Did you ever hear the story about a guy explaining the bright side of oil spills? You did not hear that story, because anyone who does that is a terrible person, and hopefully the human race collectively knows better, right? Wrong.

A Houston-based oil pipeline company recently made that very flawed argument in a written submission to Canada's National Energy Board. Kinder Morgan wants to triple the capacity of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which carries oil from Alberta to British Columbia, because of backlogged demand. The pipeline has a 300,000-barrel-a-day limit, and yet the company's demand exceeds that by about 70%, according to the National Post. Opponents of the expansion think increasing the amount of oil travelling through the pipeline will increase the likelihood of a spill.

Maybe that's why, buried deep in Kinder Morgan's 15,000 page submission to the NEB, the oil company argued oil spills "can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies," because of the economic benefits brought on by clean-up efforts. "Spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers," the report reads. Kinder Morgan does not forget to analyze the negative effects an oil spill has on local communities, like crippling fishing resources, threatening human health, and damaging property, which all carry an economic impact of their own.

But Kinder Morgan still had the audacity to include the lines about positive effects a spill can have, and their opponents are tearing them apart over them. "It is an outrageous insult to British Columbians that Kinder Morgan would claim there are possible economic benefits from an oil spill," Sierra Club British Columbia campaigns director Caitlyn Vernon said in a statement.

Local politicians are coming out against the report, too. "We know Kinder Morgan is using every trick in the book to push this pipeline through our community, but this takes the cake - proposing that a spill would actually be good for the local economy," Kennedy Stewart, a federal politician who represents an area of British Columbia through which the pipeline passes, told the Vancouver Sun. "This assertion shows the utter disregard this company has for British Columbians."

Over the 25 years Hillary Clinton has spent in the national spotlight, she's been smeared and stereotyped, the subject of dozens of over-hyped or downright fictional stories and books alleging, among other things, that she is a lesbian, a Black Widow killer who offed Vincent Foster then led an unprecedented coverup, a pathological liar, a real estate swindler, a Commie, a harridan. Every aspect of her personal life has been ransacked; there's no part of her 5-foot-7-inch body that hasn't come under microscopic scrutiny, from her ankles to her neckline to her myopic blue eyes - not to mention the ever-changing parade of hairstyles that friends say reflects creative restlessness and enemies read as a symbol of somebody who doesn't stand for anything.

Forget all that troubled history, and a Clinton run for president in 2016 seems like a no-brainer, an inevitable next step after the redemption of her past few years as a well-regarded, if not quite historic, secretary of state. But remember the record, and you'll understand why Clinton, although rested, rich and seemingly ready, has yet to commit to a presidential race (people around her insist it's not greater than a 50-50 proposition), even as she's an overwhelming favorite.

If Clinton says yes, she'll have access to a bottomless pool of Democratic political talent and cash to match all those hyperbolic pronouncements about her inevitability. If she doesn't run, the single biggest factor holding her back will be the media, according to an informal survey of three dozen friends, allies and former aides interviewed for this article. As much as anything else, her ambivalence about the race, they told us, reflects her distaste for and apprehension of a rapacious, shallow and sometimes outright sexist national political press corps acting as enablers for her enemies on the right.

Clinton isn't insane, and she's not stupid. "When you get beat up so often, you just get very cautious," says Mike McCurry, her husband's former press secretary, who joined the White House team to find a first lady traumatized by the coverage of her failed Hillarycare initiative. "She [has] had a very practical view of the media. ... 'I have to be careful, I'm playing with fire.'"

Read more here.

In the past few days, US officials have resumed a drumbeat of denunciations against the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro.

In response to an appeal from a right-wing Venezuelan émigré in Miami, President Barack Obama described himself as "deeply troubled by the continued repression of protestors in Venezuela," and declared that he was "working behind the scenes" to influence events in the South American country.

Speaking Monday via an Internet video connection to a conference in Estonia of the "Freedom Online Coalition," which includes the governments of 23 countries, Secretary of State John Kerry made unsubstantiated claims that the Venezuelan government had blocked access to some web sites and lumped it together with Russia as a country that suppresses Internet freedom and constitutes a place "where we face some of the greatest security challenges today."

Needless to say, the US secretary of state - who had earlier condemned the Venezuelan government for waging a "terror campaign" against its own people - made no mention of Washington's own role in the wholesale spying on Internet activities of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

The cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, weakened unions and soaring inequality have fundamentally reordered the country.

As America's new economy starts to look more like the old economy of the Great Depression, the divide between rich and poor, those who have made it and those who never will, seems to grow ever starker. I know. I've seen it firsthand.

Once upon a time, I worked as a State Department officer, helping to carry out the occupation of Iraq, where Washington's goal was regime change. It was there that, in a way, I had my first taste of the life of the 1 percent. Unlike most Iraqis, I had more food and amenities than I could squander, nearly unlimited funds to spend as I wished (as long as the spending supported us one-percenters), and plenty of US Army muscle around to keep the other 99 percent at bay. However, my subsequent whistleblowing about State Department waste and mismanagement in Iraq ended my twenty-four-year career abroad and, after a two-decade absence, deposited me back in "the homeland."

I returned to America to find another sort of regime change underway, only I wasn't among the 1 percent for this one. Instead, I ended up working in the new minimum wage economy and saw firsthand what a life of lousy pay and barely adequate food benefits adds up to. For the version of regime change that found me working in a big box store, no cruise missiles had been deployed and there had been no shock-and-awe demonstrations. Nonetheless, the cumulative effects of years of deindustrialization, declining salaries, absent benefits and weakened unions, along with a rise in meth and alcohol abuse, a broad-based loss of good jobs and soaring inequality seemed similar enough to me. The destruction of a way of life in the service of the goals of the 1 percent, whether in Iraq or at home, was hard to miss. Still, I had the urge to see more. Unlike in Iraq, where my movements were limited, here at home I could hit the road, so I set off for a look at some of America's iconic places as part of the research for my book, Ghosts of Tom Joad.

The 1 percent hollowed out the middle class and our industrial base. And Washington just let it happen.

I know I'm dating myself by writing this, but I remember the middle class.

I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was still possible for a high school graduate - or even a high school dropout - to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money than a high school teacher.

"I had this student," my history teacher once told me, "a real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, 'That's my car.' Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician's assistant or something. He handed light bulbs to an electrician."

In our neighbors' driveways, in their living rooms, in their backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I've always believed that the '70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people without culture or education had the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats.

That all began to change in the 1980s. The recession at the beginning of that decade - America's first Great Recession - was the beginning of the end for the bourgeois proletariat. Steelworkers showed up for first shift to find padlocks on mill gates. Autoworkers were laid off for years. The lucky ones were transferred to plants far from home. The unlucky never built another car.

For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak.
For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage.

The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars (£105) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.

Home to tens of thousands, such cages - stacked on top of each other - measure 6ft by 2.5ft.

We read a lot about a new Cold War, and I think there is truth in the words. Obama's so-called "pivot" towards Asia is clearly directed at China's emergence as a great power, at the notion of containing China, to use the very word, coined by the American State Department's George F. Kennan and used for many years to characterize America's policy towards the Soviet Union.

Obama's talk of a "pivot" is extremely revealing. How does a former sandal-wearing lecturer in Constitutional Law come up with such language? It is unmistakably the language of America's military-security establishment, that group of men glittering with brass buttons, rhodium-plated bits, and cascades of ribbons who, along with stern, close-cropped men in Armani suits, smelling of expensive cologne, periodically sit around a boat-sized polished walnut table with the President. The language, I think, reveals the real balance of power at the table, once again suggesting that it is not an elected official who sets American policy abroad.

"A freedom-destroying cocktail."

That's how Justice Antonin Scalia characterized Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement officers may pull over and search drivers based solely on an anonymous tip.

The justices ruled 5-4 Tuesday to uphold a traffic stop in northern California in which officers subsequently found marijuana in the vehicle. The officers themselves did not see any evidence of the tipped reckless driving, which was interpreted as drunkenness, even after following the truck for several minutes.

Justice Clarence Thomas said the tip phoned in to 911 that a Ford pickup truck had run the caller off the road was sufficiently reliable to allow for the traffic stop without violating the driver's constitutional rights.

The United States and the unelected European Union nomenklatura have decided to sacrifice the world economy in a bid to punish Russia for its response to the crisis in Ukraine.

British Finance Minister says economic pain suffered by sanctions price worth paying.

Changes to the Racial Discrimination Act proposed by federal Attorney-General George Brandis would ''open the door to Holocaust deniers'', allowing them to publish their claims with impunity, legal advice to NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell says.

The opinion by leading barrister Arthur Moses, SC, says the changes would ''radically narrow the protection that Australian citizens will receive from racial vilification'' and ''undermine the very purpose'' of the act.

''A new legislative right to engage in racial vilification in the course of public discussion would, for instance, open the door to Holocaust deniers to publish their opinions on websites and on social media in the course of 'public discussion','' he writes in the opinion handed to Mr O'Farrell on Friday.

Senator Brandis plans to abolish section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to publicly ''offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate'' a person. Section 18D, which provides protections for freedom of speech, will be removed.