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This evening's music features blues shouter Wynonie Harris. Enjoy!

"Justice is incidental to law and order."

-- J. Edgar Hoover

News and Opinion

U.S. law enforcement - dumb as a stump or dumb like a fox? It looks like our knights in shining armor get most of their exercise jumping to conclusions - ones that allow them to use all of their terrorism toolkit against ordinary americans who seek redress for grievances against government overreach and oppression. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.

This is worth a full read.

As Black Activists Protested Police Killings, Homeland Security Worried They Might Join ISIS

As nationwide protests against police killings of black men began rolling across the country in 2014, federal and local law enforcement who were closely monitoring protesters’ online activities repeatedly expressed a bizarre concern: that the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad.

That concern was unequivocally baseless, and no evidence ever emerged to substantiate it. Still, documents obtained by the government transparency group Property of the People, which were shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal that officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence exaggerated the significance of isolated social media activity, mostly by foreign accounts, advocating for a connection between the domestic movement against police brutality and foreign terrorism.

In intelligence reports and internal communications circulated around the time of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 Baltimore protests following the death in custody of Freddie Gray, DHS officials fretted that the Islamic State might attempt “to use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool” or call on “Baltimore rioters to join them.” And in July 2016, during nationwide protests against the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a cabinet position, circulated a memo warning that a lone, foreign pro-Al Qaeda Facebook user sought to seize on the protests to urge “‘Black’ Americans to take up arms” and “start armed war against the US government.”

These official warnings that U.S. activism against police violence might be exploited as a recruitment opportunity by violent foreign terrorist groups slightly preceded the FBI’s designation of a “Black Identity Extremist” domestic terrorism category, which essentially cast large numbers of the same black activists as potential homegrown violent extremists. As The Intercept has reported, the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremism” label, while first used in a 2017 threat assessment report, originated on the heels of the Ferguson protests, and the first individual the FBI designated as a “black identity extremist” was a young Ferguson protester the agency had entrapped. But just as there is no evidence that a “Black Identity Extremist” ideology actually exists, there is also no evidence that U.S. activists ever saw or in any way responded to sporadic social media calls to join foreign fundamentalist Islamic groups.

If anything, critics say, law enforcement’s fixation on that nonexistent connection is testimony to both their anti-black and anti-Muslim biases. ... Absent from all these documents is any evidence that anyone associated with protests in the U.S. had responded to the exhortations of Islamic extremists — or that they had ever even seen those calls in the first place. Still, law enforcement’s close scrutiny of these isolated instances, even when none of them seem to have amounted to anything more substantial than social media posts, and the fact that these calls were prominently included in intelligence assessment reports, risked conflating, in the eyes of law enforcement, legitimate domestic protest with foreign terrorism.

Worth a full read:

Chris Hedges: Reckoning With Failure in the War on Terror

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, as Max Blumenthal points out in his insightful book “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” was made possible not only by massive social inequality and concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the oligarchic elites but by the national security state’s disastrous and prolonged military interventions overseas. ...

The misguided interventions by the national security apparatus have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, over 5 million desperate refugees fleeing to Europe, the destruction of entire cities, the squandering of some $5 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money, rampant corruption and criminality. The mandarins of national security, rather than blunt the rise of radical jihadism, have ensured its spread across the globe. The architects of this imperial folly have a symbiotic relationship with those they profess to hate. The two radical extremes—the interventionists in the national security apparatus and the radical jihadists—play off of each other to countenance ever-greater acts of savagery. The more perfidious your enemy, the more your own extremism is justified. We are locked in a macabre dance with the killers we created and empowered, matching war crime for war crime, torture for torture and murder for murder. This unrestrained violence has a dark momentum that escapes management and control. It exacerbates the very insecurity it claims to be attempting to eliminate by constantly creating legions of new enemies. ...

The failure, as Blumenthal writes, to place these conflicts in context, to examine our own complicity in fueling a justifiable anger, even rage, dooms us to perpetual misunderstanding and perpetual warfare. Our response is to employ greater and greater levels of violence that only expand the extremism at home and abroad. This demented project, as Blumenthal writes, collapses “the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.” It bifurcates political space into competing forms of extremism between the jihadists and the counter-jihadists. It creates a strange and even comforting “mutually reinforcing symbiosis” that depends “on a constantly escalating sense of antagonism.” ...

The radical jihadists, in an irony not lost on Blumenthal, are often deliberately armed and empowered by the U.S. national security apparatus, along with Israel, as a way to pressure or remove regimes deemed antagonistic to Israel and the United States. Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, in audio leaked from a closed meeting with Syrian opposition activists, admitted that the U.S. had used Islamic State as a tool for pressuring the Syrian government. He also acknowledged that Washington’s complicity in the growth of IS in Syria was the major cause for Russian intervention there. ...

The corporate state, its legitimacy in tatters, seeks to make us afraid in order to maintain its control over the economic, political and military institutions. It needs mortal enemies, manufactured or real, at home or abroad, to justify its existence and mask its mismanagement and corruption. This narrative of fear is what Antonio Gramsci called a “legitimation doctrine.” It is not about making us safe—indeed the policies the state pursues make us less secure—but about getting us to surrender to the will of the elites. The more inequality and injustice grow, the more the legitimation doctrine will be used to keep us cowed and compliant. The doctrine means that the enemies of the United States will never be destroyed, but will mutate and expand; they are too useful to be allowed to disappear. It means that the primary language of the state will be fear. The longer the national security state plays this game, the more a fascist America is assured.

Max Blumenthal on "The Management of Savagery"

'Another Horrific Attack': US-Backed Saudi Coalition Bombs Yemen School, Killing Mostly Children

With a War Powers resolution that would end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen currently on President Donald Trump's desk, the Saudi-led coalition on Sunday reportedly bombed a residential area in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, killing at least 11 and injuring dozens more.

According to local medical officials, most of those killed were young children after Saudi airstrikes hit a Yemeni school.

Another horrific attack in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. More children dead. President Trump, I urge you to sign the resolution Congress passed last week ending U.S. support for this conflict. Yemen needs humanitarian aid, not more bombs. https://t.co/pEJTjazYxS

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 8, 2019

Reacting to the latest Saudi-led attack on Yemen—which comes around two weeks after the coalition bombed a Yemeni hospital—Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) demanded to know whether the Trump administration provided the Saudis with "targeting or other assistance... for this airstrike that killed girl students."

"Why is the Trump administration still supporting the Saudi-led coalition, which has committed multiple war crimes?" Lieu asked.

“Volcano of anger”: The escalating crisis in Libya

The U.N.-backed government in Libya has launched a counteroffensive to win back territory seized by renegade General Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army in a surprise assault on the capital Tripoli that could drag the country back into civil war. But despite calls for a truce from the international community, Haftar’s troops are not backing down, and war planes bombed Tripoli’s only operating airport on Monday, forcing authorities to shut it down.

The counteroffensive — dubbed “Volcano of Anger” — comes after five days of fighting that saw Haftar’s troops launch a multipronged assault on the west and south of the capital, leaving at least 25 dead and dozens more injured, a move described by Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj as an attempted coup. The government action will “purge all Libyan cities of aggressor and illegitimate forces,” Colonel Mohamed Gnounou told reporters Sunday.

The counteroffensive began after the U.S. and others announced the evacuation of troops and personnel over safety concerns as fighting continued on the outskirts of the capital. “We are deeply concerned about fighting near Tripoli,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday. “There is no military solution to the Libya conflict. This is why the United States continues to press Libyan leaders, together with our international partners, to return to political negotiations.” ...

The threat of a civil war in the oil-rich country has led to oil prices hitting a five-month high on Monday, with markets expecting lower output from the OPEC member nation.

Trump designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as foreign terrorist organization

The United States has designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards as a foreign terrorist organization, Donald Trump said on Monday, marking the first time Washington has formally named a branch of the armed forces of a foreign government as a terrorist group.

In a statement, Trump said this unprecedented step, “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft”.

Iran responded soon after, designating the US a “state sponsor of terrorism” and its military forces in the region “terror groups”.

In a statement, the Supreme National Security Council declared “that it considers the regime of the USA a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ and ‘the Central Command of America, known as Centcom’ and all forces related to it ‘terrorist groups’”, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (Irna), a state-run news agency.

The council added: “The IRGC unlike America and its regional allies who have always supported extremist and terrorist groups in West Asia region, have always been in the frontline of fighting terrorism and extremism in the region.”

Has Trump Locked U.S. and Iran into a “Permanent State of Enmity” by Listing IRGC as Terror Group?

Iran hits back after Trump labels the Revolutionary Guard terrorists

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday warned Donald Trump that his decision to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terror organization was a “mistake” and will only serve to make the elite fighting group even more popular.

Rouhani, in a speech to mark Iran's national nuclear technology day, added that the unprecedented decision taken by the White House on Monday would undermine U.S. interests in the region, labeling Washington as a “leader of world terrorism.”

“This mistake will unite Iranians, and the Guards will grow more popular in Iran,” Rouhani said. “America has used terrorists as a tool in the region while the Guards have fought against them from Iraq to Syria.”

On the Eve of Israel’s Election, Netanyahu Thanks Trump for Sanctioning Iran at His Request

On the eve of Israel’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for President Donald Trump’s decision to impose sanctions on Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by designating it a foreign terrorist organization. “Thank you, my dear friend, President Donald Trump,” Netanyahu tweeted in Hebrew, “for answering another one of my important requests.”

As the Telegraph correspondent Raf Sanchez noted, Netanyahu’s choice of words seemed to imply that Trump’s earlier decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Syrian territory Israel seized by force in 1967, was also a gift given at the request of the embattled Israeli prime minister. ... Joe Dyke, an Agence France-Presse correspondent, pointed out that Netanyahu omitted the claim that Trump’s move was made at his request in a subsequent tweet in English. That left the prime minister open to the charge often leveled at Palestinian leaders by Israelis, that they placate the international community in English and then say something quite different for domestic consumption in their native tongue.

Trump is popular with Israel’s right-leaning, nationalist electorate for a string of concessions to Israeli claims, including the de facto recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem as well as the Golan Heights. Netanyahu’s warm relations with the American president have featured heavily in his re-election campaign.

On Sunday, Netanyahu also shared a segment from Fox News in which Sean Hannity called Gantz “his crazy opponent,” for suggesting that Trump was meddling in Israel’s election.

As former Depity CIA Director and Treasury counter terror official @cohendavid told @AliVelshi the real point of designating Iran’s IRGC a terror group is to make it hard for a future White House to ever reopen nuclear talks with Iran @MSNBC

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) April 8, 2019

UK likely to be offered Brexit extension until end of year

Britain is likely to be offered a final long extension ending on 31 December after the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, failed to convince the bloc’s capitals that Theresa May has a plan to break the Brexit impasse. A number of member states, most prominently France, along with Slovenia, Austria and Spain, remain sceptical about a lengthy extension, citing the risks to the EU of Britain behaving badly.

Barnier implored EU ministers meeting in Luxembourg to keep the pressure on MPs to back the deal by supporting May’s request for a Brexit delay only up until 30 June, a leaked diplomatic note of the debate reveals. But, according to the note seen by the Guardian, there is instead growing support for the idea of a lengthy extension, with a Brexit delay of around nine months now looking likely, sources claimed.

None of the EU27 ruled out such a delay during the meeting of EU affairs ministers, The Guardian has learned. The most wary instead insisting on a “mechanism” to keep check on the British government’s behaviour.

The threats made by the Conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to disrupt the union from inside in the event of a long extension to Britain’s membership were raised in the meeting according to the leaked cable.

Barnier told the group: “We will not tolerate this”.

Brexit deadlock : 'Theresa May has less and less room for negotiation'

Brexiter MPs pursue fresh bid to oust May by indicative votes

A fresh attempt to oust Theresa May is under way over her decision to enter into talks with Jeremy Corbyn, with leading Brexiter MPs plotting ways to force a vote showing that the majority of the party has lost confidence in her. Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, has rebuffed calls from backbenchers for an indicative vote on May’s future, because the prime minister saw off a no-confidence vote in December last year and cannot be challenged again within 12 months.

However, backbench MPs are submitting a fresh batch of no-confidence letters to him in the hope the number will become so great that he has to act. After meeting the prime minister on Monday, Brady said there was “no intention of proceeding” with any informal vote of confidence. ...

Mark Francois, the vice-chair of the hardline European Research Group, called for an indicative ballot to take place this week as he said May had lost the confidence of her MPs. ... Francois later told the Guardian: “When we had an official vote of confidence prior to Christmas and 117 colleagues voted against the PM, we did not know at that time that she would be getting into bed with a Marxist with the prospect of a customs union and breaching the 2017 manifesto. Had we known that, I’m sure the vote against would be far higher. Now that everything has changed, I believe it is appropriate that colleagues should be asked again.”

America: A Failing State

The US is a gold flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the US as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.

And so, today, large parts of America are shitholes, which the residents hate so much they are consuming record amounts of drugs and committing suicide, because who the fuck wants to live in a nation with no hope, shitty bosses and no hope.

Oh, of course, there are people doing well. There were people doing well in 400AD as the Roman Empire collapses. There are always some people doing well. But the number of people doing well keeps getting less and less, and the decline keeps getting worse and worse. But the top is doing fine, so they see no reason to do anything. Heck, Trump just gave them another tax cut. Everyone they know is doing great.

And so the decline goes on, because until the elites are made to feel the pain of the majority, they will not change. And so far, no one is willing or able to make the elites pay.

Keiser Report: Breaking up BigAg

Trump was just blocked from making asylum seekers wait in Mexico

A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from sending non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are pending in the U.S.

The ruling is a blow to the administration and comes the day after the Homeland Security chief resigned.

The preliminary injunction, which was decided upon Monday, will go into effect Friday at 5 p.m. EST. The judge said that the decision was not a sweeping declaration that the federal government could not continue this practice at some point. Rather, it was about how the Trump administration was enforcing the policy.

The protocol likely does not comply with the Administrative Procedures Act, according to court documents, because it did not do enough to protect asylum seekers. The court filing said “further procedural protections would be required to conform to the government’s acknowledged obligation to ensure aliens are not returned to unduly dangerous circumstances.”

Trump Purges DHS Leadership, Threatening to Make Immigration Policies Even More Draconian

Woman arrested for Mar-a-Lago breach had device to detect hidden cameras

The Chinese woman arrested after breaching security at Donald Trump’s private club and resort, Mar-a-Lago, had a device used to detect hidden cameras, other electronics and thousands of dollars in cash in her Florida hotel room, prosecutors said on Monday.

Yujing Zhang appeared in court at a bail hearing in West Palm Beach, where prosecutors revealed that items found in her room included: a signal detector – which is used to pick up the presence of hidden cameras – nine USB drives, five sim cards and a cellphone. There was also $8,000 in cash and several credit and debit cards, according to the Washington Post.

The FBI is still investigating whether or not she is a spy.

New York State has a plan to make sure Congress sees Trump’s tax returns

A state senator introduced draft legislation on Monday that would allow New York tax officials to hand over President Trump’s state returns to Congress, in the event that the House fails to procure Trump’s filings from the IRS. The move follows a request by the House Ways & Means Committee last week for six years worth of Trump’s tax returns — a bid that the Trump White House vowed to fight with every legal weapon it’s got.

The New York law offers a backup plan in case Trump’s legal defense against Congress succeeds.

“This new bill will permit New York State to comply with requests from congressional investigative committees,” the bill’s sponsor, New York state senator Brad Hoylman, said in an emailed statement Monday. The law would “help ensure Congress can’t be blocked.”

New York law currently forbids the disclosure of state tax returns unless ordered by a court. But the bill would carve out an exception for the state’s Commissioner of Taxation and Finance to fulfill a request from any of three Congressional committees, provided the committee has already reached out to the Treasury Department.

The three committees named are those with traditional authority over tax policy, including the House Ways & Means Committee, which formally asked for Trump’s tax returns last week. The bill also names the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation. To become law, the bill will still need to pass through New York’s democrat-controlled state legislature and be signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Sanders Vows to Ban 'Disastrous' Anti-Labor 'Right-to-Work' Laws

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday told a gathering of union machinists that as president he would keep states from undermining their rights by pushing for a federal ban on so-called "right-to-work" laws.

Calling the rules "disastrous," Sanders told the International Association of Machinists that he would call on lawmakers to pass the Workplace Democracy Act, a proposal which he has regularly introduced in Congress since 1992 and which he plans to bring to the Senate floor once again in the coming days.

Under "the most significant labor legislation introduced in very, very long time...we will end once and for all the disastrous right-to-work laws in 28 states," Sanders said to loud applause.

The senator and 2020 presidential candidate also said the law would keep companies from "ruthlessly exploiting their employees by misclassifying them as independent contractors and [denying] them overtime by calling them supervisors"—both common practices by corporations.

Under right-to-work laws, unions are barred from requiring that all workers contribute dues if they benefit from the union's contract. The laws have been aggressively pushed by Republican governors and lawmakers in recent years, with proponents claiming they protect workers from being forced to join a union.

Barr says the redacted Mueller report will be released “within a week”

A partially-redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report should be released “within a week,” Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday, responding to mounting pressure from Democrats to release the full, unredacted document immediately.

Redactions to the report will be color-coded to correspond to the reason why the underlying information is being withheld from the public, Barr said during his first appearance before Congress since Mueller submitted his final report in late March. ...

Barr refused to say whether the White House has seen the report or has been briefed on its contents, despite writing in a letter to Congress on March 29 that “there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for [an executive] privilege review.”

Trump administration sabotages major conservation effort, defying Congress

Scientists and officials around the US have told the Guardian that the Trump administration has withdrawn funding for a large, successful conservation program – in direct contradiction of instructions from Congress. Unique in scale and ambition, the program comprises 22 research centers that tackle big-picture issues affecting huge swaths of the US, such as climate change, flooding and species extinction. They are known as Landscape Conservation Cooperatives – or were, because 16 of them are now on indefinite hiatus or have dissolved.

“I just haven’t seen anything like this in my almost 30 years of working with the federal government,” said a scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service who worked for one of the LCCs and wished to remain anonymous, because federal employees were instructed not to speak with the Guardian for this story. “There is this lack of accountability.”

“Congress approved $12.5m for the existing 22 landscape conservation cooperatives,” said Betty McCollum, chair of the House interior-environment appropriations subcommittee, at a recent hearing with an interior department official. “[But] we are hearing disturbing reports from outside groups and concerned citizens that the LCC program is being altered and may not receive any federal funding.”

The LCCs were established under the Obama administration in 2010 and staffed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and appeared to be achieving their goals. In Hawaii, a center found that many native Hawaiian forest birds would not have any suitable habitat remaining by the end of the century, which helped get one of the birds listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act. In flood-prone areas of the Gulf coast, work by an LCC has resulted in more residents getting access to flood-insurance discounts. Another created the “California Climate Commons”, a website that aggregates studies, data visualizations and maps on how climate change will affect the state.

“No other federal program is designed to address landscape conservation needs at a national scale” in this way, according to a 2016 review by the National Academy of Sciences.

Worth a full read, there are many more ugly details than can be fairly extracted:

Pennsylvania governor under scrutiny for role in approving pipeline

Internal government records obtained by the Guardian raise questions about the role of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf in permitting construction of a controversial fossil fuel pipeline that now faces two criminal investigations stemming from widespread environmental and property damage. The 350-mile, $2.5bn Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline through southern Pennsylvania has sparked growing outrage. It has caused roughly 140 documented industrial waste spills into wetlands and waterways, destroying numerous residential water wells, and opening large sinkholes just steps from residents’ homes.

It is being constructed by the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which first gained notoriety as the builder of the Dakota Access pipeline, a project that drew international attention and widespread opposition, particularly from Native Americans, in 2016 and 2017 on the northern Great Plains.

Emails, text messages and regulatory records show that the secretary of Pennsylvania’s department of environmental protection (DEP), Patrick McDonnell, directed staff to cut short their environmental review even as numerous shortcomings remained in the project’s permit application. The department also appeared to be under pressure from Wolf’s office at the time. DEP staff internally circulated two “deficiency letters” on 20 January 2017 that they were preparing to send to an ETP subsidiary, Sunoco Logistics, citing inadequacies in the company’s plans concerning earth disturbance activities and drilling beneath water bodies.

Five days later, a senior official in Wolf’s office, Yesenia Bane, texted McDonnell to request the agency refrain from sending a deficiency letter, pending a meeting involving Wolf, the governor’s chief of staff, and McDonnell. “Understood,” McDonnell wrote in response. Less than an hour later, McDonnell emailed several staff members involved in the pipeline review that “Govs [sic] office needs a list of the outstanding issues ASAP”.

Roughly two weeks after that, the DEP approved the pipeline without requiring many of the environmental safeguards it had initially sought. A DEP senior official who was involved in the Mariner East 2 project, John Stefanko, noted in a later legal deposition that McDonnell had directed staff “that we needed to make a decision by February 10th”, although the review had been scheduled to persist for at least several additional months.

Burger King’s plant-based Whopper gets glowing review – from a meat lobbyist

A glowing review of Burger King’s new plant-based Whopper comes from an unlikely source: a senior meat industry lobbyist who admitted the surprisingly realistic taste of modern fake meats is a “wake-up call” to livestock farmers.

In a review of the Impossible Whopper, which is being trialled in 59 restaurants in the St Louis area, Eric Bohl, director of public affairs at the Missouri Farm Bureau, wrote: “If farmers and ranchers think we can mock and dismiss these products as a passing fad, we’re kidding ourselves. This is not just another disgusting tofu burger that only a dedicated hippie could convince himself to eat.”

Bohl went to a Burger King to compare a traditional Whopper with the vegetarian alternative made by Impossible Foods, a California company that makes plant-based substitutes. Its burger is designed to “bleed” like a conventional burger and uses genetically modified yeast to produce heme, a protein that mimics the flavor of meat. ...

Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, both backed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are at the forefront of a push into meaty territory which aims to mimic the appearance and taste of flesh rather than making the sort of health-based vegetarian fare typically scorned by committed carnivores. In its mission statement, Impossible Foods says: “We’re making meat using plants, so that we never have to use animals again,” citing the environmental toll of meat production, via excessive land and water use, as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

The schadenfreude special of the week:

Rhino poacher killed by an elephant and then 'devoured' by lions

A rhino poacher is believed to have been attacked by an elephant and then eaten by a pride of lions during an incident in South Africa’s Kruger national park. Police brigadier Leonard Hlathi said police received information that a group of men had gone into the park on 1 April in order to hunt rhino, “when suddenly an elephant attacked and killed one of them”.

“His accomplices claimed to have carried his body to the road so that passersby could find it in the morning. They then vanished from the park.”

Hlathi said the group of men left the park and informed a family member of the deceased what had happened, who contacted police. Park rangers began a search for the man, on foot and by air, but could not locate the man at first due to failing light. Rangers and police returned on 4 April and were able to find the man’s remains in the Crocodile Bridge section of the park. “Indications found at the scene suggested that a pride of lions had devoured the remains leaving only a human skull and a pair of pants,” said Isaac Phaahla, the general manager of communications for the Kruger national park.

Also of Interest

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

Can the US's unsafe water crisis unite Americans?

For All His Endless Lies, Trump Has Exposed Some Important Truths

Why Is Trump Designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps As Foreign Terrorist Organization?

On the Pavement with Wikileaks

Chelsea Manning’s ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Moment

Why Is Barbara Lee Helping Fund Our Forever Wars?

Federal Reserve ‘Independence’ Means It’s Free to Serve the Financial Industry

Barack Obama is stuck in the past. He represents the old Democratic party

Ignoring Lessons of #metoo, Media Scrutinize Biden’s Accusers

Britain is in a grimmer state than I can ever remember

UK butterfly census 2018: winners and losers – in pictures

Scientists reverse memory decline using electrical pulses

A Little Night Music

Wynonie Harris - Night Train

Wynonie Harris - Man, Have I Got Troubles

Wynonie Harris & Lucky Milinder - Teardrops from My Eyes

Wynonie Harris - Drinkin' Sherry Wine

Wynonie Harris - Bloodshot Eyes

Wynonie Harris - Good Morning Mr Blues

Wynonie Harris - That's Me Right Now

Wynonie Harris - Quiet Whiskey

Wynonie Harris - Rock Mr. Blues

Wynonie Harris - Shake That Thing

Wynonie Harris - Good Rockin' Tonight