected to HSBC Switzerland.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a review of the whereabouts of doings of Mother Jones from the fall of 1903 to February 1905.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Big Backers of Clinton Foundation Found in Leaked Swiss Bank Files
Large financial backers of the Clinton Foundation charitable fund have been found among those named in thetrove of leaked documents from a Swiss division of HSBC bank this week, raising questions about the integrity of such individuals and what it says about the relationships they have with the powerful Clinton family.
According to the Guardian newspaper, which broke the story, on Tuesday:
Leaked files from HSBC’s Swiss banking division reveal the identities of seven donors to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with accounts in Geneva.
They include Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate and one of the foundation’s biggest financial backers, and Richard Caring, the British retail magnate who, the bank’s internal records show, used his tax-free Geneva account to transfer $1m into the New York-based foundation.
Hillary Clinton has expressed concern over growing economic inequality in the US and is expected to make the issue a cornerstone of her widely anticipated presidential campaign in 2016. However, political observers are increasingly asking whether the former secretary of state’s focus on wealth inequality sits uncomfortably with the close relationships she and her husband have nurtured with some of the world’s richest individuals.
The newspaper notes that it is perfectly legal for citizens from around the world—including those from the U.S. and Canada—to hold bank accounts in Geneva and reports there is "no evidence any of the Clinton donors with Geneva accounts evaded tax."
However, with Hillary Clinton now considered the Democratic Party frontrunner for 2016, the revelations may once again cast a special shadow over such dealings.
Australia May Stop Providing Water and Power to Remote Aboriginal Communities
Up to 200 indigenous communities in Australia could lose access to power and water because the government says it can no longer afford to deliver the basic services.
The remote communities are mainly located across the northern tip of Australia and the Kimberley in the country's northwest. The federal government announced late last year that it would stop paying for the utilities, making states responsible for the communities. The Western Australia (WA) state government says it can't afford to cover the costs. ...
nitial hopes of establishing a $1 billion "Royalties for Regions" fund, which would have used 25 percent of the state's mining royalties to cover the cost of power and water for the communities, were quashed this week by WA Premier Colin Barnett, who stressed that the government has not yet reached a solution. ...
Lauren Pike, a spokeswoman for the Kimberley Land Council, described what happened in 2011 when the government shuttered an indigenous community in Oombulgurri, a community in the eastern Kimberley, and relocated the residents to Wyndham, about 45 kilometers away.
"The result was just devastating," Pike said. "They literally told these people to get out of their homes and that they couldn't stay or come back, and then dumped them in the mangroves around the town.
"Houses weren't provided — nothing was provided," she continued. "People in the town literally had to hand out borrowed sleeping bags and blankets for these people coming in so they could have something to sleep on outside. It caused so much trouble in the community, and it only got worse from there. Suddenly people had access to alcohol, to illicit substances. It was just an absolute state of poverty."
The Evening Greens
New Safety Rules for 'Bomb Trains' Under White House Review
In 2013, oil production in the United States hit a 31-year high, due in large part to the introduction of two drilling innovations: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. In the absence of new pipeline capacity, all that new oil has put a strain on the railway system used to transport it around the country, leading to at least eight major spills in North America in just the last three years.
After 47 people died in a derailment and subsequent explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec in July 2013, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) began developing a proposal for stricter safety standards for transporting volatile crude and other flammable materials over the nation's railways. On Wednesday, the Department submitted the final draft of its proposed regulations to the White House to begin a formal review. ...
It's now up to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to decide whether the proposed regulations are in the best interest of public health and safety and for generating economic development. DOT declined to speculate on when new rules might take effect, but a DOT spokesperson said OIRA's review is "essentially the final step."
In November 2013, a train carrying nearly three million gallons of crude derailed, causing a fire in a west Alabama swamp, which remained tainted with oil months later. Federal data shows that more oil spilled, gallon for gallon, in 2013 alone than was spilled in total between 1975 and 2012.
In 2014, the frequency of spills hit an all-time high of 141 incidents, many of which resulted in evacuations, fires, and contaminated drinking water and wetland ecosystems.
The Crude Gamble of Oil by Rail: Bomb Trains
'Agent Orange' Herbicide Threatens Irreparable Harm to Endangered Species, Suit Charges
The Environmental Protection Agency violated the law in approving a new herbicide for genetically modified crops, threatening "irreparable harm" to endangered species, a coalition farmers and environmental groups has charged.
The herbicide is Dow AgroSciences' Enlist Duo, which the EPA approved in October 2014 despite condemnation by environmental groups, scientists and citizens. Enlist Duo is a combination of the herbicides 2,4-D—one of the active ingredients in Agent Orange—and glyphosate—the main ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup. It is for use on the Dow Enlist-brand genetically engineered corn and soy crops, already approved by the USDA.
EPA's approval of the new herbicide was promptly met with a lawsuit by the groups, which includes the Center for Food Safety, Pesticide Action Network and the Center for Biological Diversity, who charged that the agency neither adequately considered the human impacts of its use nor—in violation of its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—consulted with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to verify that the approval would not adversely harm listed species or their critical habitat.
Building on that suit, the groups stated in a motion filed late Friday that the Court should issue a stay "to prevent irreparable harm to protected species, and by two endangered species"—the whooping crane (Grus americana) and the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis).
EPA needed, according to ESA, to consult with FWS and/or the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regarding potential impacts of the approval on listed species, but it didn't.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Learn to love the pigginess of a pig, says America's rockstar farmer Joel Salatin
Greece’s port in a storm: anger as Syriza stops China extending hold on Piraeus
Is Big Brother Here for Good?
A Little Night Music
Johnny Young - Stealin'
Johnny Young - Tighten Up On It
Johnny Young - Slam Hammer
Johnny Young - Keep on drinking
Johnny Young - Money takin' woman
Johnny Young - All My Money Gone
Johnny Young - My Baby Walked Out In 1954
Johnny Young - Pony Blues
Johnny Young - Kid Man Blues
Johnny Young & his Chicago Blues Band - Wild, Wild Woman
Johnny Young & Big Walter Horton - Ring Around My Heart & On The Road Again
Johnny Young & Big Walter - Sleeping With The Devil
Johnny Young - Hot Dog
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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