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 blues singer, guitarist and storyteller Roy Book Binder. Enjoy!
Roy Book Binder - Police Dog Blues
“We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of global and local forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end, bankruptcy.”
-- Chalmers Johnson
News and Opinion
Bombing of Kurds Shows Everything That’s Wrong with U.S. Foreign Policy
The militant Kurdish independence group, known formally as the Kurdistan Workers Party, suffered strikes from Turkish fighter jets against its positions in southeastern Turkey — even as PKK-linked forces battle Islamic State militants in and around the Syrian town of Kobani. ...
The PKK is officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States. As reported previously by The Intercept, the NSA under both the Bush and Obama Administrations actively aided the Turkish military in targeting this group and has provided intelligence used to kill its members.
However, in yet another ironic twist to U.S. foreign policy in the region, this ostensible terrorist organization is now an important American partner in halting the expansion of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The PKK today in part represent the “boots on the ground” in Syria that many observers have said are necessary to any serious campaign to reverse the spread of this group. In other words, the Bush administration’s terrorist group has become the Obama administration’s freedom fighters.
The United States would surely prefer that Turkey not bomb the PKK right now, but how can it object to attacking a group that the U.S. itself designates as a terrorist organization? ... It would likewise be hard for the U.S. to publicly protect other key entities willing and able to fight ISIS, including Al-Qaeda-connected militants like Jabhat al-Nusra, paramilitary groups such as Hezbollah, or countries such as Iran, which is both the the only state to show a commitment to fighting ISIS on the ground and an official state sponsor of terrorism in the eyes of the U.S. State Department.
Obama Speaks of Fears for Kobane as He Rallies Support for Anti-Islamic State Coalition
US President Barack Obama said he is "deeply concerned" about the fate of majority Kurdish Syrian border town of Kobane, while attempting to rally support for the American-led coalition launching attacks on Islamic State (IS) jihadists. ...
Coalition aircraft have intensified a series of strikes on IS targets in the area around Kobane, also known by its Arabic name Ayn al-Arab, launching at least 21 attacks over the past two days. ... Mustafa Ebdi, a journalist and activist from Kobane told VICE News on Wednesday afternoon that aircraft had hit IS targets inside the town itself earlier in the day, but that the situation was largely unchanged otherwise, with clashes occurring but no major advances from either side.
Kobane would be a major prize for IS, partly as a propaganda victory, but also because it would allow the extremist group to connect territory held in the Syrian province of Aleppo with its stronghold of Raqqa further east. It would also destroy the threat to their rear posed by the Kurds and give the group full control of a large stretch of the Turkish border, aiding the passage of fighters and oil in and out of the country.
White House insists anti-Isis strategy is on track despite setbacks on the ground
The US-led campaign to combat Islamic State (Isis) fighters in Syria and Iraq is facing a growing crisis of confidence as setbacks on the battlefield coincide with efforts to improve allied coordination and calls for President Barack Obama to escalate the military attacks.
White House officials insist their twin strategy of air strikes and support for local ground forces is still working despite advances by Isis outside Baghdad and in the Syrian town of Kobani, but concede they will consider calls for additional bombing if requested by the Pentagon.
In the last two days alone, the US has conducted 21 separate air strikes on Isis forces in and around Kobani and recently deployed Apache attack helicopters to repel advances on Baghdad airport.
Yet the latest damage assessment released by the Pentagon on Tuesday focused primarily on damage to Isis “staging locations” and buildings rather than claiming much success against fighters on the ground who are dispersed in urban areas and much harder to target using current tactics.
Obama holds meeting of anti-ISIS coalition
Serious disagreements remain in U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State
Two months after the start of its campaign against the Islamic State, the U.S.-led coalition conducting operations in Iraq and Syria has expanded significantly but remains beset by lingering strategic differences that threaten to undermine the fight.
The Obama administration has emphasized the breadth of the coalition it has assembled to combat the militant group, including the participation of five Arab countries that have played a supporting role in the campaign of airstrikes in Syria. But serious disagreements remain, particularly over the coalition’s plan for Syria and whether the fight against Islamic State militants there will strengthen or weaken Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad in the long run.
Who benefits from U.S. war on Islamic State? Al Qaida, analysts fear
There’s an unintended beneficiary emerging from the U.S.-led campaign to crush the Islamic State: the extremist group’s main rival, al Qaida.
Al Qaida is no friend of the Islamic State, whose rapid expansion in Iraq and Syria gave it the lead in the struggle for primacy in the global jihadist movement. But the international attacks on the Islamic State also have lent urgency to al Qaida’s appeals for fighters and cash to confront “the Crusaders,” even as air strikes ravage its primary rival, according to analysts of international jihadist groups.
As a militant Islamist group, al Qaida can’t cheer on Western military intervention in Muslim nations. But analysts predict that the U.S.-led coalition’s presence will result in more cash, recruits and operating space for al Qaida, particularly in Syria. The affiliate there, the Nusra Front, is the vanguard of a rebel movement that’s been steamrolled by the Islamic State, which also is known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL.
While al Qaida loyalists must condemn the strikes in public, analysts say, they also recognize that the operations against the Islamic State offer the chance for a renaissance.
“Their preferred outcome is that it chews up the leadership (of the Islamic State), leaves the foot soldiers and they can get the foot soldiers to come back,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who researches al Qaida as a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Gartenstein-Ross warned in a Foreign Policy article last month that the U.S.-led bombing campaign risks giving al Qaida “a new lease on life.”
Pakistani Taliban leaders pledge allegiance to Islamic State
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In another sign of the Middle East-based Islamic State’s expanding influence, the chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban and five regional commanders declared allegiance Tuesday to the group and its chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The announcement marked the first instance of a major contingent of Taliban figures signaling a renouncement of fealty to the Afghan Taliban’s supreme leader, Mohammad Omar. If additional Taliban commanders follow suit, the changing loyalties could not only weaken the Afghan Taliban but also leave Pakistan and Afghanistan more vulnerable to the sort of brutal tactics employed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, analysts say.
“This is very serious and dangerous trend from Afghanistan and Pakistan, as it is a more lethal and violent militant group than even al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban,” said Ijaz Khattak, chairman of the international relations department at the University of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan
C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels
The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.
An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.
The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground. ...
But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.
Correction: US Did Find Chemical Weapons in Iraq... The Ones They Sent There
New reporting by the New York Times reveals the only chemical weapons found in Iraq were "designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies." And because they didn't fit the pre-invasion narrative, it was all kept quiet.
New reporting from the New York Times, published online late Tuesday, reveals that although the administration of George W. Bush employed false claims of a chemical weapons program to justify its 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq (no such program existed) – the reality is that substantial, largely forgotten and degraded stockpiles of older weapons did exist inside the country.
However, according to the Times, because those weapons dated back to the 1980's—when the U.S. and other western nations were acting as an ally to Iraq and supplying weapons and chemical agents to Hussein during his war against Iran—U.S. troops who ultimately came across these weapons and ordered to destroy them were told to remain quiet about what they'd encountered, even as it put their own health and those of others in grave danger.
As the newspaper reports, former U.S. soldiers who participated in the disposal of such weapons during the long occupation of Iraq said the Bush administration, including the Pentagon, suppressed the existence of them for several reasons, "including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong."
Violent Protests Break Out in Kiev as Parliament Votes against honoring Nazi group
Violent protests broke out today outside of the parliament building in Kiev after deputies voted against recognizing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a World War II partisan group, as national heroes.
Thousands gathered in Kiev on Tuesday for a rally honoring the anniversary of the group's formation 72 years ago. The nationalist paramilitary force was founded in 1942 and fought for Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, but its legacy was tainted by its collaboration with the Nazis.
The anniversary event spiraled into violence when news broke that parliament had rejected a law to celebrate the group. A handful of demonstrators surged towards police lines, and according to Associated Press and Reuters the aggressors used air guns to blow out parliament's windows and hurled smoke bombs. ...
In addition to the blue and yellow Ukraine flag, many of the event's attendees waved the flag of the far-right nationalist party Svoboda and the red and black flag of Right Sector, a semi-paramilitarized political group with alleged ties to Neo-Nazism. Representatives of both groups, however, denied that their members were behind the violence.
Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis Demand Respect
For months, the New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have insisted that it’s just Russian propaganda to say that a significant neo-Nazi presence exists inside Ukraine, but thousands of these “non-existent” neo-Nazis battled police on Tuesday outside the parliament building in Kiev demanding recognition of their Hitler-collaborating forebears.
The parliament, aware of the obvious public relations fiasco that would follow if it bowed to far-right demands to honor members of the Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UIA), defeated the proposal. That touched off riots by an estimated 8,000 protesters led by Ukraine’s right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor.
Historians blame the UIA and other Ukrainian fascist forces for the extermination of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II as these right-wing Ukrainian paramilitaries sided with the German Nazis in their fight against the Soviet Union’s Red Army. Svoboda and the Right Sektor have elevated UIA leader Stepan Bandera to the level of a Ukrainian national hero.
But Svoboda and Right Sektor activists are not just neo-Nazi street protesters. They were key figures in last February’s violent uprising that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych and established a coup regime that the U.S. State Department quickly recognized as “legitimate.” Many far-right militants have since been incorporated into the Ukrainian military in its fight to crush resistance to the coup regime from ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s east. ...
But this neo-Nazi reality continues to be an inconvenient truth about the U.S.-backed coup regime that seized power in Kiev with the overthrow of Yanukovych on Feb. 22. Several government ministries, including national security, were given to these far-right elements in recognition of their key role in the putsch that forced members of Yanukovych’s government to flee for their lives.
‘Revolution is inevitable’: Russell Brand hits Wall Street
Hong Kong police beat protester in violent crackdown on demonstrations
Video footage showing a group of Hong Kong police officers beating a pro-democracy protester has galvanised the city, ratcheting up tensions in demonstrations that have paralysed large swaths of the city for more than two weeks.
The Hong Kong television station TVB showed about six plainclothes officers in police vests leading the man, later identified as Ken Tsang – a social worker and member of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Civic party – away from a protest site, his hands bound behind his back. The officers took him to a dark corner behind a nearby building and threw him to the ground. Some kicked and beat him, while others kept watch.
Pictures posted to Facebook showed Tsang in the aftermath of the attack, with cuts and bruises on his face and neck, and circular welts running down his back.
“This is an apparent abuse of police power that a society as civilised as Hong Kong would definitely not swallow,” Alan Leong, the leader of the Civic party, told CNN. “I would advise the commissioner of police to immediately arrest the six officers involved in that attack.”
Hong Kong’s secretary for security, Lai Tung-kwok, said the officers involved would be temporarily removed from duties, as authorities expressed concern over the clip and promised an investigation.
In Response to Violence and Raids, Protesters Blockade Hong Kong Police Headquarters
After an hour-long stand-off in front of police headquarters in Hong Kong, officers allowed more than 100 protesters to enter the station in groups to file reports on the alleged police beating of political activist Ken Tsang Kin-chiu.
In the most violent police raid on Hong Kong protest zones yet, 45 people were arrested early Wednesday morning as officers tore down barricades and pepper-sprayed and dragged activists away. ...
"Hong Kong police have gone insane today, carrying out their own punishment in private," pro-democracy lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan told the Associated Press. "Hong Kong's values and its rule of law really have been completely destroyed by police chiefs."
Human rights groups said the police involved in the illegal beating must face justice. "This appears to be a vicious attack against a detained man who posed no threat to the police," said Mabel Au, Director of Amnesty International Hong Kong. "Any investigation into this incident must be carried out promptly and all individuals involved in unlawful acts must be prosecuted."
"It is stomach-churning to think there are Hong Kong police officers that feel they are above the law," Au said.
Deadly Force, in Black and White
Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.
The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.
One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week.
ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.
Teenager shot by St Louis police officer 'had gun residue on hands'
An 18-year-old who was shot dead last week after he allegedly opened fire on a police officer in St Louis, Missouri, had gunshot residue on his hands and waistband when he died, the police said on Tuesday.
Results from crime laboratory tests on the body of Vonderrit Myers appeared to give further support to police claims that Myers shot at the officer following a confrontation in the Shaw neighbourhood. Relatives denied that Myers was carrying a gun and said he was holding only a sandwich.
The St Louis force had already said that it recovered a 9mm handgun from Myers at the scene and that three of its rounds had been discovered fired towards the officer, who was in uniform but working a shift in his second job as a private neighbourhood security guard. The officer’s name has not been released.
Results from the Missouri state highway patrol lab, which police released on Tuesday afternoon, said that gunshot residue was discovered on Myers’s hands, on his T-shirt and in the waistband and pockets of his jeans.
Residue on his hands “could mean the individual discharged a firearm, was near a firearm when it was discharged, or touched an object with gunshot residue on it,” the police statement said.
Leaks, the War on Terror and the public's right to know
UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights
The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded.
Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”
Mass surveillance thus “amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.”
In concluding that mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty.
Router that anonymises internet activity raises $300,000 on Kickstarter
An internet router that aims to anonymise online activity had raised over $300,000 Tuesday, after less than 48 hours on the Kickstarter fundraising site.
Anonabox, a 2.4in by 1.6in router, directs internet data that connects to it by ethernet or Wi-Fi through the Tor network, software designed to allow anonymous web browsing.
Tor acts as a cloaking device, hiding information including the computer’s the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL, IP address and other information disclosed through regular browsing. The service can be used to help people chat and email anonymously as well as skirt censorship.
Anonabox had hoped to raise $7,500 in 30 days but raised that amount in the first six hours of the fund raiser, said its developer August Germar.
US supreme court blocks Texas abortion restrictions
The US supreme court on Tuesday blocked key parts of a 2013 law in Texas that had closed all but eight facilities providing abortions in America’s second most-populous state.
In an unsigned order, the justices sided with abortion rights advocates and health care providers in suspending an October 2 ruling by a panel of the New Orleans-based US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that Texas could immediately apply a rule that would force abortion clinics statewide to spend millions of dollars on hospital-level upgrades.
Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Last week, a coalition of women’s rights groups asked the supreme court to place a hold on a key provision of the law while the appeals process proceeds.
“The US Supreme Court gave Texas women a tremendous victory today,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Tomorrow, thirteen clinics across the state will be allowed to reopen and provide women with safe and legal abortion care in their own communities.”
Markets Panicked Over Deteriorating Fundamentals
The “Fed can fix everything” premium has left the market.
The S&P 500 has been falling even more while I compose this this short post. It went from down over 2.2% to off 2.9% of this writing and the Dow went from down 2.1%. to down 2.6%, Ten-year Treasury yields dropped to below 2%. They recovered briefly to 2.05% but are now 1.99%. Oil fell sharply overnight.
Blooomberg has a raft of “panic is on” headlines on its site. ...
The selloff marked a continuation of recent tumultuous trading sparked by fears of a global economic slowdown, dangerously low inflation in Europe and ripples from a steep drop in oil prices. Feeding the gloom Wednesday was a weaker-than-expected report on U.S. consumer spending. Traders said swings across financial markets appeared to be magnified by investors—particularly hedge funds—scrambling to exit money-losing investments.
The Evening Greens
Pollution Inequality and Income Inequality
Biodiversity, Climate Change Solutions Inextricably Linked
Executive Director of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias told IPS climate change is a main threat to biodiversity and he urged progress at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP scheduled for Dec. 1-12 in Peru.
"The threats to biodiversity continue. But where do these threats come from? They come from public policies, corporate policies and other factors that come from the socio-economic sector. These are population increase, consumption increase, more pollution, climate change. These are some of the big drivers of loss of biodiversity,” said de Souza Dias.
“So unless we see progress in the negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the loss of biodiversity will probably continue.”
But de Souza Dias is also putting forward biodiversity as part of the solution to the climate change problem. He suggested that better management of forests, wetlands, mangroves and other systems can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“We can also enhance adaptation because adaptation is not just about building walls to avoid the sea level rise impacting coastal zones. It is about having more resilient ecosystems that can resist more the different scenarios of climate change,” he told IPS
Tar Sands Trade: Kuwait Buys Stake in Alberta As It Opens Own Heavy Oil Spigot
Chevron made waves in the business world when it announced its October 6 sale of 30-percent of its holdings in the Alberta-based Duvernay Shale basin to Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KUFPEC) for $1.5 billion.
It marked the first North American purchase for the Kuwaiti state-owned oil company and yields KUFPEC 330,000 acres of Duvernay shale gas. Company CEO and the country's Crown Prince, Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, called it an “anchor project” that could spawn Kuwait's expansion into North America at-large.
Kuwait's investment in the Duvernay, at face-value buying into Canada's hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) revolution, was actually also an all-in bet on Alberta's tar sands. As explained in an October 7 article in Platts, the Duvernay serves as a key feedstock for condensate, a petroleum product made from gas used to dilute tar sands, allowing the product to move through pipelines.
And while Kuwait — the small Gulf state sandwiched between Iraq and Saudi Arabia — has made a wager on Alberta's shale and tar sands, Big Oil may also soon make a big bet on Kuwait's homegrown tar sands resources.
“Kuwait has invited Britain’s BP, France’s Total, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron, to bid for a so-called enhanced technical service agreement for the northern Ratqa heavy oilfield,” explained an October 2 article in Reuters. “It is the first time KOC will develop such a big heavy oil reservoir and the plan is to produce 60,000 bpd from Ratqa, which lies close to the Iraqi border [in northern Kuwait]…and then ramp it up to 120,000 bpd by 2025.”
Frackonomics has a hiccup:
Toxic Mix for Fracking – Oil Price Collapse & Junk Bond Insanity
It’s now called a “collapse”: The US benchmark light sweet crude plunged 4.6% to settle at $81.84 a barrel on Tuesday, the lowest since June 2012. In London, Brent made a similar journey to $85.04, its lowest level since November 2010. Explanations abound why this is suddenly happening, after years of deceptive calm. ...
The oil and gas sector is capital intensive. Drillers have borrowed phenomenal amounts of money, which was nearly free and grew on trees, to acquire leases and drill wells and install processing equipment and infrastructure. Even as debt was piling up, the terrific decline rates of fracked wells forced drillers to drill new wells just keep up with dropping production from old wells, and drill even more wells to show some kind of growth. One heck of a treadmill. Funded in part by junk debt. ...
This is what happens at the tail end of a credit bubble. Investors still lust for high-risk debt because it offers a little more yield in the era of ZIRP, but that yield did not compensate investors for the risks they were taking on. Companies and Wall Street did what the Fed had wanted them to do: issue junk and push it into retirement portfolios where it can quietly decompose. And bamboozled investors – thinking that the Fed was the best thing since sliced bread – took this debt with a desperate smile.
Now that the bottom is falling out, it is getting more expensive for these companies to borrow. Newly awakened investors are demanding to be compensated at least a little for the risk, and that risk has now been exacerbated by the collapse of the price of oil. That’s the toxic mix. If the money stops growing on trees, the jig is up for many of these companies, and the American fracking boom may well do what other oil booms have done before, and what OPEC would like it to do: grind to a halt. And investors would lose their oil-stained shirts.
Europe Poised to Press Ahead on Drastic Greenhouse Gas Reductions As Other Nations Lag Behind
The European Union’s 2020 climate and energy package, which is binding legislation, calls for emissions to be cut by 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. In addition, the plan calls for energy efficiency savings of 20 per cent and a 20 per cent increase in renewable energy technologies.
While the European Union seems largely on track to meet those targets, later this month politicians are going to vote on even greater emissions reductions, energy savings and growth in renewables by 2030. ...
Europe is already a world leader in emissions reductions and takes climate change extremely seriously. By way of comparison, under the Copenhagen Accord, Canada, the U.S. and other nations only committed to reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
Global greenhouse gas emissions grew astronomically between 1990, the year Europe’s climate targets are based on, and 2005, the year the Copenhagen’s Accord’s targets are based on — making the European targets far more meaningful than those of Canada and the U.S.
Satellites See Hot Spot of Methane in U.S. Southwest
A surprising hot spot of the potent global-warming gas methane hovers over part of the southwestern U.S., according to satellite data.
That result hints that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies considerably underestimate leaks of methane, which is also called natural gas.
The higher level of methane is not a local safety or a health issue for residents, but factors in overall global warming. It is likely leakage from pumping methane out of coal mines. While methane isn't the most plentiful heat-trapping gas, scientists worry about its increasing amounts and have had difficulties tracking emissions.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Ferguson protests reveal undercurrent of dissatisfaction with economic inequality
Ferguson and the Violence of Sanitizing the Struggle for Civil Rights
Unable to Get Dollars, Venezuelans Turn to Bitcoins
Video Shows Government Building in Flames After Demonstrations Turn Violent in Mexico
James Risen is not going to let the US fear-mongering machine win in secret
Russell Brand And Naomi Klein Talk Climate Change And The Need For Revolution
Native American Transwoman suffers severe head trauma in Brooklyn Hate Crime
A Little Night Music
Roy Book Binder - Rag Mama
Roy Book Binder - Electricity
Jimmy Murphy - Electricity
Roy Book Binder - I'm Goin' Home Someday
Roy Book Binder - Black Dog Blues
Roy Book Binder - Travellin' Man
Roy Bookbinder - Candyman
Roy Bookbinder - Mississippi Blues
Roy Book Binder - Cocaine Blues
Roy Bookbinder - Let's Get Drunk Again
Roy Bookbinder - Delia
Roy Book Binder - Davis-Travis Rag
Roy Book Binder - C C & O Blues
Roy Bookbinder - 1985 radio broadcast
Roy Book Binder Showcase at 2014 Folk Alliance
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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