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 the blues rock band Canned Heat. Enjoy!
Canned Heat - On The Road Again
"Oh the moon comes up and the sun goes down
This old world keeps spinnin' around
Just as sure as the day turns into the night
What you do in the dark turns up in the light"
-- Willie Dixon and Ry Cooder
News and Opinion
In the Same Week, the U.S. and U.K. Hide Their War Crimes by Invoking “National Security”
Colonel Ian Henderson was a British official dubbed “the Butcher of Bahrain” because of atrocities he repeatedly committed during the 30 years he served as chief security official of that Middle Eastern country. ... For years, human rights groups have fought to obtain old documents, particularly a 37-year-old diplomatic cable, relating to British responsibility for Henderson’s brutality in Bahrain. Ordinarily, documents more than 30 years old are disclosable, but the British government has fought every step of the way to conceal this cable.
But now, a governmental tribunal ruled largely in favor of the government and held that most of the diplomatic cable shall remain suppressed. ... The tribunal’s rationale is that “full disclosure of the document would have ‘an adverse effect on relations’ with Bahrain, where the U.K. is keen to build further economic and defence ties.” In other words, disclosing these facts would make the British and/or the Bahrainis look bad, cause them embarrassment, and could make their close friendship more difficult to sustain. Therefore, the British and Bahraini populations must be denied access to the evidence of what their governments did. ...
This is exactly the same mentality driving the Obama administration’s years-long effort to suppress photographs showing torture of detainees by the U.S. ... In March of this year, a U.S. judge who had long sided with the Obama DOJ in this matter reversed course. In a lawsuit brought in 2004 by the ACLU, the judge ordered the release of thousands of photos showing detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. He ruled that the Obama DOJ could no longer show any national security harm that would justify ongoing suppression.
Rather than accepting the ruling and releasing the photos after hiding them for more than a decade, the U.S. Justice Department last week filed an emergency request for a stay of that ruling with the appeals court. The argument from The Most Transparent Administration Ever™:
Disclosure of the photographs would also cause the Government irreparable injury. As Secretary Panetta determined,public disclosure of the DoD Photographs would endanger members of the U.S. Armed Forces, or U.S. Government employees abroad. That determination is entitled to deference and is not to be second-guessed.
...
A government that is able to hide its own atrocities on “national security” grounds will be one whose public endlessly focuses on the crimes of others while remaining blissfully unaware of one’s own nation. That is an excellent description of much of the American and British public, and as good an explanation as any why much of their public discourse consists of little more than proclamations that Our Side is Better despite the decades of brutality, aggression and militarism their own side has perpetrated.
Civil war still a bitter memory as El Salvador prepares to beatify Romero
Thirty-five years after he was murdered at the altar, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero will be beatified in El Salvador on Saturday in a ceremony that aims to at least temporarily unite a conflict-plagued nation.
An envoy of Pope Francis will lead the event, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of Catholics to the main square of San Salvador in recognition of a man who was known during the military dictatorship and civil war as a “voice for the voiceless”.
Romero was a deeply divisive figure in life, and his beatification – a step towards his becoming El Salvador’s first saint – was long resisted by rightwing clerics and politicians.
Romero – a conservative who later came to sympathise with the leftwing Liberation Theology movement – was shot through the heart by a sniper during mass at a hospital chapel on 24 March 1980, a day after he admonished the military and called on soldiers to cease killing innocent civilians in the country’s dirty war.
“In the name of God and this suffering population, whose cries reach to the heavens more tumultuous each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you, in the name of God, cease the repression,” he said in his final sermon.
At his funeral, the army opened fired on the more than 100,000 mourners, killing dozens.
George W. Bush's CIA Briefer: Bush and Cheney Falsely Presented WMD Intelligence to Public
For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared. And in recent days, as Jeb Bush bumbled a question about the Iraq War, he and other GOPers have peddled the fictitious tale that his brother launched the invasion because he was presented lousy intelligence. But now there's a new witness who will make the Bush apologists' mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency's deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush's intelligence briefer.
Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq's supposed WMD program and Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda. ...
Referring to the claims made by Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, Morell noted, "What they were saying about the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda publicly was not what the intelligence community" had concluded. He added, "I think they were trying to make a stronger case for the war." That is, stronger than the truth would allow.
Morell's remarks support the basic charge: Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they used the flawed intelligence to mislead.
WW3 may start soon, Soros warns, unless US loosens up on China
US planes keep distance from Chinese 'islands' -- for now
US surveillance aircraft and naval ships have yet to test China's territorial claims around artificial islands built in the South China Sea, but the Pentagon warned that could be "the next step".
Although the United States does not recognise China's claims of sovereignty around the man-made structures, American P-8 surveillance planes and naval vessels patrolling the area have not ventured within 12 nautical miles of the artificial islands -- the standard territorial zone around natural land.
"That would be the next step," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.
Asked if the military would move to within that sensitive zone, he said: "We don't have any announcement to make on next steps. We are going to continue our routine flights."
US officials have said they are weighing sending warships and surveillance aircraft within 12 nautical miles of the man-made islands in the South China Sea to test Beijing's controversial territorial claims.
China declares victory in US surveillance overflight
China declared victory on Friday over an encounter with a US surveillance aircraft overflying the contested South China Sea, saying its military "drove away" the intruder with radio warnings.
China regards almost the whole of the South China Sea as its own and the foreign ministry condemned the overflight as "highly irresponsible and dangerous", warning that such actions could cause "unwanted incidents".
Arms-ageddon? US plans to pump Middle East with more weapons
Obama Says No Rubber Stamp for Israel, But More Arms Flow
Pentagon Announces $1.9 Billion in New Arms
Obama insisted that certain “political forces” were trying to equate being pro-Israel with giving a rubber stamp to any Israeli government policy, and insisted criticism was vital to the US-Israel relationship.
Which would have sounded a lot more sincere if the Pentagon hadn’t, the same day, announced approval of another $1.9 billion in arms shipments to Israel.
As usual, the planned arms shipment is being presented as a “sale,” though in practice it is all being paid for in US military aid to Israel, so Israel won’t actually be paying for the purchase itself.
Israel's new deputy foreign minister: 'This land is ours. All of it is ours'
Israel’s new deputy foreign minister on Thursday delivered a defiant message to the international community, saying that Israel owes no apologies for its policies in the Holy Land and citing religious texts to back her belief that it belongs to the Jewish people.
The speech by Tzipi Hotovely illustrated the influence of hardliners in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s new government, and the challenges he will face as he tries to persuade the world that he is serious about pursuing peace with the Palestinians.
Hotovely, 36, is among a generation of young hardliners in Netanyahu’s Likud party who support West Bank settlement construction and oppose ceding captured land to the Palestinians. Since Netanyahu has a slim one-seat majority in parliament, these lawmakers could complicate any attempt to revive peace talks.
With Netanyahu also serving as the acting foreign minister, Hotovely is currently the country’s top full-time diplomat.
In an inaugural address to Israeli diplomats, Hotovely said Israel has tried too hard to appease the world and must stand up for itself.
“We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country,” she said. “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.”
Islamic State fighters overrun Iraqi govt lines east of Ramadi
Islamic State militants overran Iraqi government defences east of the city of Ramadi on Thursday, police and pro-government tribal fighters said.
The defensive line was breached at Husaiba, about 10 km (six miles) from the city, on Thursday afternoon after IS fighters intensified mortar and rocket fire. ...
The IS advance has exposed the shortcomings of Iraq's army and the limitations of U.S. air strikes.
Islamic State is seeking to consolidate its gains in the vast desert province of Anbar, of which Ramadi is capital, where only pockets of territory remain under government control.
Obama: ‘I Don’t Think We’re Losing’ to ISIS
In aninterview with The Atlantic, President Obama insisted he believes the strategy against ISIS remains sound, and will eventually win the war. ...
Obama began the ISIS war after the fall of the city of Mosul to ISIS, and expanded the war to Syria in September. Since then, ISIS has increased its territory in Iraq, including taking virtually the whole of the Anbar Province, Iraq’s largest. They also hold over 50% of Syrian territory now.
Six Months Later, Pentagon Admits (Maybe) We Killed Some Kids in Syria
In what one journalist described as the "first near-confirmation" of civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led airstrikes inside Syria, an official announcement by the Pentagon on Thursday that one of its bombs "likely led" to the death of two young children was met by derision and suspicion by experts who say the real deathtoll of innocent people killed in such strikes far exceeds the U.S. military's tepid admission.
The acknowledgement of the deaths was included in a report stemming from an internal investigation conducted by the Pentagon into specific bombings that took place on or around November 5 of last year near the Syrian town of Aleppo. According to the U.S. military, the strikes were aimed not at Islamic State (ISIS) militants—the group used by President Obama to initially justify U.S. airstrikes in the Syria—but rather another militant group operating in the country known as the Khorasan group. Despite early and repeated denials surrounding the incident and a six-month long probe, the report itself states that a "preponderance of the evidence" found by the investigators suggest the bombing "likely led to the deaths of two non-combatant children."
However, in the wake of the official statement, investigative journalist Chris Woods, who has extensively tracked the civilian impact caused by U.S. drone attacks and airstrikes around the world, was quoted by the Guardian as saying the U.S. admission was simply "too little, too late."
Woods, who has reported for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and more recently founded Airwars.org, a not-for-profit transparency project aimed at tracking and archiving the international air war against ISIS, said its inconceivable that U.S. military needed six months to investigate the incident and that its finding ignore widely available and key evidence. Citing his own research, Woods said last November’s attack may have killed up to four children, including five-year-old Daniya Ali al-Haj Qaddour.
The NSA Plan to Find Bin Laden by Hiding Tracking Devices in Medical Supplies
The National Security Agency concocted a plan to find Osama bin Laden by hiding tracking devices in medical supplies, in an attempt to cross what officials called the “non-electronic moat” surrounding the reportedly ailing terrorist leader.
The scheme is laid out in a top-secret NSA presentation dated June 2010 and titled “Medical Pattern of Life: Targeting High Value Individual #1,” which was among the files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The presentation cites CIA reports on bin Laden’s poor health, including renal disease, urinary tract infections, kidney stones and intestinal problems.
Analysts could “Determine Likely Meds/Equipment” and target the “Supply Chain to HVI [high value individual],” including International Committee of the Red Cross hospitals, the presentation suggests.
The slides describe “Project Planning,” and it is unclear if the scheme ever got beyond the idea stage. The U.S. reportedly located bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in the months after the presentation was dated, and he was killed in a raid on May 2, 2011.
NSA Whistleblower: No Real NSA Reforms Being Considered by Senate
Fox News Pundit Paid by NSA Contractor Reacts to Rand Paul: “Trust the NSA”
Asked by host Neil Cavuto about Rand’s speech, retired general and General Dynamics board member Jack Keane said, “Listen, I trust the National Security Agency, I think they do tremendous work. … I’m convinced they’ve got the United States’ interest at heart.”
Keane did not disclose his affiliation with General Dynamics, an NSA contractor. Keane has been on the board of General Dynamics since 2004, and received almost $250,000 in compensation last year alone.
Obama ban on police military gear falls short as critics say it's a 'publicity stunt'
Professor Peter Kraska of the Eastern Kentucky University school of justice studies called the White House rollout of its new rules on Monday a “publicity stunt”.
“Basically we had a big announcement that there would be restrictions,” Kraska told the Guardian. “It talked about armored personnel carriers. Lots of the media reported it, verbatim of course, the talking points. ...
The list of prohibited equipment includes seven items: tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles of any kind; firearms of .50‐caliber or higher; ammunition of .50‐caliber or higher; grenade launchers; bayonets; and camouflage uniforms.
Not on the list are some of the most intimidating items in police arsenals: modified M-16 assault rifles, Humvees, helicopters, night-vision goggles, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), BearCat vehicles, military-style helmets, shin guards, shields – and on.
Of the seven items on the “prohibited equipment list”, six have not been distributed to local law enforcement agencies by the Pentagon for years, according to defense department spokesman Mark Wright. ...
For some communities, the new rules on banned military gear have come too late to keep weapons of the battlefield out of police arsenals. The federal government had no plans to confiscate locally owned gear, officials said. Any equipment the Department of Defense still holds title to could be recalled, but there were no immediate plans to do so.
Indicted: Grand Jury Brings Charges Against Baltimore Police Officers Tied to Freddie Gray Death
All six Baltimore police officers in Freddie Gray case indicted by grand jury
A grand jury in Baltimore has indicted all six police officers charged over the death of Freddie Gray, paving the way for a criminal trial in the Maryland courts.
Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby announced on Thursday that some of the charges against the officers, whom she had already charged earlier in the month, had been amended.
“Additional information has been discovered and, as is often the case during an ongoing investigation, charges can and should be revised based on the evidence,” Mosby said.
The most serious charges – of second-degree murder against officer Caesar Goodson, and involuntary manslaughter against four of the officers – were affirmed by the grand jury and remained unchanged.
All six officers also face new charges of reckless endangerment, defined in Maryland law as “engaging in conduct that creates a substantial risk of death or serious physical injury to another”. The charge is punishable by an additional five years in prison.
However, the charges previously levelled by Mosby against the three officers involved in the initial arrest of Gray on 12 April were reduced, resulting in slightly shorter potential prison sentences.
Police officer shoots two men suspected of stealing beer in Washington
Two stepbrothers suspected of trying to steal beer from a grocery store were not armed when they were shot early on Thursday by a police officer who later confronted them in Washington state’s capital city.
The officer reported that he was being assaulted with a skateboard before the shooting that left one man critically injured and one in stable condition, authorities said.
Officer Ryan Donald was among those who responded around 1am to a call from a Safeway in Olympia, the police chief, Ronnie Roberts, said at news conference. Employees said two men tried to steal beer and then threw the alcohol at workers who confronted the pair.
Officers split up to search for the suspects based on witnesses’ descriptions. Donald encountered two men with skateboards who matched the descriptions, and moments later, he radioed in that shots had been fired, the police chief said. ...
One suspect was shot at the back of the police vehicle following a confrontation, Roberts said. Both men, one of them injured, then ran across the street, where the second suspect was shot multiple times in the torso.
Hundreds protest Washington police shooting of 2 unarmed men
Hundreds of people marched peacefully in Washington state's capital city to protest a police shooting that wounded two unarmed stepbrothers suspected of trying to steal beer from a grocery store.
Protesters rallied at a park Thursday, then marched about a mile to a building that houses police headquarters and City Hall, holding signs that read "Race is a Factor" and "We Are Grieving." The crowd chanted "Black Lives Matter," ''No Justice, No Peace" and the names of the young men who were shot.
The stepbrothers are black, and the officer is white, but Olympia Police Chief Ronnie Roberts said, "There's no indication to me that race was a factor in this case at all."
Bryson Chaplin was in intensive care but upgraded from critical to serious condition, hospital officials said Friday. He and his stepbrother weren't armed with guns, according to investigators.
NYPD, Housing Authority Complicit in Akai Gurley Death: Lawsuit
The family of Akai Gurley, the unarmed black man who was shot dead by a police officer in a Brooklyn housing project last year, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against New York City.
Gurley's partner, Kimberly Ballinger, brought the suit on behalf of his estate and their two-year-old daughter, Akaila. It names the officer who shot Gurley—Peter Liang—as well as his partner, Shaun Landau, the New York City Police Department, and the New York City Housing Authority. The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
Gurley, 28, was killed when Liang entered the Louis Heaton Pink housing project in East New York last November and fired his gun up an unlit stairwell, which Gurley was descending at the time.
The lawsuit says Liang shot Gurley "negligently and recklessly" and charges that both officers failed to provide adequate medical care after the shooting. It also says the city was negligent "in training, hiring, supervision and retention of the police officers involved in this incident" and in training officers on "the use and abuse of power while in the field."
It also says the housing authority created a "hazardous and traplike condition" in the stairwell by not providing sufficient lighting.
'Fight for $15' will ease economic inequality. But could it end police violence too?
The Fight for $15 movement is spreading. Seattle, San Francisco and now Los Angeles have adopted plans to make $15 the minimum wage. The effort to roughly double the federal minimum wage will greatly ease economic inequality, but it can do more than that: it can also keep citizens from being killed by the police.
As we have seen in grisly police murder after murder over the past year, a great deal of police violence happens when officers encounter men engaging in the informal economy. This is particularly true when black men (locked out of the formal economy pretty much since slavery, through one trick or another) turn to the informal economy to get by. It was while Eric Garner, father of six, was illegally selling loose cigarettes that he was choked in a homicide by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo.
By paying workers $15 an hour, we could give poor people access to enough money to live, disincentivizing the informal economy. ...
As the anthropologist David Graeber wrote at Gawker, the police “are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons” for financially strapped municipalities where “as much as 40% of the money governments depend on comes from the kinds of predatory policing that has become a fact of life for the citizens of Ferguson.” ... If companies paid a fair wage, workers could pay payroll taxes to keep the lights on in their cities, without the cities having to rely on debt financing (or citizens having to pay a get out of jail tax). And the police wouldn’t have to enforce this shakedown. ...
But most urgently, by paying people $15, we could decrease the size of our police forces and end police violence. If workers are paid enough, the police won’t be needed to protect the loot of those hoarding everything from everyone else. Maintaining the social order in a nation where white people have12 times the wealth of black and Hispanic people (and in a world where 1% of the population controls abouthalf of all wealth) requires robust policing.
McDonald's boss 'proud' of wages he pays as thousands demand a pay rise
McDonald’s new chief executive said he was “proud” of the wages the fast food giant pays its employees on Thursday as thousands of McDonald’s workers and union activists descended on the company’s headquarters near Chicago to hold the biggest ever protest against “poverty wages”.
About 3,000 McDonald’s employees from across the US chanted: “We work, we sweat, put $15 in our cheque” as they marched towards the burger giant’s headquarters holding banners reading “McDonald’s: $15 and Union Rights, Not Food Stamps.”
As the meeting began, protesters delivered a petition signed by 1.4m people calling on the company to support a $15 minimum wage and to respect workers’ rights to unionize. ...
McDonald’s dismissed the demonstrations as a publicity campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is working to organize workers across the fast-food industry. “The union has spent its members’ dues money in the past two years attacking the McDonald’s brand...in an unsuccessful attempt to unionize workers,” the company said in a statement.
Earlier this year, McDonald’s announced it would raise pay for workers at company-owned restaurants to $1 above the local minimum wage. Company-owned stores account for only about 10% of McDonald’s.
In the meeting, Steve Easterbrook, the newly appointed chief executive officer, said he was “incredibly proud” of the move and said the company was not responsible for the wage decisions of its franchisees. “We voluntarily took leadership,” he said.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature from the IWW newspaper, Solidarity: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn describes her visit to Joe Hill.
Tune in at 2pm!
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GOP Blocks Bill to Shine Light on Clandestine Trade Deals
The contents of the corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific Partnership, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's trade agenda, will remain shrouded in secrecy after Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Thursday blocked legislation that would have increased transparency around the mammoth trade agreement involving 12 Pacific Rim countries.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sponsored a bill that would require the president to make the text of trade agreements available to the public before those agreements receive "expedited consideration"—or Fast Track authority—from Congress.
The senators had hoped to pass their bill as an amendment to the Fast Track legislation, but it was clear after the Senate voted Thursday to end debate and advance the bill that they wouldn't get the chance. Instead, they tried to get consent from Hatch to vote on it separately. Hatch objected to moving the measure forward.
In response, the Huffington Post reports, Warren and Manchin "noted that although legislators are allowed to look at the text of the TPP in a secure room, they are only allowed to do so under restrictions that make it nearly impossible to understand what they are reading."
EU dropped pesticide laws due to US pressure over TTIP, documents reveal
US trade officials pushed EU to shelve action on endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility to facilitate TTIP free trade deal
EU moves to regulate hormone-damaging chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility were shelved following pressure from US trade officials over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal, newly released documents show.
Draft EU criteria could have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). But these were dumped amid fears of a trade backlash stoked by an aggressive US lobby push, access to information documents obtained by Pesticides Action Network (PAN) Europe show.
On the morning of 2 July 2013, a high-level delegation from the US Mission to Europe and the American Chambers of Commerce (AmCham) visited EU trade officials to insist that the bloc drop its planned criteria for identifying EDCs in favour of a new impact study. By the end of the day, the EU had done so.
Minutes of the meeting show commission officials pleading that “although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be seen as lowering the EU standards”.
The TTIP is a trade deal being agreed by the EU and US to remove barriers to commerce and promote free trade.
Responding to the EU officials, AmCham representatives “complained about the uselessness of creating categories and thus, lists” of prohibited substances, the minutes show. ...
Later that day, the secretary-general of the commission, Catherine Day, sent a letter to the environment department’s director Karl Falkenberg, telling him to stand down the draft criteria.
The Evening Greens
California crews struggle to contain nine-mile oil spill with booms
A fleet of 18 vessels is battling to contain an oil slick stretching nine miles along the California coast as rescuers on land try to save seals, birds and other wildlife trapped in the black goo.
Crews deployed more than 3,000 feet of boom on Thursday to corral some of the oil which flushed into the Pacific ocean after a pipeline broke on Tuesday, prompting a protest rally and renewed calls for stronger safeguards on oil transport.
Up to 105,000 gallons may have leaked from the ruptured pipeline, with about 21,000 of those gallons reaching the once-pristine waters off Santa Barbara, according to estimates.
California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has declared a state of emergency in Santa Barbara county to cut red tape and facilitate the mobilisation of resources. ...
Dozens of protesters staged a rally on the Santa Barbara courthouse lawn on Thursday, some brandishing placards that said “get oil out” and “moratorium now: no new drilling”.
At a rally in the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunken Garden on Thursday, more than 100 protestors staged a rally, shouting “No more!” as one speaker after another denounced the oil industry as inherently dangerous and risky.
Mike Lyons, president of Get Oil Out! reminded an audience of residents and reporters that the All-American oil pipeline that burst this week at Refugio was built in response to local opposition to the transportation of oil by tankers through the Santa Barbara Channel. Pipelines on land, it was argued, would be a safer alternative to shipping a hazardous substance by sea.
State of Emergency in California as Santa Barbara Cleans Up from Another Major Oil Spill
Pipeline Company Responsible for Santa Barbara County Spill #5 In Nation for Infractions
Plains All American Pipeline, based in Texas, has accumulated 175 safety and maintenance infractions since 2006, according to federal records.
A Times analysis of data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration shows Plains' rate of incidents per mile of pipe is more than three times the national average.
Among more than 1,700 pipeline operators listed in a database maintained by the federal agency, only four companies reported more infractions than Plains Pipeline.
It Turns Out bin Laden Was Worried About Climate Change
On the same day President Obama told graduating Coast Guard cadets that climate change was a "serious threat to global security," a new document revealed that Osama bin Laden was also gravely worried about the effects of climate change.
In an undated document released by Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), bin Laden laments "the great suffering the natural disasters are leaving behind" in the Muslim world, focusing in particular on flooding in Pakistan. The document also reveals bin Laden's vision for a Shariah-guided climate change development organization, independent of "traditional relief efforts," which he called "insufficient."
Though bin Laden wrote that climate change is principally a result of "plague or suffering from the Allah Almighty," he condemned unnamed states that "recruit their strongest men [and] offer their best training" for war while ignoring climate adaptation. He also fretted over studies that claimed victims of climate change outnumbered victims of war.
The founder of al-Qaeda also stated: "Had only 1 percent of [war] expenditures gone to relief, together with a sincere and experienced workforce, the earth's face would have changed, likewise the poor people's condition would have improved much decades ago." In response to this failure, he calls for "a distinct relief organization" to assist Muslims in the path of disaster.
Bin Laden's concern with climate change in the "Islamic World" tracks a stark reality: Many of the nations that are most vulnerable to a warming world are also home to huge Muslim populations.
Canadian Scientists Say the Government is Muzzling Them and They Want it to Stop
Hundreds of union activists representing Canada's scientists held protests in cities across the country this week, demanding the federal government end what they see as rampant political interference of scientific research.
There would have been thousands of government scientists joining them, according to the unions, but they worried that if they went, their jobs could become casualties of the Canadian government's so-called "war on science".
"Our scientists are scared," said Catherine Gagnon, mobilization coordinator at the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), at Tuesday's sparsely-attended protest in Ottawa.
The protest was organized to call attention to union efforts to get a "scientific integrity" clause included in their researchers' contract agreement.
It's the first time such a clause would be used in a collective agreement between the Canadian government and its scientists, and is needed to put an end to government muzzling once and for all, the groups say.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
How the U.S. ‘Solved’ the Central American Migrant Crisis
Rand Paul and FBI Director Add Some Drama as Phone-Record Collection is Set to Wind Down
How Japan May Have Convinced the IRS to Punish American 'Eco-Terrorists'
George W. Bush didn't just lie about the Iraq War. What he did was much worse.
Lessons From the Thinnest of Seymour Hersh’s Thinly Sourced Claims
The US government told me Bin Laden read my book. But what is it not telling us?
DFA: Help Stop Swiftboating of Elizabeth Warren
Tough Times in the Hate Business
Breaking: Repubs, Dems, Lobbyists Win 60 Votes, Fast Track Advance
A Little Night Music
Canned Heat - Shake 'N Boogie
Canned Heat - Little Red Rooster Boogie
Canned Heat - Rollin' and Tumblin'
Canned Heat - Poor Moon
Canned Heat - A change is gonna come
Canned Heat - Let's Work Together
Canned Heat - Catfish Blues
Canned Heat - She Split
Canned Heat - So Sad (The World in A Tangle)
John Lee Hooker With Canned Heat - Tease Me Baby
John Lee Hooker & Canned Heat - Boogie Chillen No. 2
The Muppets Take Woodstock 1969: Kermit the Frog / Canned Heat