Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Chicago bluesman, Fenton Robinson. Enjoy!
Fenton Robinson - Somebody Loan Me A Dime
“[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing.
Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.”
-- John W. Whitehead
News and Opinion
The Ghost of Ronald Reagan Authorizes Most NSA Spying
U.S. intelligence agents have broad authority to spy on U.S. companies as long as they are “believed to have some relationship with foreign organizations or persons” — a description that could conceivably apply to any company with foreign shareholders, subsidiaries, or even employees—according to newly released government documents published this morning by the ACLU.
The trove, which includes documents from the NSA, Department of Justice, and Defense Intelligence Agency, confirms long-standing suspicions that the bulk of U.S. foreign surveillance operations are governed not by acts of Congress, but by a 33-year-old executive order issued unilaterally by President Ronald Reagan.
The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, and they detail the extent of the order — which is extraordinarily broad and until recently largely obscure — and which underpins expansive U.S. surveillance programs, like siphoning internet traffic from Google and Yahoo’s overseas data centers, recording every call in the Bahamas, and gathering billions of records on cellphone locations around the world.
They also point to a gap in the public reaction to Ed Snowden’s revelations about those programs. Despite that fact that most of the NSA’s spying relies on Reagan’s directive, Executive Order 12333, the vast majority of reform efforts have concentrated on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other legislative fixes. “Congress’s reform efforts have not addressed the executive order,” notes Alex Abdo of the ACLU, ”and the bulk of the government’s disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA’s extensive mandate under EO 12333.”
New Documents Shed Light on One of the NSA's Most Powerful Tools
There's a key difference between EO 12333 and the two main legal authorities that have been the focus of the public debate — Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, which the government relies on to justify the bulk collection of Americans' phone records and the PRISM program. Because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts. That's why uncovering the government's secret interpretations of the order is so important. We've already seen that the NSA has taken a "collect it all" mentality even with the authorities that are overseen by Congress and the courts. If that history is any lesson, we should expect — and, indeed, we have seen glimpses of — even more out-of-control spying under EO 12333. ...
The documents make it clearer than ever that the government's vast surveillance apparatus is collecting information — including from Americans — about much more than just terrorist threats. The government generally defends its sweeping surveillance authorities by pointing to the threat of terrorism. But the truth is that its surveillance powers bear little relationship to that narrow goal. They reach far more broadly, allowing the government to monitor any international communication that contains "foreign intelligence information." That phrase is defined so nebulously that it could be read to encompass virtually every communication with one end outside the United States. ...
According to at least this internal Defense Department presentation, the concerns are real (N.B.: "USPs" refers to "U.S. persons," which the government defines as American citizens or organizations, as well as legal residents):
Further evidence that the Obama administration is a pack of liars:
Europeans say U.S. never briefed them on plot by Khorasan group
European counterterrorism specialists say their American counterparts never mentioned an imminent plot by al Qaida operatives in Syria to attack Western targets and didn’t brief them on the group that’s supposedly behind the plan, a previously unknown terrorist unit that American officials have dubbed the Khorasan group.
The interviews with the specialists, from two European NATO allies with close intelligence ties to the United States, raise questions about why the United States used its first series of airstrikes on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Syria to also attack eight installations belonging to the Nusra Front, an al Qaida affiliate that anti-government rebel groups consider an important ally in their fight to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
U.S. officials didn’t use the word Nusra to identify the targets, instead saying the strikes in Idlib province, far from Islamic State-controlled territory, were aimed at the Khorasan group. But activists and other rebels in Syria identified the positions hit as belonging to Nusra and said 50 Nusra fighters were killed.
U.S. officials said the Khorasan group was composed of senior al Qaida operatives who’d been dispatched to Syria to plot attacks against the West. The officials said the strikes were intended to break up a plan for an imminent attack.
The White House declined Friday to expand on that description or say with whom the intelligence about the group had been shared. ...
The European specialists, who meet regularly with U.S. officials on terrorism issues – particularly air travel and potential terrorist operations involving Western passport holders – said they were never specifically warned about such a group or such a plot. Such an omission, the specialists said, seemed unlikely if the plot were truly imminent.
As U.S.-Afghanistan Sign Troop Deal, CIA-Backed Warlord Behind Massacre of 2,000 POWs Sworn-In as VP
US and Afghanistan sign security deal
10,000 American troops to remain in the country
Afghanistan and the US have signed a long-delayed agreement to allow international forces to stay in the country beyond 2014.
In a low-key ceremony at the presidential palace, the Afghan national security adviser and the US ambassador signed the bilateral security agreement in the presence of the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani.
Hamid Karzai, Ghani’s predecessor, refused to sign the pact for more than a year, frustrating international partners who would have had to begin withdrawing material and personnel soon without it. The deal also ensures aid will continue to come from Nato countries.
“Our army needs help from [the] United States and Nato. Not only on the security side but also financially,” says Abbas Noyan, a Ghani spokesman. ...
Under the terms of the agreement, signed by national security adviser Mohammad Hanif Atmar and US ambassador James Cunningham, about 12,000 foreign troops are expected to stay to train and assist Afghan security forces after the US-led combat mission formally ends at the end of 2014.
US Expands Syria Strikes: Not Just a War Against ISIS
US airstrikes seem to be expanding in scope today in Syria, with four different provinces of the country hit in attacks, including areas where ISIS is virtually non-existent.
President Obama has been insisting it is an oversimplification to say this war is America versus ISIS. Indeed, that’s the case, but while the president is seeking to downplay the scope of the conflict, the signs are that he’s at war with actually a much broader swath of the Syrian rebellion.
U.S-led raids hit grain silos in Syria, kill workers
U.S.-led air strikes hit grain silos and other targets in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern and eastern Syria overnight, killing civilians and wounding militants, a group monitoring the war said on Monday.
The aircraft may have mistaken the mills and grain storage areas in the northern Syrian town of Manbij for an Islamic State base, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. There was no immediate comment from Washington. ...
The strikes in Manbij appeared to have killed only civilians, not fighters, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Observatory which gathers information from sources in Syria.
"These were the workers at the silos. They provide food for the people," he said. He could not give a number of casualties and it was not immediately possible to verify the information.
Isis an Hour Away from Baghdad
US air strikes are failing to drive back Isis in Iraq where its forces are still within an hour’s drive of Baghdad.
Three and a half months since the Iraqi army was spectacularly routed in northern Iraq by a far inferior force of Isis fighters, it is still seeing bases overrun because it fails to supply them with ammunition, food and water. The selection of a new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, to replace Nouri al-Maliki last month was supposed to introduce a more conciliatory government that would appeal to Iraq’s Sunni minority from which Isis draws its support.
Mr Abadi promised to end the random bombardment of Sunni civilians, but Fallujah has been shelled for six out of seven days, with 28 killed and 117 injured. Despite the military crisis, the government has still not been able to gets its choice for the two top security jobs, theDefence Minister and Interior Minister, through parliament.
The fighting around Baghdad is particularly bitter because it is often in mixed Sunni-Shia areas where both sides fear massacre. Isis has been making inroads in the Sunni villages and towns such as in north Hilla province where repeated government sweeps have failed to re-establish its authority.
Mr Abadi is dismissing senior officers appointed by Mr Maliki, but this has yet to make a noticeable difference in the effectiveness of the armed forces, which are notoriously corrupt. During the battle for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, Iraqi government forces nominally numbered 60,000 in the army, federal police and local police, but only one third were actually on duty. A common source of additional income for officers is for soldiers to kickback half their salaries to their officers in return for staying at home or doing another job. ...
A World Bank report just published reveals that out of 8,206 guards employed by one ministry only 603 were actually working. Some 132 senior officers have recently been sacked by Mr Abadi, but there is as yet no sign of the army being able to make a successful counter-attack against Isis. Worse, in Baghdad it has been unable to stop a wave of car bombs and suicide bombers, which continue to cause a heavy loss of civilian life.
Cost of US-led war against Isis is at least $780m and growing
The cost of the US-led war against the Islamic State (Isis) militant group has totalled at least $780m, according to a new estimate, as US drones and warplanes continued to attack Isis positions in Iraq and Syria on Monday.
The US defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, said on Friday that the US military is spending up to $10m a day and is likely to request more money from Congress to fund a war whose duration is uncertain. In August, before the US expanded strikes against Isis into Syria, the Pentagon estimated its daily war costs at $7.5m and has yet to provide a more precise estimate.
The Center on Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a thinktank influential with the Pentagon, estimated on Monday that the air war has already cost between $780m and $930m between 8 August, when it began, and 24 September.
Neocons’ Noses Into the Syrian Tent
Like the proverbial camel with its nose into the tent, the neocons are trying to push beyond the U.S.-led attacks on the Islamic State and other Sunni extremist groups operating in Syria into a broader “regime change” operation against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who has been a longtime target of the neocons.
For instance, Jackson Diehl, the deputy editorial-page editor of the neocon Washington Post, called the failure to attack Assad’s military “the hole in Obama’s strategy” and urged that Assad’s air defenses and air power be taken out by the U.S. military as a crucial step toward Assad’s ouster, even though Assad’s military has been the principal bulwark against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s affiliate, al-Nusra Front. ...
Of course, much of what Diehl says is untrue. The idea that a viable “moderate” rebel force exists is a fiction. A year ago, many of these “moderate” rebels – trained, funded and armed by the CIA and U.S. Arab allies – repudiated the Syrian political front that the Obama administration had cobbled together and instead embraced al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front.
Obama himself – just last month in an interview with the New York Times – dismissed the notion of relying on “moderate” rebels as a “fantasy” that was “never in the cards” as a workable strategy.
But it is a fantasy that the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies have long found useful, portraying the civil war in Syria as a black-and-white conflict between the evil Assad and the saintly “pro-democracy” rebels.
Eric Holder Continued Bush Legal Policies
Gitmo hunger strikes are a cry for help. Why is the US fighting back with secret torture?
“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: so goes the slogan of the world’s most famous offshore prison. It’s an Obama-era rebrand, a bid by Gitmo’s PR people to persuade Americans that today’s is a kinder, gentler Guantánamo Bay. There’s just one wrinkle: Gitmo is still dangerous, nasty, lawless and secretive – and the evidence just keeps piling up.
At the forefront of this war over the truth is the first-ever trial concerning the practice of force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike, due to start Monday. My client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab – a Syrian man who has never been charged, and indeed has been cleared to leave Guantánamo by the US government for more than five years – has been fighting for over a year to reform the way he and other hunger-strikers have been treated. He’s finally about to have his day in court. ...
First, the Obama administration insisted there should be no trial of force-feeding at all, claiming the courts had no power to police abuses at the base. Then it prematurely declared the hunger strike “over” and announced that Department of Defense would no longer publish the total number of prisoners on hunger strike. Around the same time, the government even wiped the inconvenient term “hunger striker” from its lexicon: talk to a Pentagon spin doctor today, and you will find there is no such thing as a hunger strike, no such thing as force-feeding. Today there are only “noncompliant detainees” who engage in “non-religious long-term fasts” and must be “enterally fed”.
This is what the Pentagon refuses to say: twice a day, every day, it puts cleared hunger-strikers through abuse that would shock most Americans if they could but see it.
Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath
In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.” ...
Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department’s response to the violence and military and police impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In “Hard Choices,” Clinton describes her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.
First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. ... The question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin American leaders, the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies vehemently demanded his immediate return to office. Clinton’s defiant and anti-democratic stance spurred a downward slide in U.S. relations with several Latin American countries, which has continued. It eroded the warm welcome and benefit of the doubt that even the leftist governments in region offered to the newly installed Obama administration a few months earlier.
Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.
Eric Holder Failed in Defending Americans' Civil Liberties
Police officer who shot black man in Walmart lied, victim's mother says
The mother of a young black man killed by police while holding an unarmed BB rifle in an Ohio Walmart store has accused the officer who shot her son of giving a dishonest account of what caused him to open fire.
Tressa Sherrod said store surveillance footage did not support the explanation given by officer Sean Williams for fatally shooting John Crawford III while responding to a 911 call from another shopper in a suburb of Dayton last month. ...
Williams said in his account of the August 5 shooting that as he approached Crawford, who had been repeatedly accused by the 911 caller of pointing the rifle at people, he feared for his life and the lives of his colleague, Sergeant David Darkow, and customers in the store.
“Sergeant Darkow repeatedly yelled ‘drop the weapon’,” said Williams, in a narrative released by Beavercreek police late last Friday. “After repeated commands to drop the weapon the male turned to us in an aggressive manner with the rifle in hand. At that time the black male was in a position where he could shoot me or sergeant Darkow.”
Walmart surveillance footage released last week, after a grand jury declined to indict Williams on criminal charges, showed that Crawford – who was still on his phone – was shot from the side while apparently moving to run away from the advancing armed officers.
Footage synced by the FBI with a recording of the 911 call indicated that Williams shot Crawford about one second after he and Darkow rounded a corner into the pet products aisle, where Crawford had been standing for five minutes, occasionally swinging the BB rifle at his side and holding it towards a shelf. The word “down” could be heard being shouted in the background of the call moments before Williams fired his two shots.
Crawford’s mother said the discrepancy between the police report and recordings was clear. “Him reaching for the gun? I didn’t see that,” she said on Monday. “He turned towards them in an aggressive way? I didn’t see that. But that’s what they said in their report.”
Teachers stage mass sick-out to protest changes to US history curriculum
Seventy percent of the teachers at two Colorado schools refused to work as conservative Jefferson County board tries to change courses and teacher contracts
Two high schools in Colorado canceled classes Monday after dozens of teachers called in sick in protest of a conservative school board’s proposal to change the history curriculum.
This is the second such teacher sick-out in two weeks and comes on the heels of student walk-outs over the issue. At the two high schools where sick-outs were staged, Golden and Jefferson high school in Jefferson County, 73% and 81% of teachers called out, respectively. Unrest is also tied to new teacher evaluations. Negotiations for a new contract between the district and the union broke down last spring.
The board wants to review Advanced Placement US history curriculum, which was recently revised by the College Board, the organization that sets standards for the courses. Some conservative school board members feel that the new curriculum has an overly negative view of US history, and advocate changes.
“My feeling is it’s an attack on teachers and public education, and a disregard for the needs of our students,” said a social studies teacher who worked that day but had knowledge of the protest. The teacher wished to remain anonymous for fears of retribution. “It’s a really, really scary to be a teacher in Jefferson County right now,” the teacher said.
Hong Kong activists threaten to step up protests
Pro-democracy protest leaders in Hong Kong have threatened to step up their campaign if the region’s chief executive does not meet them by midnight on Tuesday, after he insisted that Beijing would not retreat on limits to voting reforms.
Leung Chun-ying had urged demonstrators to withdraw immediately from an occupation that has brought roads in the city centre to a standstill for the third night running. Tens of thousands of protesters withstood a rainstorm to make their voices heard.
“If Leung Chun-ying doesn’t come out to Civic Square before midnight ... then I believe inevitably more people will come out on to the streets,” said Alex Chow, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, which organised class boycotts that sparked the mass protests.
He said options included widening the protests, a strike by workers and possibly the occupation of government buildings. ...
Police have stepped back over the past two nights, maintaining a discreet presence after the use of teargas and pepper spray at the weekend failed to disperse the protests. Occupy Central with Love and Peace earlier called for people to maintain the momentum of the protests into Wednesday’s national holiday. ...
The protests have been sparked by Beijing’s insistence that universal suffrage for the 2017 election of the next chief executive must be tightly controlled, with a committee stacked with pro-Beijing sympathisers picking a handful of candidates. Underneath that lie broader concerns about the future of the region and its ability to protect its identity and freedoms.
Umbrella Revolution: Hong Kong’s Biggest Protests in Decades Challenge China on Political Freedom
Pro-Democracy Demonstrators Dig Deep, Hold Ground in Hong Kong
Crowds again swell as chief executive says he won't resign and Chinese government refuses to budge on election reforms
Despite a call earlier on Tuesday by Leung Chun-ying, the chief executive of Hong Kong, that demonstrators should end their barricaded sit-in in the city's center, those rallying under the name 'Occupy Central with Peace and Love' appear to be digging in, not giving up.
Leung gave a brief public speech in which he said he would not resign, as protesters have demanded, but said that the protests are proving disruptive to their fellow citizens and should end. Backed by leaders in Beijing, Leung acknowledged that the protesters appeared to have staying-power, but said demands for more control over the elected leadership and governance of Hong Kong will not be entertained by leaders in China.
"The central government will not rescind its decision," Leung said.
Among Chicago's black voters, disenchantment grows with Mayor Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel won election as mayor of Chicago three years ago in part because of his strength in the African-American community, but enough black voters have since soured on him that a black labor leader is emerging as a potential rival in the city's February election.
Emanuel easily won the majority of voters in every African-American ward in 2011 to become mayor of Chicago, the nation's third-largest city. Since then, a persistently high murder rate, the closing of 50 public schools and a sense that Emanuel is out of touch have hurt his position and invited a bid from Karen Lewis, president of Chicago's teachers' union.
Any candidate for mayor other than Emanuel, who served at President Barack Obama's first chief of staff, would start with a financial disadvantage. The mayor has taken advantage of his popularity with the city's business community and his national profile to raise more than $8 million in campaign funds.
Lewis, who has not yet committed to a run, has less than $60,000, including $40,000 of her own money. A national teachers' union has pledged $1 million if she decides to challenge Emanuel.
Support for Emanuel among black Chicagoans, a third of the city's population, has fallen sharply, according to recent polls. About one in four black voters now approves of Emanuel's performance, according to a Chicago Tribune poll released in mid-August. In May 2013, forty percent of black voters approved of the mayor's job performance, the Tribune said.
Citywide, 35 percent of voters approve of his job performance.
Detroit Bankruptcy Judge Says He Can't Stop Controversial Water Shutoffs
The city of Detroit can continue shutting off water for some residents after a bankruptcy judge ruled today that he doesn't have the authority to block the controversial practice of disconnecting water services for homes and businesses with unpaid utility bills.
In court this morning, Judge Steven Rhodes — who is presiding over the city's ongoing bankruptcy proceedings that kicked off in early September — said he did not have jurisdiction over the issue that has resulted in thousands of people losing their water services. He also said that there is no "enforceable right" to water. ...
The water shutoffs garnered international criticism in June when the United Nations spoke out on the matter. A group of UN experts were critical of the city's shut off policy, saying it violated human rights.
"Disconnections due to non-payment are only permissible if it can be shown that the resident is able to pay but is not paying. In other words, when there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections," Catarina de Albuquerque, a UN expert on the human right to water and sanitation, said in a statement. ...
Regardless of jurisdiction, Emma Lui, a campaigner at the Blue Planet Project, a water rights advocacy group, told VICE News that the judge's comment about water not being an enforceable right was "very disappointing," and "wrong." Lui explained that countries around the world, including the US, have signed the UN resolution recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. She said it is not just up to actors at the national level to follow this agreement, but that the responsibility falls on states and municipalities as well.
The Evening Greens
NOAA's new report finds climate change behind five heat waves that occurred across globe in 2013
A new study has added to body of evidence linking human-caused climate change with extreme heat events.
Published Monday by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the NOAA-led study investigated the causes of 16 extreme weather events in 2013 across four continents. This third such annual report covered analyses by 20 global research groups.
The analyses "overwhelmingly show" a link between the five heat waves included in the study—ones that hit Australia, Korea, Europe, Japan and China—and climate change. The effects of climate change mean more long-duration summer heat waves and overall warming annual temperatures are becoming as much as 10 times more likely, the study finds. ...
The study's findings are important not only to understand how runaway emissions have fueled these events but to also better prepare for the ones to come, NOAA states.
US Sanctions Against Russia Might Just Have Saved the Polar Bear
ExxonMobil was forced to suspend cooperation with Russia's state-owned oil company Rosneft just two days after tapping a major oil and gas field in the Kara Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia. ...
University-1 is the name of the Rosneft-ExxonMobil well that drilled 7,000 feet below the Arctic Ocean floor to reach deposits estimated to hold 87 billion barrels of oil. In announcing the find, Sechin said the field would be called Pobeda — "Victory" in Russian.
Without technical assistance from Western oil and gas companies, however, Rosneft may be unable to continue its offshore exploration in the Arctic, says Heather Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). ...
Environmental groups have opposed offshore oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, however, citing concerns over potential spills, which would be especially difficult to manage in the remote region. ...
Rosneft's drilling permits, he added, overlap with several important nature reserves, among them the Russian Arctic National Park and Wrangel Island, a UNESCO heritage site.
The amount of area covered by sea ice during the summer months in the Arctic has decreased by about 12 percent per decade since the late 1970s and temperatures in the region have increased at twice the rate as the rest of the world.
UK fracking lobby gets OK to drill beneath your feet as public protests
Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF
Species across land, rivers and seas decimated as humans kill for food in unsustainable numbers and destroy habitats
The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.
“If half the animals died in London zoo next week it would be front page news,” said Professor Ken Norris, ZSL’s director of science. “But that is happening in the great outdoors. This damage is not inevitable but a consequence of the way we choose to live.” He said nature, which provides food and clean water and air, was essential for human wellbeing.
“We have lost one half of the animal population and knowing this is driven by human consumption, this is clearly a call to arms and we must act now,” said Mike Barratt, director of science and policy at WWF. He said more of the Earth must be protected from development and deforestation, while food and energy had to be produced sustainably. ...
The fastest decline among the animal populations were found in freshwater ecosystems, where numbers have plummeted by 75% since 1970. “Rivers are the bottom of the system,” said Dave Tickner, WWF’s chief freshwater adviser. “Whatever happens on the land, it all ends up in the rivers.” For example, he said, tens of billions of tonnes of effluent are dumped in the Ganges in India every year.
As well as pollution, dams and the increasing abstraction of water damage freshwater systems. There are more than 45,000 major dams – 15m or higher – around the world. “These slice rivers up into a thousand pieces,” Tickner said, preventing the healthy flow of water. While population has risen fourfold in the last century, water use has gone up sevenfold. “We are living thirstier and thirstier lives,” he said.
Racing to save Kenya’s wild elephants from poachers
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Insane Traffic Stop Tests Arizona ‘Show Me Your Papers’ Law
Why the Showdown with Islamic Extremists Is the War the Pentagon Was Hoping For
How Do You Fight?
A Little Night Music
Fenton Robinson - You Dont Know What Love Is
Fenton Robinson - I Hear Some Blues Downstairs
Fenton Robinson - stormy monday
Fenton Robinson - The Getaway
Fenton Robinson - Going To Chicago
Fenton Robinson - From my heart
Fenton Robinson - Checking On My Woman
Fenton Robinson - Blue Monday
Fenton Robinson The Sky Is Crying
Fenton Robinson - Slick and Greasy
Larry Davis w/Fenton Robinson(g) - I Tried
Larry Davis w/Fenton Robinson(g) - Texas Flood
The Blues Hall of Fame - Fenton Robinson
Fenton Robinson - Mississippi Steamboat + Crazy Crazy Loving
Fenton Robinson - I Believe
Fenton Robinson - Special Road
Fenton Robinson - As The Years Go Passing By
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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