Political Linkage

• Today's comic by Tom Tomorrow is The bad intelligence:
  
• EU dropped pesticide-control laws under U.S. pressure in negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
• Proposed fedeal regulations on CO₂ emissions would cut coal production:

  Production of coal in the United States would drop by one-fifth in the next five years and almost one-third by 2025 under the Obama administration’s regulatory crackdown on carbon emissions from electric power plants, the Energy Department’s statistical branch said on Friday. Retirements of coal-fired power plants would double, with about 50 gigawatts more in lost capacity compared with business as usual, the new analysis by the department’s Energy Information Administration found. At first, power plants would mainly switch to natural gas, but over time, solar and wind capacity would soar.

• R.D. Kaplan says it’s time to bring imperialism back to the Middle East. When did it ever leave? This guy repented for his active participation in pressing for the invasion of Iraq. Then he said he deeply regretted it. Now he's at it again. Repentance requires a vow not to repeat the offense. Guess he missed that part.
• Iran adviser says U.S. let ISIL take over Ramadi:

  An Iranian newspaper is quoting the chief of an elite unit in Iran's Revolutionary Guard accusing the U.S. of allowing the Islamic State group to seize the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the latest criticism to follow the fall of the city.

• Deadline for releasing final JFK assassination-related documents fast approaching:

  A special team of seven archivists and technicians with top-secret security clearances has been set up at the National Archives and Records Administration to process all or portions of 40,000 documents that constitute the final collection of known federal records that might shed light on the events surrounding JFK’s murder, POLITICO has learned — files that according to law must be made public by October 2017. But the records’ release is not guaranteed, says Martha Murphy, head of the National Archives’ Special Access Branch. While the JFK Records Act of 1992 mandated the files be made public in 25 years, government agencies that created the paper trail can still appeal directly to the president to keep them hidden. And some scholars and researchers, not to mention the army of JFK conspiracy theorists, fear that is exactly what will happen given the details about the deepest, darkest corners of American spy craft that could be revealed — from the inner workings of the CIA’s foreign assassination program and front companies to the role of a CIA psychological operations guru accused of misleading congressional investigators about alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities.

• Former S.C. GOP executive director Todd Kincannon says he threatened wife because cough medicine made him "completely crazy".
• Canada's truth commission nears the end of its seven-year probe into residential schools for Indians:

  Between 1929 and 1974, St. Michael's Indian Residential School was home to thousands of kids enrolled in often year-round boarding school. Under the watchful eye of RCMP officers, aboriginal parents were forced to give up their children as young as 4-years-old to Indian agents, or face possible fines or imprisonment. From tiny communities across the coast of BC, the children were brought into the cold, brick rooms of St. Mike's. Run by the Anglican church under the authority of the Indian Act, St. Mike's was where those little kids learned that their hair and bodies were disgusting, that their families were demonic, and that no amount of work, physical and sexual abuse, or distance from their backwards communities would cure them of the stain of Indian-ness. [...] Many have urged the UN to classify the residential school system under the 1948 Genocide Convention. It seems to fall squarely within the boundaries, not only of the softer cultural genocide, but also as straight-up genocide, the definition of which includes "forcibly transferring children... with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."