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 r&b songwriter and pianist Floyd Dixon. Enjoy!
Floyd Dixon - Hey Bartender
"Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"War is the health of the state."
-- Randolph Bourne
News and Opinion
'My Enemy's Enemy': In Yemen Chaos, Al Qaeda May Be the Biggest Winners
Khaled Batarfi, a high-ranking member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has plenty to smile about. As Yemen descends into a full-scale war between Shia Houthi rebels and the Saudi Arabia-backed forces of its president-in-exile, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, dormant AQAP factions — backed by a handful of Sunni tribes — have surged out of their heartlands into towns and cities across the country's central and southern provinces.
Last week, in a lightning offensive, fighters from the group stormed al Mukalla, capital of the oil-rich Hadhramaut province. Entering in the dead of night by morning they had taken over government buildings, emptied the city's bank vaults of the equivalent of $80 million, and freed 300 prisoners, including Batarfi and several other high-ranking members of AQAP, from the local jail.
But for the power hungry group, the snatch of al Mukalla is just the tip of the iceberg. The lawlessness that followed the revolution of 2011, coupled with the recent outbreak of war, has enabled AQAP to secure a stronghold in at least seven governorates: 'Ibb, Al-Jawf, Ma'rib, Hadhramout, Lahj, Abyan, and Shabwah. ...
Created through a merger between Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda in 2009, AQAP has long been perceived as a threat by the United States. In 2013, State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki described AQAP as "one of the foremost national security challenges faced by the US." With the support of the Yemeni government, the US has maintained a military and intelligence service presence in the country for more than a decade. Since 2011 a joint operation between the two has launched 88 drone strikes against AQAP, killing more than 482 people.
But now both the Sunni tribes and AQAP, traditionally opposed to the government, suddenly find themselves in a de facto alliance with forces led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the US. "It's a classic case of my enemy's enemy," Robert McFadden, vice president of the Soufan Group, a security and intelligence consultancy, told VICE News. "There really is no other option... the whole situation is a mess."
Islamic State takes 3 Iraqi villages, presses into Ramadi after Tikrit loss
Two weeks after a critical victory at Tikrit, where a combination of U.S. airstrikes, government troops and Shiite Muslim militias overwhelmed an Islamic State force that had held the city for nearly a year, the Iraqi government faced a new challenge Wednesday, a sign of how much remains to be done to defeat the militants.
In a surprise assault, Islamic State fighters captured three villages outside Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province 100 miles south of Tikrit, and pushed to within 500 yards of a key government center in the northeastern section of the city, one of the few population centers in Anbar still under government control.
Government forces were responding with heavy bombardment from military aircraft, but the outcome of the battle was uncertain as night fell. Thousands of residents and troops were reported fleeing the city.
“The soldiers, the militias, the tribes, everyone with a gun who had said they would protect us from Daash has fled the city,” said one resident reached by phone, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. “There wasn’t even any fighting in this area and they just left. The city is a ghost town, and people are scared of Daash if they stay and scared they will be slaughtered by Daash on the road if they flee.” Daash is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
Iraq PM says Yemen could stoke regional war, slams Saudi operations
Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said on Wednesday the fighting in Yemen could engulf the region in war, and suggested after talks in Washington that U.S. leaders shared his concerns and "want to stop this conflict as soon as possible."
Abadi, who met with U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday, also said that convincing Iraq's neighbor Saudi Arabia to halt its offensive in Yemen could be difficult.
Saudi Arabia is engaged in a three-week-old campaign of air strikes against Yemen's Houthi rebels, who are allied with Iran and have taken over the capital and forced the president to take refuge in Riyadh.
Asked about Iranian efforts to broker a peace deal for Yemen, Abadi said: "From what I understand from the (Obama) administration, the Saudis are not helpful on this. They don't want a cease-fire now." ...
The White House, however, denied Obama had criticized Saudi Arabia in his talks with Abadi and renewed U.S. support for the anti-Houthi military campaign by the Saudis and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council regional grouping.
Saudi ambassador to U.S. rejects UN criticism on Yemen casualties
The Saudi envoy to the United States denied Wednesday that the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen had caused an unusually high number of civilian casualties and brushed off calls by U.N. officials and human rights groups for greater care in targeting.
Saudi-led pilots are working hard to “avoid and minimize civilian casualties,” Ambassador Adel al Jubeir said during a briefing on the 3-week-old air offensive aimed at reversing a Houthi takeover of much of the impoverished country of 25 million at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
Jubeir also asserted that the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition was trying to speed up the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid to Yemen, where a humanitarian crisis has been intensifying amid growing shortages of bread, medicines, fuel and other basic goods.
I Believed America Could Do No Wrong - John Kiriakou, Former CIA Official
Mr. Kiriakou was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was official policy. He spent 23 months in prison after being convicted of passing classified information to a reporter.
US and EU Accused of Turning a Blind Eye to 'Rampant Torture' in Uzbekistan
Four men broke into Yusuf's apartment in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent in July 2009 and started beating him, before putting him in handcuffs and taking him to the local police station. Yusuf says this was not the first time he was attacked and detained, but on this occasion he was questioned by officers for three days, who took a long baton to his head and used a plastic bag to suffocate him.
He refused to sign a confession saying that he'd plotted to overthrow Uzbekistan's constitutional order, but was ultimately convicted in court on drug charges and slapped with a fine.
Yusuf's story of torture and abuse at the hands of Uzbek authorities is just one of 60 testimonies compiled in a damning report out on Wednesday from Amnesty International alleging that "rampant torture" is an integral part of the justice system in the Central Asian country.
The organization slammed the US and European Union (EU), claiming they are turning a blind eye to "endemic torture" in Uzbekistan — pinning this ambivalence on the country's role as an ally in the War on Terror.
"Uzbekistani people are routinely and systematically tortured there, it's a regime that uses torture flat out, straight up, with no nuance," Julia Hall, Amnesty's expert on counter-terrorism and human rights, who led the two year investigation, told VICE News.
Iran Slams Senate Bill: Says Deal With Six Countries, Not Just US
With a Senate compromise ensuring that the US Congress will be given effective veto power over any nuclear deal negotiated with Iran, Iranian officials are reminding the US that they are only one of six nations being negotiated with. ...
Israel, by contrast, is thrilled at the bill throwing a road-block in front of a potential nuclear deal, with Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz terming it “an achievement for Israeli policy.”
The bill dramatically weakens the US negotiating position at the talks, as it will now be unclear if the US negotiators can actually deliver what they offer without having to first check with a hawkish Congress largely opposed to any deal.
'Thousands' of Israeli Arab homes threatened with demolition
"Where will we go," asks eight-year-old Tiba Qeren, saying goodbye to the family home that, like those of many other Israeli Arabs, is condemned to demolition for failing to meet planning rules.
"I'm afraid," she tells AFP. "I know that they are going to destroy our home as they have others in Ramle," the mixed Arab and Jewish town where they live, about 18 kilometres (11 miles) from Tel Aviv.
"I'm annoyed because I tell myself: who gives them the right to destroy our house," she says, her young voice shaking with anger.
"The land is not theirs, it belongs to my family and the house is not theirs because it is my family who built it! "
The Israeli Arab community has its roots in the 160,000 Palestinians who stayed on their land after the creation of Israel in 1948.
Today they and their descendants number around 1.3 million. ...
Across the country the potential threat is huge, Arab former MP Hana Sweid said.
"About 25,000 Arab homes fall under the scope of demolition orders," he told AFP.
This is an interesting article well worth a read and far too rich in detail to be usefully fairly excerpted. Here's an introduction:
Religious Fanaticism is a Huge Factor in Americans’ Support for Israel
Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. So it’s certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion.
The answer should make everyone quite uncomfortable: it’s religious fanaticism. The U.S. media loves to mock adversary nations, especially Muslim ones, for being driven by religious extremism, but that is undeniably a major factor, arguably the most significant one, in explaining fervent support for Israel among the American populace. In reporting its poll findings, Bloomberg observed:
Religion appears to play an important role in shaping the numbers. Born-again Christians are more likely than overall poll respondents, 58 percent to 35 percent, to back Israel regardless of U.S. interests. Americans with no religious affiliation were the least likely to feel this way, at 26 percent.
Michelle Bachmann: Obama's poor relationship with Israel will bring the return of Jesus
Former Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann stated that President Barack Obama’s handling of the Iranian nuclear deal is a symbol of the coming of the end of times and the “imminent” return of Jesus Christ, during a recent radio interview.
Bachmann explained that if Obama and the United States turn their back on Israel, this would bring severe “curses” upon the United States, similar to those seen in the end of days.
But, Bachmann is not afraid of the end of days, rather she says that “these are the most exciting days in history” because nothing is more important than the return of Jesus Christ. ...
“If we actually turn our back on Israel as we have seen Barack Obama do today, if that happens then I think we will see a scale and a level of push back in the United States, negative consequences,” Bachmann told Understanding the Times radio host Jan Markell on Sunday. “I don’t know what they are, but I believe that the Bible is true. And believe what the Bible says is that our nation and the people of our nation will reap a whirlwind, and we could see economic disasters, natural disasters.”
Phone data collection crossed line in 1992
The Obama administration has repeatedly used the threat of post-9/11 terrorism to justify secretly vacuuming up the telephone records of virtually every American.
Now it turns out the government was grossly violating innocent citizens' privacy much earlier and for a more questionable reason.
For nearly a decade before 9/11, the Drug Enforcement Administration secretly collected the telephone records of millions of Americans as part of an effort to catch drug traffickers. The practice continued with the secret approval of top Justice Department officials under four presidents until it was halted in 2013, USA TODAY's Brad Heath reported last week.
The program, known as USTO, underscores what history has taught about government surveillance: Once the government finds a way to secretly collect masses of personal data, mission creep takes over and the collection grows. Soon, as former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander once put it, the government wants "the whole haystack to find the needle."
The problem is the haystacks aren't made of hay but of personal details about Americans, gathered on the chance that a tiny fraction might someday prevent a terrorist attack or, in the case of USTO, help break up a drug cartel. Those are not good enough reasons to apply a vacuum-cleaner approach that gratuitously sweeps up records from innocent people along with data from legitimate suspects.
‘Brand’s revolution’: Celebrity to support political activism with crowdfunding; Keiser reports
New Zealand Spy Data Shared With Bangladeshi Human Rights Abusers
Secret documents reveal New Zealand’s electronic eavesdropping agency shared intelligence with state security agents in Bangladesh, despite authorities in the South Asian nation being implicated in torture, extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses. ...
An NSA document that outlines the agency’s relationship with New Zealand, dated from April 2013, noted that “the GCSB has been the lead for the intelligence community on the Bangladesh CT [counter-terrorism] target since 2004.” The document added that the New Zealand agency had “provided unique intelligence leads that have enabled successful CT operations by Bangladesh State Intelligence Service, CIA and India over the past year.”
The specific Bangladesh “State Intelligence Service” referred to is not named in the document. Bangladesh has several agencies that focus on gathering intelligence, principally the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, the National Security Intelligence agency and the police Special Branch. The lead agency that executes the country’s counterterrorism operations is the Rapid Action Battalion. Each of these agencies has been accused of involvement in severe human rights abuses over a number of years. ...
New Zealand does not have a high commission or any other official building in Bangladesh in which to hide a covert listening post. The Snowden documents suggest the Dhaka unit may be located inside a U.S. diplomatic building with operations overseen by the NSA and the CIA.
The 2009 GCSB report said that the Bangladeshi surveillance was made possible through “the Dhaka F6 environment survey.” F6 is a designator used to refer to a joint CIA/NSA unit known as the Special Collection Service, which eavesdrops on communications from U.S. embassies and consulates.
Grayson on Money & Politics: "If We Do Nothing, We Can Kiss This Country Goodbye. Well, Pucker Up"
Voting machine password hacks as easy as 'abcde', details Virginia state report
Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report.
The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in Virginia, “would get an F-minus” in security, according to a computer scientist at tech research group SRI International who had pushed for a formal inquiry by the state of Virginia for close to a decade.
In a damning study published Tuesday, the Virginia Information Technology Agency and outside contractor Pro V&V found numerous flaws in the system, which had also been used in Mississippi and Pennsylvania.
Jeremy Epstein, of the Menlo Park, California, nonprofit SRI International, served on a Virginia state legislative commission investigating the voting machines in 2008. He has been trying to get them decertified ever since.
Anyone within a half mile could have modified every vote, undetected, Epstein said in a blog post. “I got to question a guy by the name of Brit Williams, who’d certified them, and I said, ‘How did you do a penetration test?’” Epstein told the Guardian, “and he said, ‘I don’t know how to do something like that’.”
Top US lawmakers to discuss police killings as reform momentum builds
Recent video of police killings of black men galvanises lawmakers into tackling issue as New York congressman asks: ‘What more does Congress need to see?’
Top US lawmakers are to discuss ways of tackling the killing of black suspects by police amid signs that the hitherto muted political response to a spate of recent controversies is giving way to more concerted attempts at reform.
Prominent Republicans Rand Paul and Raúl Labrador will join leading African American Democrats such as Senator Cory Booker and Representative Elijah Cummings for a debate on criminal justice reform at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, on Thursday.
Recent video of the shootings of Walter Scott in Charleston and Eric Harris in Tulsa, both of which have led to charges against officers involved, has helped galvanise momentum on Capitol Hill which has been slow to build since the disputed death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August.
Cummings told the Guardian he was convening the debate “because I believe we have a unique moment of bipartisan, nationwide support to reform our criminal justice system – a system that has led to the over-criminalization, imprisonment, and even deaths of Americans across the country, particularly in communities of color. ...
The event is expected to discuss calls by Cummings for a better national register of police killings and from Paul for a trial of police body cameras, as well as broader sentencing reform and changes to drug laws.
"A Corporate Trojan Horse": Critics Decry Secretive TPP Trade Deal as a Threat to Democracy
Warren Blasts Government for Ignoring 'Blatantly Criminal Activity' on Wall Street
In remarkson Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren criticized the failure of both federal regulators and Justice Department officials to prosecute or otherwise hold to account Wall Street banks and financial institutions despite their long and steady pattern of "blatantly criminal activity."
Speaking at conference hosted by the Levy Economics Institute, Sen. Warren was firm in her denunciation of regulators—including those at the Security and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve—for not using the tools already available to them and for largely failing to meet their oversight obligations.
She also had stern words for the DOJ, which she says has repeatedly failed to use criminal statutes at its disposal. "The Department of Justice doesn’t take big financial institutions to trial ever—even when financial institutions engage in blatantly criminal activity," said Warren, according to a copy of her prepared remarks.
Additionally, Warren castigated those who argue that such strong regulations are somehow anti-business or anti-market.
In an interview with the Huffington Post's Zach Carter subsequent to her public remarks, Warren explained: "The opponents of financial reform have cast the debate as rules vs. markets, that somehow anyone who believes in rules is anti-market. Rules are not the enemy of markets. They protect markets from blowing up. The real fight isn't between markets and rules. And it never has been. It's between competitive capitalism and crony capitalism."
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a WE NEVER FORGET tribute to Morris Rubin and Abraham Novick who were murdered on April 16, 1915, during the Fur Workers' Strike against Hollanders.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Fight for $15: Tens of Thousands Rally as Labor, Civil Rights & Social Justice Movements Join Forces
Fight for $15 swells into largest protest by low-wage workers in US history
Workers in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and more than 200 cities across the US walked out on their jobs or joined marches and protests on Wednesday during what organisers claimed was the largest protest by low-wage workers in US history.
Some 60,000 workers took part in the Fight for $15 demonstrations, according to the organisers. ...
By late afternoon on the east coast no arrests had been reported, a marked contrast to last May’s action when more than 100 people were arrested during a protest outside McDonald’s Chicago headquarters.
The demonstrations were the latest in a series of strikes that began with fast-food workers in New York in November 2012. The movement has since attracted groups outside the restaurant industry: Wednesday’s protesters included home-care assistants, Walmart workers, child-care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors and other low-wage workers. It also sparked international support, with people protesting against low wages in Brazil, New Zealand and the UK.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest US unions and representing janitors, security guards, hospital aides and nursing home workers, has bankrolled the campaign, pumping in more than $25m according to documents filed with the US Department of Labor.
Hat tip Smiley7, Ron Wyden strikes again:
Deal Reached on Fast-Track Authority for Obama on Trade Pact
The leaders of Congress’s tax-writing committees reached agreement Thursday on legislation to give President Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate an ambitious trade accord with 11 other Pacific nations, beginning what is sure to be one of the toughest legislative battles of his last 19 months in office. ...
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had to agree to stringent requirements for the trade deal to win over Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the finance panel. Those requirements included a human-rights negotiating objective that has never existed in trade agreements, according to lawmakers involved in the talks.
The legislation would also make any final trade agreement public for 60 days before the president signs it, and up to four months before Congress votes. If the agreement, negotiated by the United States Trade Representative, fails to meet the objectives laid out by Congress — on labor, environmental and human rights standards — a 60-vote majority in the Senate could shut off “fast track” trade rules and open the deal to amendments. ...
Republican leadership is firmly behind the trade authority bill, an exception to the otherwise divisive relationship between Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans. But a sizable minority of Republicans — especially in the House — are reluctant to cede almost any type of authority to the president. Whether Republican leaders can get their troops in line, and how Mr. Obama can round up enough Democratic votes, is emerging as one of the larger legislative questions of the year.
Mr. Reichert said that only 15 to 20 Democrats so far are supportive in the House. Last year, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said he would need 50.
Wall Street understands that the fix is in:
Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street backers: We get it
Populist rhetoric, many say, is good politics — but doesn’t portend an assault on the rich.
Hillary Clinton sounded like a woman on a mission after her long drive into the heartland: “There’s something wrong,” she told Iowans on Tuesday, when “hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.” ...
It’s “just politics,” said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of her Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008. ...
Indeed, many of the financial sector donors supporting her just-declared presidential campaign say they’ve been expecting the moment when Clinton started calling out hedge fund managers and decrying executive pay all along — right down to the complaints from critics that such arguments are rich coming from someone who recently made north of $200,000 per speech, and who has been close to Wall Street since her days representing it as a senator from New York. ...
In the words of Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House who now advises billionaire environmentalist hedge fund manager and donor Tom Steyer, “The fact is that any Democrat running for president would talk about this. It’s as surprising as the sun rising in the East.” ...
Tom Nides, a Clinton confidant and Morgan Stanley vice chairman, said her recent comments did not amount to a change of position.
“She has a long history on these issues going back to 2008 and even earlier, from capital gains taxes to Dodd-Frank,” he said, referring to the bank regulation legislation. “This is not, ‘Oh my God she’s running to the left.’ This is basically who she has been. She has great relationships with people but that doesn’t mean she is always going to give those people what they want.”
The Evening Greens
World Bank breaks its own rules as millions lose land and livelihoods
Review of World Bank documents reveals electricity, water and transport projects contravened safeguards designed to protect rights of indigenous people
The World Bank has repeatedly violated its own policies on protecting the rights of indigenous people by funding projects that resulted in nearly 3.4 million slum-dwellers, farmers and villagers losing their land or having their livelihoods damaged over the past decade, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
The projects, into which the bank channelled more than $60bn (£40bn), aimed to boost electricity and water supplies and expand transport networks in some of the world’s poorest countries. But they have resulted in more than 1.2 million people in Vietnam being displaced over the past decade, as they made way for dams and power plants funded by the organisation. In addition, more than 1 million people in China were displaced by about $12bn of bank investment. ...
In many cases, the organisation did not follow internal policies and safeguards requiring it to monitor evictions caused by its projects and provide resettled people with new housing options and job prospects, the investigation showed.
In addition, many of the projects are fossil fuel-based, such as the coal-fired Tata Mundra power station. Since his appointment as president of the bank in 2012, Jim Yong Kim has committed the bank to addressing the challenges of climate change and reducing reliance on fossil-fuels. This week, he called for fossil-fuel subsidies to be scrapped and for a carbon tax to be introduced.
“There was often no intent on the part of the governments to comply, and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to enforce,” said Navin Rai, a former World Bank official who oversaw the institution’s protection for indigenous people from 2000 to 2012. “That was how the game was played.”
The Fragmentation of Canadian Climate Policies
Ahead of BP Spill Anniversary, the Obama Administration Has Proposed New Gulf of Mexico Drilling Rules
On April 20, 2010 a well blowout at a BP oil rig caused the deaths of 11 workers and nearly five million barrels of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
Five years later the federal government has proposed new regulations to prevent another catastrophic accident in the Gulf.
"[W]e're releasing one of the most significant safety and environmental protection reforms that the department has launched as part of President Obama's commitment to ensure the responsible development of America's domestic energy resources," Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI) said this week in announcing the rules. ...
Environmental groups, residents of the Gulf of Mexico, and a former top offshore drilling regulator, say the new rules are too little, too late.
Former Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service director, Liz Birnbaum, said the department's three to seven year grace period for compliance seems too lenient. "I am concerned about the fact that I know the industry can do this faster," she told VICE News. "It doesn't feel like they are pushing really hard on the timelines."
BP dropped green energy projects worth billions to focus on fossil fuels
Oil firm invested billions of pounds in clean and low-carbon energy in the 80s and 90s but later abandoned meaningful efforts to move away from fossil fuels and locked away the research
At one stage the company, whose annual general meeting is in London on Thursday, was spending in-house around $450m (£300m) a year on research alone - the equivalent of $830m today.
The energy efficiency programme employed 4,400 research scientists and R&D support staff at bases in Sunbury, Berkshire, and Cleveland, Ohio, among other locations, while $8bn was directly invested over five years in zero- or low-carbon energy.
But almost all of the technology was sold off and much of the research locked away in a private corporate archive. ...
An investigation by the Guardian has established that the British oil company is doing far less now on developing low-carbon technologies than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Back then it was engaged in a massive internal research and development (R&D) programme into energy efficiency and alternative energy.
Even before the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had put climate change on the international political map with a landmark speech in 1988, the company was doing ground-breaking work into photovoltaic solar panels, wave power and domestic energy efficiency as part of a wider drive to understand how greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed. ...
“All the reports that we produced were filed away and contain a huge mass of information. We had been researching alternative energies for years going back to the early 1980s,” said one senior scientist involved in the BP programme who did not want to be named.
Obama's plan to tackle climate change faces legal challenge
The cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s plan to address climate change is still months away from being finished, but it is already facing a high-stakes legal challenge from critics who want to halt the process in its tracks.
A federal appeals court hears arguments on Thursday in two cases challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s far-reaching proposal to cut Earth-warming pollution from the country’s coal-fired power plants.
The lawsuits – one from a coalition of 15 states and another brought by Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp, the nation’s largest privately held coalmining company – are part of a growing political attack from opponents who say the move is illegal and will kill jobs, cripple demand for coal and drive up electricity prices.
At issue is whether the EPA has legal authority for its plan under the Clean Air Act. But the agency and environmental advocacy groups have urged the court to throw the cases out as premature, saying legal challenges must wait until the EPA issues a final rule this summer.
Opponents concede it is not typical for a court to provide relief before a rule is final, but argue that states and the coal industry already face the prospect of shutting down coal plants and spending other resources in anticipation of the rule.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI
Buttes and beasts: amazing US national parks – in pictures
My friend died in a police van. That could have been me - if I were black
How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program
The shared roots of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, in one chart
Snowden Coming Closer To Icelandic Citizenship
State House Republicans hijinx
A Little Night Music
Floyd Dixon - Please Don't Go
Floyd Dixon - Roll Baby Roll
Floyd Dixon - Doin' The Town
Floyd Dixon - Nose Trouble
Floyd Dixon - Baby Let's Go Down To The Woods
Floyd Dixon - Rockin' At Home
Floyd Dixon - Tired Broke and Busted
Floyd Dixon - Ooh Little Girl
Floyd Dixon - Blues for Cuba
Floyd Dixon - My song is don't worry
Floyd Dixon - Tight Skirts
Floyd Dixon - Time Brings About a Change
Floyd Dixon- Late Freight Twist
Floyd Dixon - Don't Send Me No Flowers
Floyd Dixon - Wine,Wine,Wine
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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