May 18 | CBS

People in Honduras' predominantly Indian Mosquito coast region burned down government offices and demanded that U.S. drug agents leave the area, reacting angrily to an anti-drug operation in which a local mayor said police gunfire killed four innocent people, including two pregnant women.

Animosity is being aimed at both Honduran authorities and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which confirmed on Wednesday that some of its agents were on a U.S.-owned helicopter with Honduran police officers when the shooting happened Friday on the Patuca River in northeastern Honduras.

Honduran and U.S. officials said only the police officers on the anti-drug mission fired their weapons, and not until the helicopter was shot at first. The officials said the aircraft was chasing a small boat suspected of carrying drugs on the river.

Local officials said the two men and two pregnant women killed weren't drug smugglers. They said the victims were diving for lobster and shellfish.

** Protesters on rampage after drug agents shoot 4 dead
** Honduras prisoners riot at jail in San Pedro Sula
** Reverberations from drug raid felt in US, Honduras
** Murder of Honduran reporter blamed on drug gangs

Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" was actually blasting from my ITunes player when I clicked over to Memeorandum and saw this headline -- "Donna Summer Dead At 63."

This is a terrible loss. I know what a cliche that is, but I don't know what else to say, and it's true. Donna Summer was a "disco legend" for good reason.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has given an ominous warning to the West about military adventurism against Syria and Iran.

"Hasty military operations in foreign states usually bring radicals to power," Medvedev, president for four years until Vladimir Putin's inauguration on May 7, told a conference in St. Petersburg in remarks posted on the government's website.

"At some point such actions which undermine state sovereignty may lead to a full-scale regional war, even, although I do not want to frighten anyone, with the use of nuclear weapons," Medvedev said. "Everyone should bear this in mind."

I suspect he may be talking about Israel's nuclear arsenal there. If Israel became embroilled in an attack on Iran, missiles tipped with chemical weapons might well be a retaliation to which Israel's obvious recourse would be nukes. Or maybe he's talking about some hypothetical way down the road where an arc of failed states comprising US-conquered Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan leads to so much non-state trouble boiling up that it sparks an India-Pakistan war. Maybe he's setting out Russia's stall. Reuter's Gleb Bryanski writes:

Medvedev gave no further explanation. Nuclear-armed Russia has said publicly that it is under no obligation to protect Syria if it is attacked, and analysts and diplomats say Russia would not get involved in military action if Iran were attacked.

Russia has adamantly urged Western nations not to attack Iran to neutralize its nuclear program or intervene against the Syrian government over bloodshed in which the United Nations says its forces have killed more than 9,000 people.

"No obligation" isn't the same as "won't, never-ever" and maybe the conventional wisdom of all those analysts about Russian intentions in the region is plain wrong. It wouldn't be the first time the experts have been flatfooted. One things for sure, the PM of Russia wasn't just flapping his gums.

Naomi Wolf | May 17

Guardian Online - On Wednesday 16 May, at about 4pm, the republic of the United States of America was drawn back – at least for now – from a precipice that would have plunged our country into moral darkness. One brave and principled newly-appointed judge ruled against a law that would have brought the legal powers of the authorities of Guantánamo home to our own courthouses, streets and backyards.

US district judge Katherine Forrest, in New York City's eastern district, found that section 1021 – the key section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which had been rushed into law amid secrecy and in haste on New Year's Eve 2011, bestowing on any president the power to detain US citizens indefinitely, without charge or trial, "facially unconstitutional". Forrest concluded that the law does indeed have, as the journalists and peaceful activists who brought the lawsuit against the president and Leon Panetta have argued, a "chilling impact on first amendment rights". Her ruling enjoins that section of the NDAA from becoming law.

You can take the man out of Scotland but you can't take Scotland out of the man, apparently. Try as I might, I cannot understand the American obsession with race and the manifold problems it causes. Reading various blogs and comments about the latest Census Bureau announcement, I'm still none the wiser.

If you're not English, why are you worried? (Joke!). Surely the only true non-racism is to honestly not care about race except when its used as a pretext to label and abuse some poor bugger (not joke).

By Michael Collins

Criminal charges against Rupert Murdoch insider and favorite Rebekah Brooks may be a prelude to looming charges arising out of Brooaks' testimony before the Leveson Inquiry last week.

Crown Prosecution Services charged Brooks, her husband, and four others with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on Tuesday May 15. The alleged conspiracy took place between July 6 and July 19, 2011.

Brooks and the co-conspirators concealed and removed materials sought by police in their investigation of phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation subsidiary, News International, according to prosecutors. Brooks resigned as chief executive officer of the subsidiary on July 15, 2011. (Image: SnowViolent)

Brooks' current legal troubles should not obscure the significance of her testimony before the Leveson Inquiry last week. During her several hours on the witness stand, she was confronted with an explosive email that, if true, implicates Conservative Party Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a conspiracy to pervert the British regulatory process in favor of News Corporation's bid to acquire the ten-million-subscriber pay TV company BSkyB. News Corp owns 39% of the company. It sought the remaining 61%.

Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch passes along this World Food Program video from Chad, "ground zero of the Sahel food crisis".

London-based journalist Neal mann is in Burkina Faso, where children are eating the leaves off trees to survive. You can follow his social media posts from his journey here.

Now, ask yourself why footage from across West Africa isn't on your nightly news, every night.

A moment arrives tomorrow that is one of those markers in life that grabs your attention. My daughter graduates from college-- although she still needs a couple two credits-- and it makes all the difference.

I worry for her, as I worry for all young people of my acquaintance, from fellow bloggers to people at my gym and work, to her friends. I see trouble, deep deep trouble, ahead.

I guess if I could make a keynote at a graduation, I'd say something like this:

Today, you are glad to be finishing a stairway in your life. You've climbed to a landing, and can take a breath and look back down. Those steps, they looked so tall and steep as you walked up, but you made it. You perservered, and did what you had to and got through.

(Title corrected - mb)

Props to McClatchy Newspapers & special correspondent Jon Stephenson for doing what should have been done weeks ago by a major US news outlet: interviewing survivors of US Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales' notorious massacre in Afghanistan earlier this year:

“I told the women inside our room: ‘Let’s run! Let’s get out of here,’ ” recalled Rafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.

“Then there was shooting, and the dogs stopped barking,” said Naim, who’s in his 50s.Shortly afterward, there was pandemonium at Naim’s front door as Rafiullah and a handful of terrified women and children poured into his yard, seeking shelter. Minutes later, another woman and a young girl emerged from the darkness.

“She was screaming and crying,” Naim said of the woman. “She said, ‘My husband has been martyred,’ ” meaning that he’d been killed.

Tokyo | May 17

AFP - A Japanese bank has halted transactions by the Iranian government after a US court ordered a $2.6 billion asset freeze over the 1983 bombing of US barracks in Beirut, a bank spokesman said on Thursday.

"It is true that we have received the order from the US court," to freeze $2.6 billion of assets, a spokesman for the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ told AFP, declining to give details on the value of Iranian holdings at the bank.

The court order reflects "the amount that the court in 2007 upheld for compensation demands by families of victims of the 1983 attacks on US forces in Beirut," he said.

The bank lodged an appeal against the US court order on Thursday, he said.

"One of the reasons for the appeal is that the US court has ordered a freeze on assets in accounts not only in the United States but also in Japan, which is problematic under Japanese law," the spokesman said.

At what point will the rest of the world tell us to go f*ck ourselves? When will our assets start be seized or frozen because of our atrocities?

A small step forward towards undoing all the harm done by fearmongering and jingoism in the last decade:

A U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked enforcement of a recently enacted law's provision that authorizes indefinite military detention for those deemed to have "substantially supported" al Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces."

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan ruled in favor of a group of civilian activists and journalists who said they feared being detained under a section of the law, which was signed by U.S. President Barack Obama in December 2011.

"In the face of what could be indeterminate military detention, due process requires more," the judge said.

She added that it was in the public interest to reconsider the law so that "ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention."

By issuing a preliminary injunction, the judge prevents the U.S. government from enforcing section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act's "Homeland Battlefield" provisions.

Noam Chomsky writes that "The current US economy is built on 'growing worker insecurity' - people who are too busy and poor to make demands," and has a couple of new terms for us.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances". It urged investors to put money into a "plutonomy index". The brochure says, "The World is dividing into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest."

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that's where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don't really care about them. We don't really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they're sometimes called the "precariat" - people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it's not the periphery anymore. It's becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

Read the whole thing.

There's nowhere the U.S. doesn't consider it's own backyard, whether the locals like it or not.

The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon's Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

A brigade from 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, NY will be assigned the task of putting US boots on the ground across the continent.

Africa Command is still based out of Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany because not a single African nation volunteered to host the US military basing required when Bush first stood up the unit in 2007. The view of the Southern African Development Community, which includes South Africa, Angola, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that "it is better if the United States were involved with Africa from a distance rather than be present on the continent" was echoed by every other African security organisation and individual nations. Given that, one has to wonder just how welcome the guys from 10th Mountain will be.

David Usborne | New York | May 16

The Independent - The company that gave us the Instamatic has acknowledged that for 30 years it operated a small nuclear reactor in a basement on its corporate campus in Rochester, New York, unbeknown to almost everyone save a few scientists and engineers.

Kodak, which began operating the device, called a californium neutron flux multiplier (CFX), in 1974, insists there was nothing unsafe about it.

None the less, it came pre-loaded with nearly 1.5kg of uranium enriched up to a level of 93.4 per cent, which is just about right for an atomic warhead.

Not sure exactly when I said it, but I did predict that Greece would exit the Euro. I also said that it should leave the Euro sooner, rather than later and do so on its own terms. Now elite opinion has decided it's okay for Greece to exit. Mostly because the neoliberals have already raped the economy there. You heard it here first.

Back in summer 2010 I suggested that there was a worrying emerging pattern of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan - that far from each being an "isolated incident" from which "it's very difficult to draw a generalisation", a comparison of the frequency of such attacks with those in Iraq might suggest it was going to be a whole lot harder to stand up the Afghan security forces than expected. That idea has taken on more credence within the past two years as the number of "green on blue" attacks has snowballed from a handful to dozens.

Today, the New York Times has a detailed report on just one of those attacks, on March 1 this year, in which two Americans and their two Afghan attackers died - and which destroyed an armored vehicle as well as half the base before a helicopter gunship ended the fighting. A third conspirator was caught and the NYT's Matthew Rosenberg writes:

The coalition and Afghan Army would now have a rare opportunity to interrogate an Afghan soldier who had turned on coalition forces; most are quickly killed in ensuing firefights. Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban?

Chuck Hagel pens an oped on "The Challenge Of Change" for the US:

The great challenges facing the world today are the responsibility of all peoples of the world. They include cyber warfare, terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, prosperity and stability, and global poverty, disease and environmental degradation."

I'm assuming that "environmental degradation" doesn't just mean pollution but is code for global warming/climate change in case Republicans reading get upset by the actual words*.

It's one thing to ignore an elephant, it's entirely another to avoid a tornado.

* At least I hope so, because the alternative - that the Chair of the Atlantic Council and co-Chair of Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board has written such a piece without mentioning climate change at all - is just too horrible a possibility to contemplate.

We all had a pretty good laugh at the woman who got up in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska city council and railed on about homosexuality in response to the proposed "Fairness Ordinance" extending anti-bias protections to the LGBT community.

Select quotes:
1. "A huge percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don't have AIDS yet."

2. "Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner who did away with them."

Remember last summer's suspenseful adventures of the New Republican Tea Party? When they threatened to do something that even Greece hasn't quite done yet - default on the country's debt? When American bonds were downgraded?

Well, they love the country so much that they want to do it again. John Boehner said so yesterday.

It seems to me that deliberately sabotaging the country's financial standing verges on (is?) treason. It's like when a couple divorces and one of them manages to pull all the money from their joint bank accounts.

Except we're not so lucky to have the Republicans getting out of our lives with their addictions to racism and failed economics.

It looks like Ezra Klein will be following this. That's good, because it makes me sick.

One might begin to see the seeds of its decline here:

iMore reports that Google may make four times the ad revenue off of their use in iOS than they do from their own Android platform. Apple wants to change that. Apple has already begun intermediating search queries though Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Next up is that other large data components on iOS, maps.

Lindell Kay & Mike Mchugh | Camp Lejeune, NC | May 15

The (Jacksonville) Daily News - A wide-reaching investigation by military and civilian authorities has uncovered a criminal conspiracy within the Armed Forces to steal and sell nearly $2 million in guns and combat gear to gangs in the U.S. and foreign countries including China, military officials have confirmed.

The probe began more than a year and a half ago when agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began to conduct undercover operations to disrupt and reduce the theft, transfer, sale and possession of stolen U.S. Government property. With the aid of Marine and Naval authorities, NCIS has recovered $1.8 million in stolen guns and combat gear to include assault rifles, night-vision goggles, flashlights and other items, military officials said.

Via Ian Welsh, a must-read interview with Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X. If the Anonymous hacker group says it doesn't have real leaders, then Doyon is one of the major leader's they haven't got. "There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth" he says of Anonymous' 50,000 strong collective, who Ian calls "the only enforcer class the left has". Doyon refuses to accept the term "terrorist" applies.

Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, “Who is it that’s terrified?” If it’s the bad guys who are terrified, I’m really super OK with that. If it’s the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I’d ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We’re fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It’s the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right.

“Information terrorist” – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, “Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.”

This is just beyond tears.

I've been reading the rare posts on this blog for a while - and they should all be read - but I seldom comment simply because words are insufficient.

I'm sure there are many more women and probably gays in similar circumstances.

All I can do is agitate for better VA funding and programs and speak up for tighter controls in the military.

And weep.

Under Kansas law, it is perfectly legal for a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse, a hospital, or just about anyone, to allow a woman to bleed to death if you think the woman's bleeding is caused by an attempted abortion:

With the signing of a new expanded conscience clause bill in Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback has now legally blessed a virtually open-ended number of situations in which "religious" workers can refuse to assist women under the guise that they believe they "may be" terminating a pregnancy.

Go read David Axe on how Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti joined the dots to throw some new light on America's shadow wars along Africa's Indian Ocean coastline. F-15s based in Djibouti carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, spyplanes at the same airbase, Reaper drones with bases in the Seychelles Yemen and Ethiopia. Axe himself adds the possibility of a floating headquarters for special forces ops sitting somewhere of the coast.

America is waging more wars, with a bigger involvement, than it wants to admit.