5: Leak reveals Rex Tillerson is director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company
Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show.
Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – has been a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, since 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.
The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely.
Though there is nothing untoward about this directorship, it has not been reported before and is likely to raise fresh questions over Tillerson’s relationship with Russia ahead of a potentially stormy confirmation hearing by the US senate foreign relations committee.
The Guardian
4: This Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Raise Sea Levels By 11 Feet
The Earth’s climate, it seems, isn’t listening to the politicians that are insisting it’s not warming. The temperature continues to rise incrementally, and the globe’s large glaciers—giant vaults of stored water—continue to melt, releasing into the oceans. The global sea level, due to thermal expansion and glacial melting, continues to rise, building up a head of steam like a train just beginning its descent down a steep hill.
Greenland’s hulking glacier and the Arctic Sea ice are now marked by their rapid melting. And the western Antarctic ice sheet has garnered a lot of attention recently, too. But while scientists were fretting over the western side of Antarctica, the eastern Antarctic ice sheet has been melting too. Australian researchers braved treacherous sea conditions to collect data on the melting Totten Ice Shelf there, which holds up a body of ice that would cause over 11 feet of sea level rise, if it melted. Their findings are published in the journal Science Advances.
Scientists have concluded that ice shelves and glaciers in eastern Antarctica have been experiencing basal melt, where the bottom layer of a body of ice starts to melt away, but they’ve never directly observed how it’s happening and what the main drivers of melting are until now.
Vice News
3: Andrew Bacevich: Trump’s “Israel First” Policy Will Likely Lead to More Violence in Region
Donald Trump has tapped the far-right-wing bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Many are calling Friedman an unprecedented pick for the position, given his hostility toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians and his disregard for international law. Friedman has no diplomatic experience. He supports Israel’s Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and says he doesn’t think it would be illegal for Israel to annex the entire Palestinian territory, despite the fact that it would be blatantly illegal under international law. For more, we speak to military historian Andrew Bacevich. His latest book is “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.”
Democracy Now
2: Duterte’s drug war: Death toll goes past 6,000
More than 1,000 people have been killed every month during the first six months of Duterte’s term.
Aljazeera
1: HOW MANY CHILDREN WERE SHOT DEAD TODAY? AN INTERVIEW WITH GARY YOUNGE
Every day, on average, seven children and teenagers are shot dead in the United States. November 23, 2013 — the day Gary Younge chose randomly as the setting for his book Another Day in the Death of America — was “just another day in America.”
Journalist Gary Younge speaks to demonstrators in Trafalgar Square. Thousands march through central London on UN anti-racism day to demand that the British government accept a greater share of refugees seeking asylum in Europe.Refugees welcome demonstration, London, Britain – 19 Mar 2016 (Rex Features via AP Images) Journalist Gary Younge speaks to demonstrators in Trafalgar Square in London. Photo: Rex Features/AP ImagesOn that Saturday, he writes, “as befits an unremarkable Saturday in America,” 10 children and teens were killed by guns. On that particular day, all the victims were boys; eight were black, two Latinos, and one white. The youngest was nine, the oldest 19; their average age was 14.7. But as Younge notes, they were not all the children and teens killed by guns on that day — they were the ones he could find, scouring local news sites for stories that sometimes fell short of a hundred words.
The Intercept
