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This evening's music features blues musician and multi-instrumentalist, Lucky Peterson. Enjoy!

“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector… At first, at the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes everyone whom he meets … then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.… Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by the payment of taxes and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?… Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery.”

-- Plato's Republic

News and Opinion

In a Speech Filled with Fear & Xenophobia Donald Trump Accepts Nomination

Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells

Donald Trump's speech accepting the Republican nomination for president will probably go down as one of the most frightening pieces of political rhetoric in U.S. history.

Even for people who believe the danger of genuine authoritarianism on the U.S. right is often exaggerated, it’s impossible not to hear in Trump’s speech echoes of the words and strategies of the world’s worst leaders.

Trump had just one message for Americans: Be afraid. You are under terrible threats from forces inside and outside your country, and he’s the only person who can save us. ...

And if anything, Trump’s speech is actually more terrific, fabulous and huge than those of previous fanatics, since he promises he’s going to fix everything overnight. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end,” Trump says. “Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored.”

Trump: “I alone can fix this.”
Is this guy running for president or dictator? #RNCwithBernie

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 22, 2016

Trump/Nixon: the parallels are startling

As Donald Trump’s own advisers said this week that Trump would use Richard Nixon’s famous “law and order” rhetoric during his 1968 campaign as his inspiration for his Republican nomination speech on Thursday, many have begun comparing Trump to the disgraced former president. The parallels with a man who presided over another era in which there were widespread allegations of police brutality and killings of unarmed African Americans seem compelling.

But if you take a detailed look back at Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president, the analogy runs much deeper than his not-so-coded language attacking racial minorities. As each day passes, Trump’s success looks more and more similar to Nixon’s rise to power.

Just yesterday, Trump campaign surrogate (and widely assumed prospective attorney general) Chris Christie said Trump would seek a new law to purge Obama-appointed federal employees. Trump has also promised to “prosecute” Hillary Clinton if he becomes president, and given the disturbing call-and-response of “Lock her up!” during Christie’s convention speech on Tuesday, there’s little doubt he would follow suit. It’s a reminder that Nixon took his own campaign hatchet man John Mitchell and installed him as attorney general to do his dirty work. ...

Much like Trump, Nixon and Agnew spent a great deal of their campaign attacking the media, so much so that as former New York Times general counsel James Goodale wrote in his 2011 book on the Nixon administration’s war on journalism: “Many who covered the election for the press said they felt under threat with everything they wrote.” ...

And then there’s foreign policy. Nixon spent the entire 1968 campaign claiming that he had a “secret” plan to get the US out of Vietnam and that he would bring peace to a country torn up by war – all the while covertly planning on escalating the war behind the scenes. You may remember Trump started out his campaign claiming he had a “secret” plan to defeat Isis and has been relentlessly hammering Hillary Clinton for voting for the disastrous Iraq war. Yet at the same time, he supported that war at the time, and has made several comments suggesting he would engage in war crimes, such as torture and killing the families of terrorists.

'Sorry for Buzzkill': Michael Moore Predicts Trump Victory

Donald Trump: the madman in his castle

For the sake of public safety and national security, no tennis balls would be allowed in the cordon sanitaire around the Quicken Loans Arena, site of the Republican national convention, nor would water guns, toy guns, knives, rope, tape, umbrellas with metal tips, light bulbs, gas masks or several dozen other items. Guns, however, were authorized. Guns were OK. ...

Guns allowed, but no tennis balls. It’s the sort of garishly insane proposition that’s just another normal day in America, the kind of stunt that a bunch of latter-day Dadaists might pull to highlight societal derangement and degradation. Let the word go forth: America has lost its mind! Or maybe dementia serves as a better metaphor, the country shuffling around like a bonkers senior citizen with a Depends on his head and Kleenex boxes for shoes. ...

Fear has been the driving force of the GOP since the start of the cold war – fear of Commies, fear of black people, fear of Mexicans, gay people, feminists, Muslims, terrorists, feds and so forth, the fear-mongering cultivated to a high art form in the years since 9/11. The difference this time around is economic. The Republican establishment told the base to do one thing, and the base, at long last, did the opposite. “Pluck the chicken but don’t make it scream,” a long-ago New World dictator once told his cronies, but in America in the year 2016, after 35 years of supply-side economics, wholesale globalization, and the biggest redistribution of wealth – not trickle down, but vacuum up – in history, the chicken is screaming.

Trump's Neo-Fascism Appeals to Victims of Obama/Clinton Economics

Politicians to blame for rise of 'respectable racism', says Lady Warsi

Politicians have allowed xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism to enter the mainstream as a result of their toxic and divisive campaigning, according to Lady Warsi.

The Conservative peer and former party co-chair told the Guardian she was deeply worried about the current political climate, claiming a surge in “respectable racism” was feeding the far right.

“I was still disgusted but more comfortable with the racism of the 70s and 80s that was overt and thuggish, than this new form of respectable xenophobia where it is done in political circles, journalism and academia,” she said.

Warsi argued that the EU referendum and London mayoralty campaigns had helped create a climate in which people feel it is acceptable to tell long-established British communities “it’s time for you to leave”.

Referring to a spike in hate crime since the 23 June EU vote, she said: “I do not hold anybody who voted for Brexit responsible for the rise in racism; I don’t hold people who believed in Brexit responsible; but I definitely hold politicians, who put out divisive xenophobic messages and posters, responsible because this created the atmosphere in which this thrived.”

She claimed the campaign had created a sense of threat by singling out certain societal groups – such as eastern Europeans, Turks, and refugees – as “others”.

International Journalists Reflect on Rise of Donald Trump

This German media take on Trump is mildly amusing.

Was Trump’s speech ‘presidential’?

Turkey suspends European Convention on Human Rights

Turkey will temporarily suspend the European Convention on Human Rights after announcing a state of emergency following the attempted coup.

Deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Thursday that Turkey would follow the example set by France when it did so following last November's attacks by Isis militants in Paris. ...

There have been concerns in Turkey that the move will see a return to the days of martial law after a 1980 military coup, or the height of a Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s.

Turkish Parliament Grants Erdogan Sweeping New Powers for State of Emergency

In a 346-115 vote, the Turkish parliament has approved a three month state of emergency across Turkey, the first time such a state will be applied over the entire nation. The vote grants sweeping new powers to President Erdogan, who had already centralized an unprecedented level of power before the failed coup.

The state of emergency allows the government to effectively ignore human rights law entirely, with the constitution only limiting them to the extent that there are limits in place from international treaties. Turkey’s withdrawal from the European Commission on Human Rights today suggests that they are planning to pare down such limits. ...

Turkey has repeatedly imposed a state of emergency in the Kurdish southeast of the country, but has never done so nationwide.

Donald Trump Crams Two Errors Into One Statement on Turkey

In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, after suggesting that he might not defend another member of the NATO alliance in the event of a Russian attack, Donald Trump was asked if he was paying close attention to what was happening in Turkey, following the failed coup attempt last week.

Trump replied that he had been impressed by the efforts of the Turkish people, who took to the streets to prevent the military from seizing power — but did so in a way that demonstrated his ignorance about a central facet of what took place last Friday night.

“They came out on the streets,” Trump said, according to the transcript, “and the army types didn’t want to drive over them like they did in Tiananmen Square when they sort of drived them over, and that was the end of that. Right? People said, ‘I’m not going to drive over people.'”

In this brief comment, Trump managed to be completely wrong about both what took place in Turkey last week, and the backstory to an iconic image from the 1989 protests in China.

[Turkish soldiers in tanks did run over protesters, whereas the Tiananmen "tank man" was dragged away and not run over. See article for details. - js]

Turkish academics talk about living in fear: 'It's the final stage of a witch hunt'

After the coup attempt that failed to remove Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, the government has gone on the offensive against what it says is a vast network of plotters, which it calls a "parallel state" run by exiled cleric and Erdogan enemy Fethullah Gülen. ...

"What we are witnessing right now is the final stage of a witch hunt," said an adjunct professor at a Turkish university who, like all others interviewed for this story, asked to remain anonymous because of the risk to her safety.

It all began, she said, well before the failed coup, to silence "any opposition voices against the government," including journalists as well as academics.

"The hunt against academics started a few months ago," she said, when the Turkish armed forces launched a vast operation against Kurdish militants who want an autonomous region in the country's east. "The president himself openly called 1,128 academics who signed a petition for peace with the Kurds 'intellectual waste,' and some of the 1,128 were jailed. Many lost their jobs without any future chances to enter academia again," she said.

Security forces have even started detaining top academics suspected of complicity in the failed coup.

"Every day academics are fired or called traitors by the government for speaking their minds and telling the truth," said a professor at a major Turkish university who earned his PhD in the US and then returned to his native country to teach. ... Erdogan "will use this crisis as an excuse to kill two birds with one stone," he said. The president wants to "eliminate the remaining autonomy of the country's educational institutions, especially universities, which have always been an important source of opposition ... and bring them under total government control."

Department of Homeland Security detains journalist returning from Beirut

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has come under scrutiny over its policy of detaining journalists, after a Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal said she was detained and asked to hand over her cellphones at Los Angeles international airport last week.

In a long Facebook post on Thursday, Maria Abi-Habib described how she was met by DHS officials while waiting in immigration after a flight that started in Beirut. ...

In her Facebook post, Abi-Habib wrote that one officer escorted her to a back room, where she met another.

After questioning her, the officer asked her to hand over her cellphone, saying she wished to collect information. According to Abi-Habib: “I told her I had first amendment rights as a journalist she couldn’t violate and I was protected under. I explained I had to protect my sources of information.

“‘Did you just admit you collect information for foreign governments?’ she asked, her tone turning hostile.

“‘No, that’s exactly not what I just said,’ I replied, explaining again why I would not hand over my phones,” Abi-Habib said.

Abi-Habib told the officers her cellphones were owned by the Wall Street Journal, and they would have to contact the paper’s lawyers if they wanted to confiscate them. Thirty minutes later, after the officer had consulted with her supervisor, Abi-Habib was allowed to leave. ...

Abi-Habib shared a DHS document the officer gave her, which outlined the department’s right to take electronics and search them anywhere within 100 miles of a port of entry. This, Abi-Habib pointed out, would encompass all of New York City.

Paris prosecutor says Nice attacker had accomplices

The Paris prosecutor says the driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and he had been plotting his attack for months.

Prosecutor Francois Molins said his office, which oversees terrorism investigations, said five suspects currently in custody are facing preliminary terrorism charges for their alleged roles in helping driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, in a judicial inquiry opened Thursday.

State Dept grilled over dozens of civilian deaths in Syria airstrikes

US Airstrikes in North Syria Villages Killed Entire Families, Locals Confirm

US airstrikes in and around Manbij have been killing a lot of civilians, and a Tuesday morning salvo against some nearby villages was the worst of all, killing entire families that the US said they “mistook for ISIS fighters.” 56 were reported killed at the time, but ensuing reports suggest that as many as 212 may have died.

With ISIS turning back the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) in Manbij once, the US tried to back the second push into the city with even more airstrikes. The ongoing US assumption has been that more airstrikes and less restrictions would mean success.

Instead, it meant killing scores, maybe hundreds of civilians, and cast the SDF in the role of the villain among many locals, positioned as America’s allies, and many are now wondering if they can even theoretically hold Manbij if they do capture it, given how many locals despise them.

Saudi Arabia’s PR Machine Uses the 28 Pages to Blame Iran for 9/11 Attacks

Last Friday the U.S. government finally released 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report that detail possible ties between the Saudi Arabian government and the 9/11 hijackers.

The document lists various forms of assistance provided by Saudi agents to the hijackers, including help finding a flight school and various forms of financial support when the hijackers arrived in the United States. ...

Several outlets controlled by Saudi Arabia’s vast public relations machine are trumpeting the document as a vindication that closes the door on any suggestion that the Saudi government had any ties to the 9/11 terrorists. ...

Watch: Frances Townsend on the release of the 28 pages https://t.co/vGcaCswgYI

— Saudi Embassy (@SaudiEmbassyUSA) July 20, 2016

Andrew Bowen, writing for al Arabiya, declares that the document ends any “conspiracy” that the Saudi government provided support to the hijackers. Another al Arabiya columnist, Turki Aldakhil, goes a step further, and in a piece about the 28 pages (“The Sept. 11 road began from Tehran”), attempts to claim that the declassified document should raise questions about Iran. The 28 pages, notably, does not include any information about Iran.

Edward Snowden designs phone case to show when data is being monitored

Edward Snowden has helped design a mobile phone case called the “introspection engine” that, he claims, will show when a smartphone is transmitting information that could be monitored.

Presenting via video link to event at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Snowden and co-designer Andrew “Bunnie” Huang showed how the device connects to a phone’s different radio transmitters, showing its owner knows when a cellular, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection is being used to share or receive data.

Initial mockups of the introspection engine show a small, monochromatic display built into its casing shows whether the phone is “dark”, or whether it is transmitting, and it also can supply an iPhone with extra battery power and cover the rear-facing camera.

It could be developed to act as a sort of “kill switch” that would disconnect a phone’s power supply when it detects that a radio is transmitting data after its owner has attempted to turn it off.

The device is an academic project and nowhere near ready for the mass market, but could still influence how consumers view the “tracking devices” – otherwise known as smartphones that they rely on every day.

Lagarde case: French court rules IMF chief must stand trial over payout

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes resigns amid sexual harassment scandal

Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes officially resigned on Thursday, leaving the cable channel he built into the one of the largest, most influential, and most infamous news networks on the planet.

Ailes' resignation is "effective immediately," Fox's parent company 21st Century Fox said in a statement. ...

The company did not announce a permanent replacement in its statement, but said 85-year-old Rupert Murdoch will assume the role of "acting" chairman and CEO for Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network.

Will black people ever feel safe around police? I doubt it

#CharlesKinsey was shot by police while lying down, his lawyer says https://t.co/TxzkVicMhX pic.twitter.com/WgCLJBKrBx

— CNN (@CNN) July 21, 2016

Once again, the unnecessary shooting of an unarmed black man by a police officer to whom he posed no danger is making headlines. Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist, was working with an autistic client earlier this week when he was shot by a Miami police officer. Shot as he held his hands in the air and assured the cop that he was no threat.

The big difference in the Kinsey shooting and the others that we often discuss in spaces like this is that he lived to tell the tale. What isn’t different is the inevitable question: “If an innocent guy like that can get shot, how can black people ever feel safe at the hands of police?”

We are reminded, once again, that the answer is “they can’t”. Not without a complete upheaval of the law enforcement system as we know it, at least. But how many ‘good’ men, women and children have to be harmed to get us to a place where we can even dream of such a thing? What sort of victim do we require to have The Moment that changes the hearts and minds of a nation committed to notions of inherent black criminality?

We haven’t found out yet for another great American shame, gun control.

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

I think the 2014 death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice is the police violence analogue. Video of officer Timothy Loehmann gunning the child down as he played alone with a toy rifle was viewed by people across the globe. Two years, and many noteworthy police shooting videos later, the fight to stop law enforcement officers from killing black civilians with relative impunity is nowhere near won. ...

So, will the shooting of Charles Kinsey be The Moment?

When your story has a big as hell plot hole in it. #CharlesKinsey pic.twitter.com/QUc5uamotv

— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) July 22, 2016

Charles Kinsey Is Alive and Twitter Is Rejoicing — and That Says a Lot About the US

Thank god #charleskinsey lived to tell this story. He's an aid to an autistic boy, did everything he was supposed to and got shot in the leg

— AshleyTisdaleFrench (@ashleytisdale) July 21, 2016

Thankful that #CharlesKinsey is alive to tell his story. He did everything right. EVERYTHING and the cop still shot him. I mean...

— Awesomely Luvvie (@Luvvie) July 21, 2016

At a place where I'm just happy #CharlesKinsey ain't dead

— Yung Metaphysique (@SoloExMachina) July 21, 2016

The news of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and dozens of others has rightfully received full media coverage and attention. Often in these cases, videos show exactly what happened. Then, police officers are able to tell their sides of the story, but victims are not able to speak on their own behalf. That Kinsey is alive to tell his story is so often not the case when it comes to extrajudicial police shootings.

These tweets also reveal a brutal truth about police shootings in the U.S. Unarmed black men and women — who are often just doing everyday actions — too often end up dead after interacting with the police. The sense of relief that Kinsey is alive is a byproduct of the disturbing and devastating state of policing and race relations in this country.

Atlanta police shooting of unarmed black man leads to rare murder charge

Just weeks before residents of Atlanta shut down their own streets over the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in other parts of the country, Deravis Caine Rogers was shot dead by police in their own Georgia city.

He was African American, unarmed, and provided “no provocation” for the shooting, according to police.

His case didn’t attract the attention that other police shootings caught on cellphone videos have. But in a rare development, the officer who fired the gun, James Burns, has already been charged with murder and fired.

It is the first time in six years that a district attorney in Georgia has charged an officer without the officer first appearing before a grand jury for indictment.

“The decision of APD [Atlanta police department] to terminate and of DA Paul Howard to prosecute Officer James Burns for the killing of Caine Rogers does indeed mark an unprecedented shift in how Atlanta and Fulton County hold police accountable for their actions,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, based in Atlanta.

In Cleveland, Lonely Protesters Marched Through Empty Streets

Organizers for the Stand Together Against Trump rally in Cleveland had planned for 5,000 participants. The march, a peaceful demonstration that “America’s fundamental ideals of liberty and equality are greater than Trump’s incessant scapegoating and bullying,” was supposed to close out a week that some had predicted would overshadow the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which came amid nationwide civil unrest and race riots and exploded in violence.

But there was no mayhem in Cleveland. ...

A couple hundred people showed up for what had been expected to be one of the week’s largest events. Those who made it to the rally — trekking out in scorching heat to a designated parade route a half-hour walk from the convention center — were unrelenting. On a long bridge overpassing a desolate industrial zone, nowhere close to the buzz of the convention center but also far from cars, passersby, or really any sign of life, they carried hopeful signs claiming, “We’re better than this” and “Love trumps hate,” and chanted “Vote your conscience” in a nod to Ted Cruz’s words the night prior. ...

Surrounded by metal gates on one side and a dirt hill on the other, demonstrators shouted, unironically, “this is what democracy looks like.” Then they turned around and went back to where they came from — an empty lot the ACLU, which sued the city over the remoteness of the official parade route, called an “industrial wasteland.”

Jill Stein: 'The Politics of Fear has Delivered Everything We Were Afraid of'

PERIES: Dr. Stein, now we've come to a critical time. The Democratic Party convention is next week. And I'm sure there's enormous pressure on the Green Party to hand over, particularly in those swing states, hand over the Green Party members to the Democratic Party and ask not to do another Ralph Nader and split the vote and make sure that Donald Trump gets elected. I'm sure there's enormous pressure. You're resisting that pressure. Why?

STEIN: Well, splitting the vote could've been blamed on any of the minor parties in that race in Florida. And remember, it wasn't Ralph Nader, it was the Supreme Court that stopped the vote recount that would have been won by Al Gore, and it was Al Gore who decided not to fight that outrageous decision by the Supreme Court. So there's blame to be shared all around here. But, in fact, Al Gore said that he would have done--he supported George Bush's policy and all the terrible things that we associate with George Bush.

And this politics of fear that tells you to vote against what you're afraid of instead of for what you believe, that politics has a track record. The politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of. It is a propaganda campaign.

We are the ones we have been waiting for. Democracy needs a moral compass. It needs values. It needs an affirmative vision. Right now we have a situation where the American people are rejecting both of our candidates. Even the supporters of Hillary Clinton don't really support her; they just don't like Donald Trump. And the majority of Donald Trump supporters mainly are motivated by not liking Hillary Clinton. And the system is working overtime to disguise the fact that there are other choices--in fact, the kinds of choices that people are clamoring for, that stand up for the people's agenda that Bernie showed there was so much support for.

That agenda is alive and well. Our numbers have actually tripled in the polls. We went from 2 percent to 6 and 7 percent over the course of the last six weeks without any coverage from corporate media. Can you imagine what it would be if we were actually getting some time?

Hours Before Hillary Clinton’s VP Decision, Likely Pick Tim Kaine Praises the TPP

Hillary Clinton's rumored vice presidential pick Sen. Tim Kaine defended his vote for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Thursday.

Kaine, who spoke to The Intercept after an event at a Northern Virginia mosque, praised the agreement as an improvement of the status quo, but maintained that he had not yet decided how to vote on final approval of the agreement. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has qualified her previous encouragement of the agreement, and now says she opposes it.

Kaine’s measured praise of the agreement could signal one of two things. Either he is out of the running for the vice presidential spot, as his position on this major issue stands in opposition to hers. Or, by picking him, Clinton is signaling that her newly declared opposition to the agreement is not sincere. The latter explanation would confirm the theory offered by U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, among others, who has said that Clinton is campaigning against the TPP for political reasons but would ultimately implement the deal.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson courts disaffected voters in Cleveland

Set for Convention Floor Fight, Push to End Superdelegates 'Catching Fire'

The push to abolish the "antidemocratic superdelegate system" within the Democratic National Committee is at its apex ahead of a DNC Rules Committee meeting on Saturday, at which an amendment to minimize the influence of those party insiders will be considered.

Superdelegates, which only exist within the Democratic Party, are unpledged elected officials or party elites who may back the candidate of their choosing at the convention, regardless of how their state voted in a presidential primary or caucus. The vast majority lined up behind Hillary Clinton before the 2016 primary race even began.

More than 130,000 people have signed a petition in support of the effort, and more than 50 Rules Committee members have joined in by cosponsoring and filing an amendment to sweep away superdelegates. While this is "far from a majority of the 187-member committee," as Alex Seitz-Wald notes for MSNBC, it does put the amendment past the 25 percent threshold of support within the committee that will be needed to issue a "minority report" and force a vote on the floor of next week's Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.

"The campaign to end superdelegates is catching fire," said Aaron Regunberg, Rhode Island state representative and a DNC Rules Committee member leading the fight. "Superdelegates disempower voters, they are less diverse than our overall delegates, and they are wildly unpopular. The time has come to end the archaic and undemocratic superdelegate system once and for all—and that starts Saturday in Philadelphia."

"Build Bridges, Not Walls": Medea Benjamin On How She Disrupted Donald Trump’s Speech

A new ruling on voter ID laws could affect the 2016 presidential race

In a victory for proponents of expanded voting access, one of the country's most conservative federal courts on Wednesday found a Texas voter identification law to be unconstitutional because it disenfranchised minority voters.

The ruling by the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals puts on notice a similar voter identification law in Mississippi, which, along with Louisiana, is in the circuit court's jurisdiction.

"We believe the ruling applies to Mississippi as well. It does by necessity," Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties' Voting Rights Project, said on Thursday. "This is hugely significant and we expect it to reverberate around the country."

The ruling comes after a 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, in which the high court gutted a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law, section 4(b), was intended to protect against a return of Jim Crow-era voting requirements that were used to systematically keep African-Americans from voting in the American south.

The court ruled that Texas's state law, Senate Bill 14, which requires voters provide a state-issued identification, such as a driver's license, passport or military ID, was unconstitutional due to its "discriminatory effect" on the voting capabilities of black and Latino citizens.

Republicans in Cleveland Deny Climate Change as Arctic Snow Turns Pink

Donald Trump's reported top pick for energy secretary, oil and fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, declared on the Republican National Convention stage on Wednesday night, “Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded.”

One day earlier, NASA had announced that this June was the hottest June on record, and that the same could be said for every month in 2016 — part of a long-term climate trend that has exacerbated geopolitical conflicts. ...

Meanwhile, another group of scientists estimated that temperature rises had helped cause 1 trillion tons of Greenland glacial ice to melt between 2011 and 2014. ...

Meanwhile, scientists noted that the earth’s clouds had changed shape, growing taller and moving away from the tropics toward the poles, encouraging drier weather in the subtropics. ...

Meanwhile, Greenland snow turned watermelon pink as Arctic ice melted more than ever before, covering about 40 percent less of the sea than it did 30 years ago.

US Failing Dismally on Sustainable Development, Despite Vast Wealth

The United States is far behind other wealthy countries when it comes to sustainable development, a new report found this week, meaning the country is "seriously far" from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ratified by United Nations member states in September 2015.

Rampant poverty, mass incarceration, a too-high murder rate and too little renewable energy were a few of the reasons for the poor ranking given to the U.S., according to the Washington Post.

"What we've done in this report is a first scan of about 150 countries," said Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute as well as the UN's Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which created the report, to the Washington Post. "It's the first time anybody has taken a look across the world."

As the Post writes, the sustainable development goals are "a global agenda to fix climate change, stop hunger, end poverty, extend health and access to jobs, and vastly more—all by 2030":

The goals comprise no less than 17 separate items and 169 "targets" within them. And this isn't just an airy exercise—the targets are quite specific ("By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the population at a rate higher than the national average"). That means that at least in many cases, countries can actually be measured on how they’re faring in meeting these goals, based on a large range of sociological, economic and other indicators.

And while some on the left have critiqued the UN's highly-touted goals for focusing too much on economic development and argued that achieving sustainability requires a more radical shift away from Western capitalist thinking, many progressives have also praised the goals' call for a renewed international focus on social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

On those counts, the U.S. is failing dismally, says the report put together by SDSN alongside the German foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung. The wealthiest country in the world is ranked 25th out of 83 on sustainability and social goals, falling behind Hungary, Slovenia, Belarus, Canada, and the U.K.

Greenpeace: 'Extremely High' Jump in Post-Fukushima Radioactive Chemicals

Greenpeace Japan reported Thursday that waterways in the Fukushima district have hundreds of times more radiation now than before 2011, when the nuclear disaster that forced the evacuation of at least 160,000 people occurred.

Looking back at the past five years, the environmental group's new report, Atomic Depths: An assessment of freshwater and marine sediment  contamination: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster—Five years later (pdf), finds that the hazardous chemical cesium-137 was present in the soil on the banks of the Abukuma, Niida, and Ota rivers.

"The extremely high levels of radioactivity we found along the river systems highlights the enormity and longevity of both the environmental contamination and the public health risks resulting from the Fukushima disaster," said Ai Kashiwagi, energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan. "These river samples were taken in areas where the Abe government is stating it is safe for people to live. But the results show there is no return to normal after this nuclear catastrophe." ...

"The radiological impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the marine environment, with consequences for both human and nonhuman health, are not only the first years. They are both ongoing and future threats, principally the continued releases from the Fukushima No. 1 plant itself and translocation of land-based contamination throughout Fukushima Prefecture, including upland forests, rivers, lakes and coastal estuaries," the report continues.

Greenpeace states:

The lifting of evacuation orders in March 2017 for areas that remain highly contaminated is a looming human rights crisis and cannot be permitted to stand. The vast expanses of contaminated forests and freshwater systems will remain a perennial source of radioactivity for the foreseeable future, as these ecosystems cannot simply be decontaminated.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The lies Trump told this week: a special Republican convention edition

Peter Thiel: I Miss the Days of Strong, Daring Federal Spending

Folha’s Journalistic Fraud Far Worse Than We Reported Yesterday: A Smoking Gun Emerges

America Keeps Lethal Nukes All Over Europe for No Good Reason

Atlanta mayor rejects demand to end Israel police training

Donald Trump Is Always Right

A Little Night Music

Lucky Peterson - Smooth Sailing

Lucky Peterson - Blues in My Blood

Lucky Peterson - Tribute to the King

Lucky Peterson - Yer Blues

Lucky Peterson - Tin Pan Alley

Lucky Peterson - Statesboro Blues

Lucky Peterson - I'm Still Here

Lucky Peterson - Driving Wheel