Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Lest anybody think the Harper Cons' combination of dishonesty and secrecy is limited to political payoffs, Blacklock's reveals (PDF) that they subsidized the shipment of corporate jobs out of Canada - and didn't deign to inform the public that the program existed until seven years after the fact.

- And APTN reports on the Cons' suppression of tens of thousands of pages of documents detailing the causes and effects of underfunding of First Nations child welfare.

- But then, both stories also serve as important examples of the value of detailed research into government activity. And Nicky Woolf credits the Guardian for taking up that cause around the globe - making it an increasingly valuable journalistic resource even in the U.S.:

Figures given exclusively to The Atlantic show that -- according to internal analytics -- June 10, the day after Snowden revealed his identity on The Guardian's website, was the biggest traffic day in their history, with an astonishing 6.97 million unique browsers. Within a week of publishing the NSA files, The Guardian website has seen a 41 percent increase in U.S. desktop unique visitors (IP addresses loading the desktop site) and a 66 percent rise in mobile traffic. On June 10, for the first time in the paper's history, their U.S. traffic was higher than their UK traffic.
...
The Guardian also has a reputation for solid investigative journalism. The NSA story isn't their first rodeo. They were one of three publications to work closely with WikiLeaks to process the mountains of data leaed by Bradley Manning in 2010. When Rupert Murdoch's vast tabloid the News of the World was finally caught phone-hacking, it was The Guardian that brought it down, doggedly fighting for the story for two years against a storm of legal threats and denials from News International. Before that, the paper was known for having faced down a storm of litigation to prove that the former MP Jonathan Aitken had lied before a court, giving them probably their best-known front page, featuring the headline "He Lied And Lied And Lied".

I ask Gibson what's coming up for Guardian US, when the Snowden dust finally settles. "We will add commentators, we will add reporting, we will add verticals, we will continue to grow, and we'll work with commercial partners and do tech and business and all the things that we want to be," she says. The publication is doubling down on its investigative presence in the States as well: Investigative journalist Paul Lewis is joining the paper's Washington bureau from the London office this month, and Nick Davies, the reporter whose two years of digging brought about the phone-hacking scandal, is joining the New York team later in the year.

- John Ahni Schertow offers a look at the process being used to push a nuclear waste depository on the community of Pinehouse - and the rightful response from community members.

- Finally, Kathleen Rodgers and Darcy Ingram criticize the Cons' lack of interest in any youth involvement in politics other than as paid flacks and trained seals.