Lisa Mascaro | Washington | May 25

LAT - In a momentary flash of bipartisanship, the Senate approved legislation that would allow Americans speedier access to generic drugs as well as breakthrough treatments for life-threatening diseases as part of a Food and Drug Administration revamping that now heads to the House.

But the comity didn't last, and the FDA accord was quickly followed by another round of partisan fighting over President Obama's push to keep student loan interest rates low. On party-line votes, senators blocked Democratic and Republican efforts to prevent interest rates from rising this summer.

John Markoff | San Francisco | May 25

NYT - A just-completed report from a presidential advisory committee urges President Obama to adopt new computer technologies to make better use of a huge swath of the radio spectrum now controlled by federal agencies.

The shift, which could be accomplished by presidential signature — and without Congressional involvement — would relieve spectrum congestion caused by the popularity of smartphones, and generate far more revenue for the federal government than auctioning spectrum to wireless carriers, according to the authors of the report.

"From the outside, anarchy might look threatening and scary and exciting. From the inside, anarchy can seem quite boring. But it is a profoundly hopeful type of boring." This more nuanced account of what anarchism is and what anarchists do is a refreshing change from the usual shrill MSM version. A must-read. "

The Guardian has two good peices that need to be read together today. First, Mehdi Hasan points out that Barack Obama, like Mitt Romney, is an apologist for the 1%. Then Gary Younge writes that while the white working class is often said to 'vote against its own interests' by rejecting Democrats, we could equally ask why poor black and latino folk consistently vote against their interests by turning out for Dems.

Those who are struggling and believe Romney will improve their economic lot are wrong, regardless of their race. Eight years of George W Bush proved that. But it does not follow automatically from that that their home should be supporting Democrats under whom things have gotten less bad less quickly. True, those are the only two choices on offer. But if you're poor they are not great choices. What they need is a party that represents their interests. In a country where corporate money chooses the candidates and therefore shapes the debate that will demand a change in politics, not just politicians.

Or as one of my friends crudely put it: "the difference is that the Dems at least offer to buy you dinner before they date-rape you. But you still don't get that dinner."

Washington Post, By Jeremy Borden, May 25

Woodbridge, VA - Before she was 2, her mother recalls, Lori Anne Madison was reading her first book — Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.” At age 3, she competed in her first spelling bee.

Now 6, Lori Anne is the youngest contestant on record to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Her ticket to the competition that begins Tuesday was the word “vaquero,” meaning cowboy, which she spelled correctly to win the Prince William County bee.

It will get tougher onstage at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center when the home-schooled girl from Woodbridge faces 277 opponents, most of whom are at least twice her age. Last year, the winning word was “cymotrichous,” which means having wavy hair. The previous winner spelled “stromuhr,” which is a medical instrument.

But Speller 269, who will compete for $30,000, among other prizes, reports that she isn’t particularly nervous and isn’t cramming.

Joe DeCapua | May 24

VOA - A new assessment has been released on efforts to end LRA rebel attacks in central and east Africa. The Enough Project says despite the deployment of U.S. advisers, current operations lack resources and troops.

Enough Project field researcher Kasper Agger spent several weeks in the region affected by LRA attacks. He said in the first three months of this year, there were more than 50 attacks, 9 deaths, 90 abductions and the continued displacement of nearly 450,000 civilians. Agger, who’s based in Kampala, Uganda, titled his report Mission in the Balance.

“I wanted to give it that title to stress that despite progress on the ground we are still far from seeing an end to the LRA. So I wanted to stress some kind of urgency,” he said.

The Enough Project is an advocacy group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity.

Adam Gabbatt | Montreal | May 24

The Guardian - More than 500 people were arrested in Montreal on Wednesday night as protestors defied controversial new law Bill 78

Protests that began in opposition to tuition fees in Canada have exploded into a political crisis with the mass arrest of hundreds of demonstrators amid a backlash against draconian emergency laws.

More than 500 people were arrested in a demonstration in Montreal on Wednesday night as protesters defied a controversial new law – Bill 78 – that places restrictions on the right to demonstrate. In Quebec City, police arrested 176 people under the provisions of the new law.

Demonstrators have been gathering in Montreal for just over 100 days to oppose tuition increases by the Quebec provincial government. On Tuesday, about 100 people were arrested after organisers say 300,000 people took the streets.

Michael Tarm | Chicago | May 24

AP - U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said Thursday he isn't sure what his future holds as he steps down from the job he has held for 11 years. He ruled out elected office and hinted that switching sides and becoming a defense attorney wouldn't suit him.

But the highly regarded Fitzgerald, 51, did say he could see himself accepting another government position, if asked.

"Whenever the phone rings in the future and the (caller) ID says `public service calling,' I (will) answer the phone," said Fitzgerald, addressing a news conference in Chicago.

He added that he has not discussed the possibility with the Obama administration about becoming FBI director, a job for which his name has surfaced several times.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. | Washington | May 24

AOL Defense - The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously passed its mark-up of the annual defense spending bill, rejecting all proposed cuts to the Air National Guard, cutting the Defense Department's civilian and contractor workforce by 5 percent over five years, and restricting aid to Pakistan.

The bill is silent on detention of terrorist suspects.

When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.

Alok Jha | May 24

The Guardian - Notoriously reclusive Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong gives video interview to Certified Practicing Accountants of Australia

As the first person to walk on the moon, he is a man whose name will be remembered for generations to come. But perhaps one of the other well-known things about Neil Armstrong is that he hardly ever gives interviews.

It was therefore something of a coup for Alex Malley, chief executive of Certified Practicing Accountants of Australia, to secure almost an hour of Armstrong's time to discuss the astronaut's trip to the moon.

In the illuminating conversation posted online on the CPA Australia website, Armstrong revealed how he thought his mission, Apollo 11, only had a 50% chance of landing safely on the moon's surface and said it was "sad" that the current US government's ambitions for Nasa were so reduced compared with the achievements of the 1960s.

"Nasa has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve," said Armstrong. "It's sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people."

** CPA Australia Presents
An Audience with Neil Armstrong
In this four part series the first man to walk on the moon, gives a personal commentary on Apollo 11’s historic lunar landing, his thoughts on leadership and taking risks to innovate for the future

Chris Boyette | May 23

CNN - A fire was burning Wednesday evening on a nuclear submarine docked at a U.S. Navy shipyard in Maine, and four people were injured, authorities said.

The USS Miami's reactor was not operating at the time and was not affected, according to Gary Hildreth, a public affairs officer for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery.

Navy spokesperson Lt. Myers Vasquez said the attack sub was in dry dock for regularly scheduled maintenance when the fire started.

Haji Mujtaba/ Miranshah & Jibran Ahmad / Peshawar | May 23

Reuters - A U.S. drone strike on suspected Islamist militants in northwest Pakistan killed 10 people on Thursday, intelligence officials said, an attack likely to raise tensions in a standoff with Washington over NATO supply routes to Afghanistan.

The pilotless drone aircraft fired two missiles at a compound in a village in North Waziristan, a day after a similar attack killed four suspected militants in the same region.

The Guardian's Nick Hopkins reports that British defense chiefs are dusting off and updating contingency plans after being told by M.I.6 that there's still a "25-50% chance" that Israel will decide to attack Iran before the US elections in November, inevitably drawing in the US and UK.

Israel must weigh up whether President Obama is likely to take a harder line on pre-emptive action against Iran next year if he has won a second term.

"The Americans might hang out the Israelis to dry after the election, but not before," said a senior Whitehall source. "Obama would have to support Israel if there was an attack before November."

British contingency measures are mostly defensive: making sure British troops in Helmand, Afghanistan are properly prepared for the prospect of Iranian-sponsored attacks as well as by Talibanesque groups and moving UK minesweeping vessels to the Persian Gulf to help keep shipping lanes open if Iran mines the Strait. Hopkins reports that some cabinet ministers would strongly resist UK involvement in any missile or air strikes on Iran by the US if Israel does drag the allies into war. That resistance seems to extend into the British civil service and military establishments.

The Guardian has spoken to a number of Foreign Office and military officials in recent months, and all of them have expressed dread at the thought of a conflict with Iran.

One spoke of fear every time Obama and Cameron are left to discuss the issue and what may have been agreed. "We have our hearts in our mouth," said the source.

I wonder if US officials feel the same way? Probably.

We probably shouldn't be, because something similar could happen to Democrats, eventually:

Washington (CNN) -- When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.

"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.

Zach Epstein

BGR - Hackers associated with well known hacker-activist group “Anonymous Operations” have released a massive cache of data they say was obtained when they hacked a website belonging to the United States Department of Justice. “Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” Anonymous wrote in a statement on its website. The hackers claim the file contains emails as well as “the entire database dump” from the DOJ website.

“We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information,” the hackers wrote. ”We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.”

TomDispatch/TruthDig, By Chris Hellman & Mattea Kramer, May 22

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion—a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.

By Evelyn M. Rusli & Michael J. De La Merced | New York | May 23

NYT - Just days before Facebook went public, some big investors grew nervous about the company’s prospects.

After publicly warning about challenges in mobile advertising, Facebook executives held conference calls to update their banks’ analysts on the business. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and other firms soon started advising clients to dial back their expectations. One prospective buyer was told that second-quarter revenue could be 5 percent lower than the bank’s earlier estimates.

From IPS:

The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.

Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils.

I know I've written about this before, but I'm going to keep repeating the message because this is the biggest danger of climate change to Americans, who need to realise this is coming. American-produced apathy and denialism is one of the biggest drags on world-wide climate change opinion, and thus on action. Maybe this, a disaster for the bulk of America's heartland, will convince Americans to get their collective heads out of their asses.

John M. Broder & Matthew L. Wald | Washington | May 21

NYT - Gregory B. Jaczko, whose three-year tenure as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been marked by bitter battles with colleagues and with Congress, announced Monday that he would step down as soon as a successor was confirmed.

The White House said it would name a successor “soon,” but it is unlikely that anyone will be confirmed to succeed Dr. Jaczko for many months, ensuring continued turmoil at the deeply divided agency. The commission’s inspector general is preparing a report to be issued in coming weeks that is expected to repeat some of the charges of mismanagement and verbal abuse of subordinates that have isolated Dr. Jaczko from other members.

Alissa J. Rubin | Kabul | May 22

NYT - The leading American diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, will leave his post this summer after less than a year, an American Embassy spokesman said Tuesday.

“The ambassador has with regret confirmed that he is going to be stepping down," said the spokesman, John Rhatigan, who is based in Kabul.

Over at AmericaBlog, Gaius Publius cogently argues that "if Occupy leaders (organizers) don't take on and reject violence, they will do lasting damage both to Occupy and to the broader movement of which Occupy is just one part." The heart of his argument is that:

You don't stop police violence with non-violence; but you justify it by violent acts of your own. Your violence guarantees escalation of violence on both sides, and guarantees that their violence (police beatings; pepper-swabbed eyeballs and throats; multiple strip searches; extended stays in urine-soaked solitary cells) will be sold as "necessary" by the entire troop of millionaire news-blond(e)s.

But if non-violent protest won't halt police violence, in a time when it is increasingly normalized, what will? And if it cannot be halted, where do we end up?

Washington, DC - Last week we witnessed the capo di tutti capi of political and policy evolution. President Barack Obama, after Vice-President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan played the role of his social-issue Shofar, came out in favour of the equality of marriage for all in the US, regardless of sexual orientation. To put it in simple terms: for the first time in the history of this country, the president of the United States supports gay marriage.

This is obviously a big moment. For those seeking to enter loving relationships recognised by law, nothing has changed in that realm. But culturally, when the president or other major political figures make strong statements on issues, it changes everything. To quote Republican House Leader Shelley Runyon in the film The Contender: "What I say, the American people will believe. And do you know why? Because I will have a very big microphone in front of me."

Matt Stoller explains a stark reality of U.S. (and, increasingly, British) politics:

Most activists and political operatives are under a delusion about American politics, which goes as follows. Politicians will do *anything* to get reelected, and they will pander, beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal, just to stay in office. It’s all about their job.

This is 100% wrong. The dirty secret of American politics is that, for most politicians, getting elected is just not that important. What matters is post-election employment. It’s all about staying in the elite political class, which means being respected in a dense network of corporate-funded think tanks, high-powered law firms, banks, defense contractors, prestigious universities, and corporations. If you run a campaign based on populist themes, that’s a threat to your post-election employment prospects. This is why rising Democratic star and Newark Mayor Corey Booker reacted so strongly against criticism of private equity – he’s looking out for a potential client after his political career is over, or perhaps, during interludes between offices. Running as a vague populist is manageable, as long as you’re lying to voters. If you actually go after powerful interests while in office, then you better win, because if you don’t, you’ll have basically nowhere to go. And if you lose, but you were a team player, then you’ll have plenty of money and opportunity. The most lucrative scenario is to win and be a team player, which is what Bill and Hillary Clinton did. The Clinton’s are the best at the political game – it’s not a coincidence that deregulation accelerated in the late 1990s, as Clinton and his whole team began thinking about their post-Presidential prospects.

Bill Clinton is nowadays worth around $80 million and admits "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then." Stoller notes in a tweet that you can substitute "general" for "politician" and understand what makes the Pentagon tick too.

A report from a couple of weeks ago that German police fired only 85 bullets in action during the whole of 2011 is still drawing amazed comment from American friends on Twitter.

Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17 injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.

Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.

"Our police officers are no thugs in uniform," Lorenz Caffier, interior minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, said at a press conference Tuesday.

People shouldn't be so amazed at the German figure, rather they should be outraged at American statistics. American gun culture is run amuck.