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 guitarist and singer Robert Cray. Enjoy!
Robert Cray - Great Big Old House
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
-- G.K. Chesterton
News and Opinion
Gaza Ceasefire: After 1,800+ Dead, What Led Israel to Stop the Assault — and What Comes Next?
Hey, let's see how many hours they can go before Israel starts bombing civilians again...
Gaza crisis: Israel and Hamas begin 72-hour ceasefire
Hostilities suspended as of Tuesday morning, with Israel saying it has finished destroying tunnels and withdrawn forces
A definitive end to the four-week conflict in Gaza appeared possible on Tuesday morning as an agreed 72-hour ceasefire between Hamas and Israel came into effect and the Israeli military said it had withdrawn from the Palestinian territory.
The suspension of hostilities came into force at 8am on Tuesday and is due to be followed up with further discussions in Egypt about ending the four-week war. The Israeli military said it had withdrawn all forces from Gaza by 8am. A volley of last-minute rockets was fired by militants towards Israel.
The likelihood of Israel agreeing to a longer-term ceasefire appeared to increase on Tuesday as Israeli radio stations reported that ground forces had completed their main Gaza war mission of destroying cross-border tunnels. At least 32 of the underground passages and dozens of access shafts had been located and blown up, Israel Radio and Army Radio said. ...
Representatives of Palestinian factions had been in Cairo since Sunday to agree a set of demands and a possible end to hostilities. More than 1,800 Palestinians have died, health officials in Gaza say. Israeli casualties include 64 soldiers and three civilians killed by rocket fire.
The new proposal was communicated late on Monday night to the Israelis, who accepted the ceasefire plan around midnight. An Israeli official confirmed a delegation would be heading to Cairo for talks.
Netanyahu Vows ‘Prolonged’ Gaza Campaign
At Least 1,900 Killed as Latest Ceasefire Nears
Despite a 72-hour ceasefire starting early Tuesday morning, supposedly to give way to negotiations in Cairo on a settlement of the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to rule out ending the Gaza War. ...
A deal to end the war seems extremely unlikely at this point, with Israel talking up the possibility of unilaterally ending the war at some unspecified future date as a viable alternative to making any concessions to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza itself.
Still, Israel has agreed to send a delegation to Cairo for negotiations, and that means a deal is at least theoretically possible, assuming this ceasefire doesn’t end like the last 72-hour ceasefire, 75 minutes in, with Israeli soldiers attacking a tunnel and then complaining that return fire from Hamas fighters inside the tunnel constituted a “violation.”
Chris Hedges: Examining The "Israel Has A Right to Defend Itself" Narrative
US won’t leverage arms transfers to press Israel for cease-fire
The Obama administration will not leverage arms transfers to Israel to bring about a cease-fire, the top Pentagon spokesman said.
The arms and ammunition provided to Israel is “through a longstanding foreign military sales program,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters on Saturday. “Israel is a staunch ally in that part of the world. And that program has existed for many years, and we’re supplying that material through that program.”
Lady Warsi resigns over UK’s ‘morally reprehensible’ stance on Gaza
Lady Warsi, the senior Foreign Office minister, has resigned from the government in protest at its policy on Gaza, describing it as “morally indefensible”. ...
She said the UK’s stance was “not consistent with the rule of law and our long support for international justice”, adding: “The British government can only play a constructive role in solving the Middle East crisis if it is an honest broker and at the moment I do not think it is.” ...
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Warsi said: “Our position not to recognise Palestinian statehood at the UN in November 2012 placed us on the wrong side of history and is something I deeply regret not speaking out against at the time.”
The Tory peer said that, having now stood down, she wanted to “speak more freely” on the issue and her first demand after handing in her resignation letter was for the UK to introduce an arms embargo against Israel.
“It appals me that the British government continues to allow the sale of weapons to a country, Israel, that has killed almost 2,000 people, including hundreds of kids, in the past four weeks alone. The arms exports to Israel must stop.”
Warsi was known to have been unhappy with David Cameron’s failure to unequivocally condemn Israel’s incursion into Gaza or the mounting death toll.
‘Israel shows overall indifference to the plight of Gaza citizens’
UN dragged into conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza
The UN has been dragged unwillingly into the war between Israel and Hamas after six of its schools were hit in two weeks and weapons caches found in three, violating the organisation's neutrality.
The attacks on UN schools sheltering people fleeing bombardment have reverberated around the world, with unusually strong condemnation from Washington, and UN demands for an international inquiry into "gross violations of international law". The most recent attack, on Sunday, was described by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, as "a moral outrage and a criminal act". ...
On top of the shelling and rocket fire and the accompanying war of words, 11 UN workers have been killed in the four-week conflict, including at least five teachers and a school principal. The UN says 95 of its installations in Gaza have been damaged since the start of the conflict, in 135 strikes that include at least 10 direct hits.
Cornel West calls Obama a war criminal for helping facilitate Palestinian deaths in Gaza
Putin tells government to respond to Western sanctions
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to prepare retaliatory measures against the latest round of Western sanctions, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.
Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts
Contrary to the Obama administration’s public claims blaming eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, some U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings.
This judgment – at odds with what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have expressed publicly – is based largely on the absence of U.S. government evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Despite U.S. spy satellites positioned over eastern Ukraine, U.S. intelligence agencies have released no images of a Buk system being transferred by Russians to rebel control, shipped into Ukraine, deployed into firing position and then being taken back to Russia. Though the Obama administration has released other images of Ukraine taken by U.S. spy satellites, the absence of any photos of a rebel-controlled Buk missile battery has been the dog not barking in the strident case that Official Washington has made in blaming the rebels and Russia for the July 17 shoot-down that killed 298 people.
Given the size of these missile batteries – containing four 16-foot-long missiles – the absence of this evidence prompted caution among U.S. intelligence analysts even as senior U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream media rushed to judgment blaming the rebels and Russians.
Ukrainian Civilians Under Siege
As Ukrainian troops close in on the pro-Russian separatist-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, civilians in those enclaves are under siege, with hospitals running out of medicine, widespread power outages leaving the majority of residents without electricity, and daily shelling forcing people to flee for other parts of Ukraine or to Russia.
Local news reports suggest that almost 50,000 households in Luhansk have no electricity, 5,000 households are without water, and more than 4,000 households have no gas.
According to the Associated Press:
The power grid was completely down Monday, the city government said, and fuel is running dry.
Store shelves are emptying fast, and those who haven't managed to flee must drink untreated tap water. With little medicine left, doctors are sending patients home.
In an impassioned statement released over the weekend, mayor Sergei Kravchenko described a situation that is becoming more unsustainable by the day.
"As a result of the blockade and ceaseless rocket attacks, the city is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe," Kravchenko said. "Citizens are dying on the streets, in their courtyard and in their homes. Every new day brings only death and destruction."
The UN estimates that more than 1,200 civilians have died since fighting began in April.
Humanitarian Crisis: No water, power, comms in Lugansk, E. Ukraine
Pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine 'use ambulances to move fighters'
Pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine have expropriated ambulances to transport able-bodied fighters and threatened medical staff, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report due out on Tuesday.
The organisation, which has also criticised pro-Kiev forces for using imprecise Grad rockets in civilian areas, found a number of instances of rebels stationing fighters at hospitals, seizing or destroying medical equipment and using ambulances to transport fighters. ...
It also documented at least five cases of hospitals being hit by explosives, resulting in the deaths of at least two medical workers. HRW said it was not certain who had attacked the hospitals, but given that four of them were in areas controlled or occupied by insurgents, there was a strong suggestion that Ukrainian forces were responsible. It said even if rebel fighters had occupied hospital premises, it was not acceptable for Ukrainian forces to attack them there.
US to Give Kurdish Forces Air Support
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Rudaw has learned from a high-level American official that the United States has offered the Kurds air support in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The official source who didn’t want to be named said that the US would also provide the Kurdish Peshmerga with arms and military expertise.
The American offer is said to include humanitarian aid to be transported by air to the people of Shangal and Zumar who have been displaced as a result of fighting in their areas.
This newspaper has also learned that a number of European countries have contacted the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) with offers of military support.
U.S. General Is Reportedly Killed by an Afghan Soldier
KABUL, Afghanistan — A United States Army major general was killed on Tuesday by an Afghan soldier, shot at close range at a military training academy on the outskirts of Kabul, officials of the American-led coalition said Tuesday. The officer was the highest-ranking member of the American military to die in hostilities in the Afghanistan war.
The coalition officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity and would not release the name of the major general, said an unspecified number of other service members of the American-led coalition and Afghan soldiers, including a senior Afghan commander, also were shot. Their conditions were not immediately known.
Other details of the shooting were sketchy, and the coalition, in an official statement, would only confirm that one of its service members had been killed in what it described as “an incident” at the Marshall Fahim National Defense University in Kabul. The coalition declined to specify any further details, saying it was still working to notify the family of the deceased.
Pakistani man held at US facility denied legal counsel during decade-long hold
For years, as he was caged in a barely acknowledged detention facility on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, Yunus Rahmatullah’s captors denied him access to a lawyer.
Rahmatullah, a Pakistani man first detained by the UK in Iraq in 2004, has described his inability to even speak to counsel in a lawsuit he has filed in Britain, where, unbeknownst to him, his case had attracted the attention of UK judges. Although he claims he “endlessly and relentlessly requested access to a lawyer,” the US military uniformly denied him.
Until his release in May, Rahmatullah was among the most secret cohort of detainees the US still holds in the Obama era: the dozens of non-Afghans, mostly Pakistanis, within the Detention Facility at Parwan, about an hour’s drive from Kabul.
Those detainees are off-limits to human rights advocates and, critically, legal counsel – a key reason why US courts have not extended them the habeas corpus rights recognized for their counterparts at Guantánamo Bay. ...
British forces, Ramatullah contends, tied him to a moving vehicle, stripped him naked and doused him with cold water, placed him in a tiny room where he could neither stand nor recline, and poured water onto his cheesecloth-wrapped face in a style reminiscent of waterboarding.
Later, when US forces in Iraq took custody of Rahmatullah, the Pakistani man claims that among other abuses, he had his hands secured to a post above his head; was stripped naked; was suspended above a tank of cold water; and was led around on a makeshift leash by a woman guard.
The Senate Is Not Happy That the CIA Censored Its Report on CIA Torture
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s scathing report on the genesis and efficacy of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was finally returned to the committee Friday after going through a months-long multi-agency declassification review.
And those agencies apparently didn't like what they reviewed.
... In a statement issued Friday evening, the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said a “preliminary review” of the summary contained “significant redactions,” and the report will now be held by the Intelligence Committee until “further notice” in order to figure out the “basis” and “justification” for blacking out portions of the document.
Two officials with access to the declassified executive summary told VICE News that some of the redactions allegedly pertain to the manner in which the detainees were held captive, and to certain torture techniques that were not among the 10 “approved” methods contained in a Justice Department legal memo commonly referred to as the “torture memo.” The officials said the never before–revealed methods, which in certain instances were “improvised,” are central to the report because they underscore the “cruelty” of the program. Some other redactions allegedly pertain to the origins of the program and the intelligence the CIA collected through the use of torture, which the Senate report claims was of little or no value — a claim with which the CIA disagrees.
Another US official told VICE News that the CIA “vehemently opposed” the inclusion of some of the footnotes because they allegedly revealed too many “specific” details about the CIA’s operational files, which evidently contain information about foreign intelligence sources and operations, and provide clues about the foreign governments that allowed the CIA to operate its torture program in their countries.
Obama officials, Senate intelligence panel spar over deletions from torture report
The Obama administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee are sparring over the administration’s deletions of fake names from the public version of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, McClatchy has learned. ...
Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for the committee’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told McClatchy on Monday that the blackouts _ officially known as redactions _ were made to pseudonyms used for both covert CIA officers and foreign countries.
“No covert CIA personnel or foreign countries are named in the report,” he said. “Only pseudonyms were used, precisely to protect this kind of information. Those pseudonyms were redacted (by the administration).” ...
A former federal official familiar with the contents of the report said that he was skeptical of the need to excise all pseudonyms, saying such extensive deletions would harm the public’s ability to understand what occurred.
“The story is partly about names and places. All of a sudden you wouldn’t be able to tell that story,” said the former federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Essentially it just becomes a bunch of verbs. ‘Something was done but nobody did it and it wasn’t done anywhere.’ It’s similar to ‘Mistakes were made.’ There’s no accountability in the narrative. It would make it incomprehensible.”
President Obama's Whitewashed History of U.S. Torture
When President Obama declared last week that "we tortured some folks," the headlines focused on the fact that he spoke relatively plainly about Bush-era interrogations. Yet in the same comments he put forth inaccurate information on torture. "In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong," he said. ... This statement would be perfect if the Bush administration had tortured a few al-Qaeda members on September 12, 2001, to see if any more attacks were imminent. Perhaps it could even help to explain torture perpetrated in late 2001 and 2002. But torture didn't stop in "the immediate aftermath of 9/11." Torture did not stop once it was abundantly clear that 9/11 would not be followed by imminent attacks (if only because years had passed and another attack had not, in fact, occurred).
Contra Obama, "we did some things that were wrong" long after "the immediate aftermath of 9/11," nor was torture restricted to uncovering imminent threats. "This was a carefully orchestrated criminal conspiracy at the heart of the government by people who knew full well they were breaking the law. It cannot be legally or morally excused by any contingency," Andrew Sullivan writes, adding, "It is not as if the entire country has come to the conclusion that these war crimes must never happen again. The GOP ran a pro-torture candidate in 2012; they may well run a pro-torture candidate in 2016. This evil—which destroys the truth as surely as it destroys the human soul—is still with us."
CIA Admits to Spying on Senate but No Prosecutions to Follow
Corporations and dictators go together like, um, torture and a US backed regime...
Documents suggest foreign automakers aided Brazil’s dictators
A commission investigating the former junta unearths evidence that Volkswagen, Mercedes, Ford and other firms may have helped identify “subversives” on their payrolls.
SAO PAULO, Brazil – When João Paulo de Oliveira was fired in 1980 by Rapistan, a Michigan-based manufacturer of conveyor belts, his troubles were only beginning.
In ensuing years, the military dictatorship that ran Brazil arrested or detained him about 10 times. Police cars passed by his house in São Paulo’s industrial suburbs, he said, and officers would make throat-slashing gestures or wave guns at him.
Oliveira’s apparent offense: Being a union organizer during an era when the military considered strikes to be tantamount to communist subversion. ...
A government-appointed commission investigating abuses during Brazil's 1964-1985 dictatorship has found documents that it says show Rapistan and other companies secretly helped the military identify suspected "subversives" and union activists on their payrolls. ... Foreign and Brazilian companies are cited in the documents, including, most prominently, some of the world’s biggest automakers: Volkswagen AG, Ford Motor Co, Toyota Motor Corp and the Mercedes-Benz unit of Daimler AG, among others.
The National Truth Commission was created in 2012 by President Dilma Rousseff, herself a former leftist militant who was jailed and tortured by the military in the early 1970s.
The commission is tasked with shedding new light on abuses during that era and who was responsible for them. The U.S.-backed dictatorship killed some 300 people and tortured or imprisoned thousands more in what it saw as a fight to stop leftists from turning Brazil into a giant version of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
New York Police Killing of Eric Garner Spurs Debate on Chokeholds & Filming Officer Misconduct
Obama's War on Journalism Coming to a Head
A Supreme Court ruling against NYT reporter James Risen, who is refusing to reveal sources, leaves the Department of Justice with a serious decision to make on whether it will finally defend press freedoms or continue its attack on them.
Ten months after the Committee to Protect Journalists issued its scathing report “The Obama Administration and the Press,” journalists and potential whistleblowers continue to face unprecedented surveillance and legal jeopardy. The report, authored by Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, remains grimly up to date as it describes “the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between American journalists and government sources.”
The US Department of Justice seems determined to intensify that fearful atmosphere—in part by threatening to jail New York Times reporter James Risen, who refuses to name any source for the disclosure in his 2006 book State of War that the CIA bungled a dumb and dangerous operation with nuclear weapons blueprints in Iran.
The government is now prosecuting a former CIA employee, Jeffrey Sterling, for allegedly leaking that information to Risen. Attorney General Eric Holder may soon decide whether he wants to imprison Risen for not capitulating.
Immigration crisis forces Obama to 'act alone' with executive orders
When US lawmakers left Washington DC for a five-week long congressional recess late last week, a frustrated Barack Obama said he was left to “act alone” on immigration.
But the president’s immigration battle has two fronts: the growing humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, where more than 57,000 Central American children have arrived unaccompanied, and mounting pressure for reform from the more than 11 million undocumented people who live, work and raise families in the United States.
“I don’t think the president has any option but to do something that is bold, and big and our community will judge him based on the scope of that,” said Lorella Praeli, the advocacy and policy director for United We Dream, a pro-immigration reform group, during a conference call with reporters on Thursday.
In a dizzying finale before the recess, House Republicans eked out the votes to pass two bills – neither of which have a realistic chance of becoming law – that aim to address the crisis at the US’s southern border. One measure would scale back the Obama’s deferred action program for young immigrants, a hallmark of the president’s record on immigration.
Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group, said during the call that Congress’ refusal to pass immigration reform gives president “sole responsibility” to act, adding that the gridlock provides a pathway for the president “to go big on administrative action”.
Are US Banks Still ‘Too Big to Fail’?
Analyzing a government report is like eating and digesting a meal — better to take it slowly than gobble quickly and suffer the possible consequences. Example: last Thursday’s report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on whether or not large financial institutions were still perceived as “too big to fail.” ...
Stanford University economist Anat Admati ... testified that, “The main problem with the guarantees is they reinforce and create perverse incentives and intensify the conflicts of interest between the banks and the rest of society. … Requiring that banks fund themselves so that those who benefit from the upside of risk bear more of its downside brings about more safety and corrects distortions.”
In The New York Times, columnist Gretchen Morgenson writes, “Six years after the financial crisis, it’s clear that some institutions remain too complex and interconnected to be unwound quickly and efficiently if they get into trouble.
“It is also clear that this status confers financial benefits on those institutions. Stated simply, there is an enormous value in a bank’s ability to tap the taxpayer for a bailout rather than being forced to go through bankruptcy.”
Morgenson adds, “Were we to return to panic mode, the value of the implied taxpayer backing would rocket. The threat of high-taxpayer bailouts remains very much with us.” ...
Senators Brown and Vitter stated, “Today’s report confirms that in times of crisis, the largest megabanks receive an advantage over Main Street financial institutions. Wall Street lobbyists may try to spin that the advantage has lessened. But if the Army Corps of Engineers came out with a study that said a levee system works pretty well when it’s sunny — but couldn’t be trusted in a hurricane — we would take that as evidence we need to act.”
America's Inequality Nightmare
John Steinbeck explained that the reason so many of this country’s working- and middle-class vote against their own economic interests is that “Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaires in waiting.” Researchers at the University of Hannover in Germany have now released data that somewhat supports Steinbeck’s quip. The study measured actual income inequality and upward mobility versus perceived income inequality and upward mobility in a number of countries. The results are conclusive: U.S. voters don’t demand income redistribution, from the rich to the lower economic classes, because they don’t grasp how severe inequality actually is.
In the U.S., a child born in the top 20 percent economically has a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top, whereas a child born in the bottom 20 percent has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top, making the U.S. one of the least upwardly mobile nations in the developed world. Our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina, rather than like countries like Canada and Germany, but American voters, in large, believe America is just doing fine.
The Evening Greens
World's top PR companies rule out working with climate deniers
Some of the world’s top PR companies have for the first time publicly ruled out working with climate change deniers, marking a fundamental shift in the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around the issue of global warming.
Public relations firms have played a critical role over the years in framing the debate on climate change and its solutions – as well as the extensive disinformation campaigns launched to block those initiatives.
Now a number of the top 25 global PR firms have told the Guardian they will not represent clients who deny man-made climate change, or take campaigns seeking to block regulations limiting carbon pollution. Companies include WPP, Waggener Edstrom (WE) Worldwide, Weber Shandwick, Text100, and Finn Partners.
“We would not knowingly partner with a client who denies the existence of climate change,” said Rhian Rotz, spokesman for WE.
Weber Shandwick would also not take any campaign to block regulations cutting carbon emissions or promoting renewable energy. “We would not support a campaign that denies the existence and the threat posed by climate change, or efforts to obstruct regulations cutting greenhouse gas emissions and/or renewable energy standards,” spokeswoman Michelle Selesky said.
Domestic Coal Consumption Down But Exports Still Rising
Win over EPA won’t save Southern W.Va. coal, experts say
This week, West Virginia leaders were painting a picture of the rosy future that could await the coal industry, were it not for the Obama administration. Sprinkled among comments criticizing proposed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the state’s elected officials made it sound like the good times could be just around the corner for the coalfields — if only the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would get out of the way.
Speaking to a coal industry rally in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin cited projections he said showed “coal will be the world’s leading source of energy” in 2035.
Testifying at an EPA public hearing in Washington, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., noted that coal is expected to continue to provide at least 31 percent of U.S. power through 2030, and that coal use by other countries, primarily China and India, is growing. ...
However, what Tomblin, Manchin and other coal industry supporters weren’t saying is that less and less of the coal that gets burned will come from the hills and hollows of Southern West Virginia. Experts agree that coal in the state’s southern counties remains in a long-term downward spiral, regardless of what the EPA does or doesn’t do about global warming.
Coal production in the state’s southern counties, and the rest of the Central Appalachian basin, has plummeted in the past 15 years. Current government forecasts project a steep decline will continue through the end of this decade before bottoming out. While tougher air-pollution rules have played a role, experts cite a variety of more important factors, with competition from cheap natural gas and a long-predicted depletion of the best and easiest-to-reach coal reserves chief among them. ...
“It just doesn’t look like coal there is going to boom in the future,” said Robert Milici, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The best coal has been mined out. It’s pretty well gone.”
Chinese capital to ban coal use to curb pollution
Beijing will ban coal use in its six main districts by the end of 2020, state media cited the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau as saying, as the Chinese capital steps up efforts to combat air pollution.
Beijing and the surrounding area in China's northeast is often wreathed in noxious smog, which has been cited as a factor in high rates of lung cancer. ...
Fuel oil, petroleum coke, combustible waste and some biomass fuels will also be prohibited as part of the effort to fight pollution, Xinhua said.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Before and after: satellite images of destruction in Gaza
US/Israeli Hypocrisy on Human Rights
Lobbyists bidding to block government regs set sights on secretive White House office (OIRA)
Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers - bobswern's diary about this article here
Why are some people transgender?
A Little Night Music
Robert Cray - Blues Get Off My Shoulder
Robert Cray - Phone Booth
Robert Cray - Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark
Robert Cray - Sadder Days/(Won't Be) Coming Home/I'm Done Cryin'
Robert Cray - Who's Been Talkin'
Robert Cray - Consequences
Robert Cray - Nothin' But A Woman
B.B King, Robert Cray Band, Jimmie Vaughan, Hubert Sumlin - Paying the cost to be the boss
John Lee Hooker and Robert Cray - Baby Lee
Shemekia Copeland & Robert Cray - I Pity The Fool
Robert Cray - Smoking Gun
Robert Cray: Cookin' in Mobile
Robert Cray - Montreux Jazz Festival 2008
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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