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This evening's music features Chicago blues singer and bass player Willie Kent. Enjoy!

"The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies--which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest--well-nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home."

-- Hannah Arendt

News and Opinion

Fake President, fake administration use fake emergency to perpetuate real crisis.

The Trump Administration Is Declaring a Fake Emergency to Sell Weapons to Saudi Arabia

The Trump administration chose the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend to invoke an obscure state-of-emergency provision that would allow it to sell billions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates without giving Congress a chance to block the sale.

A Democratic congressional source told The Intercept on Friday that the administration was using the measure to clear a backlog of more than 20 proposed arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, many of which would be blocked if they came to a vote in the Senate. Under the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, the State Department must notify Congress 30 days before concluding an arms sale, which gives Congress the chance to vote on halting the weapons transfer. Under the rarely used provision, however, the president can certify that “an emergency exists” and that an immediate transfer is necessary for “the national security interests of the United States.”

In a statement on Friday, Sen. Bob Menedez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that in notifying Congress of its plans, the Trump administration had “described years of malign Iranian behavior but failed to identify what actually constitutes an emergency today.”

In the past, presidents who invoked the provision have been able to point to time-sensitive emergencies that justified going around Congress. In the days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, for example, President George H.W. Bush invoked it to transfer M60 tanks and F-15 aircraft to Saudi Arabia to secure its northeastern border. Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who warned days ago that the Trump administration would try to circumvent Congress, said that President Donald Trump is only using the loophole because he knows he cannot sell weapons to Saudi Arabia any other way. “There is no new ‘emergency’ reason to sell bombs to the Saudis to drop in Yemen, and doing so only perpetuates the humanitarian crisis there,” Murphy said in a statement Friday.

As Trump Avoids Congress to Send More Bombs to Saudis, Airstrike Kills Seven Yemeni Children

The head of the United Nations children's agency on Sunday reiterated her call for peace in Yemen after a Saudi-led aistrike on a fuel station near the southern city of Taizz killed 12 civilians including seven children—an attack that came as the Trump administration used a legal loophole to sell more bombs to the kingdom.

The latest casualties, said UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore, bring number of children killed or harmed over just the last 10 days to 27.

"These are only the numbers that the United Nations has been able to confirm; actual numbers are likely to be even higher," said Fore.

"Nowhere is safe for children in Yemen," she added. "The conflict is haunting them in their homes, schools, and playgrounds."

The latest airstrike took place Friday, and UNICEF's figures represent an updated death toll. A medic and Houthi rebel forces had told Agence France-Presse Saturday that nine civilians were killed, with two children among them. [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/26/trump-avoids-congress-send-... Lise Grande, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, issued a statement Saturday reflecting the updated death toll.]

Assange Is Indicted for Exposing War Crimes While Trump Considers Pardons for War Criminals

The Trump Administration Wants the Power to Decide Who’s a Journalist

With the indictment of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on espionage charges Thursday, Trump administration prosecutors are attempting to assert the power to determine who is and who is not a journalist.

It’s a reminder that in America there is no accepted definition for what journalism is, and that journalists largely operate under the same protections as any citizen: the First Amendment. Instead, news organizations rely on a set of professional, legal, and political norms to safely function. And the Obama and Trump administrations have blown up many of them. Assange’s indictment is just the most stark example.

“This is a five-alarm fire for the First Amendment,” said Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia. “This administration has no credibility to decide who's a journalist.”

The media world has long worried that the U.S. government would take up the question of whether WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is a journalist. Those fears became reality when the Department of Justice slapped Assange with an 18-count indictment under the Espionage Act, explicitly arguing that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher. It marks the first time the U.S. has ever charged a journalist under the World War I-era law, which curbs speech deemed damaging to national security.

Much of the charging document describes run-of-the-mill reporting techniques: coaxing sources for additional access; protecting their identities; and soliciting and publishing sensitive information they provide. It’s left news organizations and media lawyers worried that other journalists who cover national security could be next. “The administration has gone from denigrating journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ to now criminalizing common practices in journalism that have long served the public interest,” Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, said in a statement.

Why Assange Prosecution Is Complete Bulls**t!

The Indictment of Julian Assange Under the Espionage Act Is a Threat to the Press and the American People

A true democracy does not allow its government to decide who is a journalist. A nation in which a leader gets to make that decision is on the road to dictatorship.

That is why the new U.S. indictment of Julian Assange is so dangerous to liberty in America.

The Trump administration has charged Assange under the Espionage Act for conspiring to leak classified documents. The indictment, released yesterday, focuses on his alleged efforts to encourage former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents to him and WikiLeaks about a decade ago.

Many of those documents, including U.S. military reports and State Department cables, were later published by WikiLeaks, but they were also the basis of reporting by major news organizations like the New York Times and The Guardian, which published some of them. The Manning leaks helped reveal long-hidden truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the post-9/11 global war on terror. Among the most striking leaks were a classified video of U.S. military attack helicopters killing a dozen people, including two Reuters staffers, in Baghdad in 2007, as well as the more than 250,000 State Department cables, which continue to be an important reference for reporters and researchers studying U.S. foreign policy.

The Manning documents also turned WikiLeaks into a strange new player in the modern journalistic ecosystem. WikiLeaks would obtain materials from sources inside governments and other organizations and then disseminate them, either by publishing them itself or by sharing them with major news organizations. WikiLeaks served as an intermediary between sources and reporters.

Does that make Assange, its founder, a journalist? A debate over that question has raged ever since and has never been resolved.

Journalists don’t want the government to settle this question — and Americans shouldn’t either. If the government gets to decide what constitutes journalism, what’s to stop it from making similar rulings about any outlet whose coverage it doesn’t like?

US Army Tweet Inadvertently Triggers Responses Revealing 'Real, Painful, and Horrifying Human Costs of War'

The U.S. Army may have gotten more than it bargained for when it recently asked on Twitter, "How has serving impacted you?"

The question, posed just before the nation officially marks Memorial Day, brought attention to "the real, painful, and horrifying human costs of war," said advocacy group Win Without War.

Observers described the responses, which came from veterans, their loved ones, and people from countries where U.S. has waged war, as "brutal" and "heartbreaking."

Mike Pence Tells West Point Graduates They Will Be In Combat: ‘It Will Happen’

Vice President Mike Pence warned West Point graduates on Saturday to expect combat at some point during their service in a “dangerous” world. In a commencement speech, he said grads might have to fight against forces aligned with North Korea or China, or in Afghanistan or Iraq, as well as possibly face an unidentified foe in “this hemisphere.”

“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen,” Pence said. “Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region.” He warned: “Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere ... When that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns.”

Pence’s words were particularly ominous amid rising tensions in U.S. relations with some other nations. President Donald Trump has vowed to back a coup in Venezuela. He has adopted a more bellicose tone toward Iran and announced the deployment of an additional 1,500 troops to the Mideast. Ignoring objections from some lawmakers, he’s also bypassing congressional review and allowing the sale of billions of dollars of arms to Saudi Arabia.

US Blames Iran for Gulf Tanker Sabotage, Iraq Rocket Attack

With the US having signed off on another 1,500 ground troops being sent to the Middle East, some justification is needed. A top Pentagon official is relying on previous speculation to make this all look very official.

Vice Admiral Michael Gilday told reporters that the US has “very high
confidence” that recent sabotage of oil tankers off the coast of the
United Arab Emirates was done by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He also claimed rockets recent fired ib Baghdad were fired by “Iranian proxies.“

Donald Trump welcomes Japan's offer of mediation with Iran

Donald Trump has said he would support Shinzo Abe’s efforts to act as a mediator between the US and Iran, as reports suggested the Japanese prime minister would visit Tehran next month for talks with the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani.

Speaking at a press conference on the penultimate day of his state visit to Japan, Trump also gave his backing to Abe’s attempts to set up a first summit, without preconditions, with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, hours after the regime described the US president’s national security adviser, John Bolton, as a warmonger.

Tehran says it has no interest in talking to the US administration, which has imposed tough sanctions on the country over its nuclear programme and last week sent 1,500 troops to the region.

“I know that the prime minister and Japan have a very good relationship with Iran so we’ll see what happens,” Trump, who has offered Tehran direct talks, told reporters before a working lunch with Abe.

Trump, who became the first world leader to meet Japan’s new emperor, Naruhito, on Monday, added: “The prime minister has already spoken to me about that and I do believe that Iran would like to talk. And if they would like to talk, we would like to talk also. We’ll see what happens … nobody wants to see terrible things happen, especially me.” Trump later said Washington was not interested in regime change in Iran.

Jews in Germany warned of risks of wearing kippah cap in public

Germany’s government commissioner on antisemitism has suggested Jews should not always wear the traditional kippah cap in public, in the wake of a spike in anti-Jewish attacks.

“I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere, all the time, in Germany,” Felix Klein said in an interview published Saturday by the Funke regional press group. The remarks were criticised by the Israeli president as representing a “capitulation” to antisemitism.

In issuing the warning, Klein said he had “alas, changed my mind compared to previously”.

Antisemitic attacks are on the rise in a number of European countries, and a survey of Jewish people across the European Union carried out in December found 89% of Jews feel antisemitism has increased in their country over the past decade, while 85% believed it to be a serious problem.

Antisemitic hate crimes rose by 20% in Germany last year, according to interior ministry data, which blamed nine out of ten cases on the extreme right. There were 62 violent antisemitic attacks, compared to 37 in 2017. France has also seen a spike in violent incidents.

Bolsonaro supporters take to Brazil’s streets as approval ratings drop

Hardcore devotees of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, have taken to the streets across the country in their first major show of force since his landslide election victory last October. ... Pro-Bolsonaro rallies were reported in more than 300 towns and cities, including Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília, and Juiz de Fora, where Bolsonaro was stabbed on the eve of his election, although many of the demonstrations appeared small.

Flag-waving Bolsonaristas also turned out to protest in the Amazon, a region activists fear could suffer irreversible damage under a leader notorious for his hostility to the environment. ... Bolsonaro did not take part in the controversial mobilization, which critics have slammed as a dangerous attempt to radicalise supporters and bully Brazil’s democratic institutions into backing the president’s plans. But he tweeted his approval, sharing cellphone videos of the rallies with his 4.3m followers. ...

Five months into Bolsonaro’s four-year term his approval ratings have plummeted with Brazil’s economy stuttering, political infighting raging and the president facing uncomfortable questions over his family’s ties to organized crime and a corruption scandal involving one of his sons. Bolsonaro has also faced international repudiation as a result of his extremist views, recently cancelling a visit to New York because of protests against him there.

In an editorial on Sunday the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper said support for Bolsonaro “was melting away before our eyes”, with about 36% of voters now considering his administration bad or awful, compared to just 17% in February. The majority of Brazilians who were not seduced by Bolsonaro’s “salvationist gobbledygook” had little left but pessimism, the newspaper added. ...

Waning support for Bolsonaro has sparked growing chatter about his possible impeachment among political observers.

European Elections: Why did the Brexit party come out on top?

Move 9 women freed after 40 years in jail over Philadelphia police siege

For 40 years, Janine Phillips Africa had a technique for coping with being cooped up in a prison cell for a crime she says she did not commit. She would avoid birthdays, Christmas, New Year and any other events that emphasized time passing while she was not free. ... On Saturday she could finally begin accepting the passage of time. She and her cellmate and sister in the black liberation struggle, Janet Holloway Africa, were released from SCI Cambridge Springs in Pennsylvania, after a long struggle for parole.

The release of Janine, 63, and Janet, 68, marks a key moment in the history of the Move 9, the group of African American black power and environmental campaigners who were imprisoned after a police siege of their home in August 1978. The pair were the last of four women in the group either to be paroled or to die behind bars.

The saga of Move was one of the most dramatic and surreal of the 1970s black liberation struggle. Along with their peers, the women lived in a communal house in Philadelphia under group founder John Africa, AKA Vincent Leaphart. All members took the last name Africa to show they considered themselves a family. A cross between the Black Panthers and west coast hippies, Move campaigned not only for equal treatment for African Americans but also for respect for animals and nature, caring for 48 stray dogs in the house.

Such unconventional attitudes brought them into conflict with neighbours and the Philadelphia police, a notoriously brutal force even by American standards. After a siege lasting several months, on 8 August 1978 officers went in to clear the group from the property. In the melee, officer James Ramp was shot and killed with a single bullet. Despite the single shooter, and despite the fact that the group always protested that they were unarmed and that Ramp was killed by fire from fellow officers, the five men and four women were each sentenced to 30 years to life. ...

Janine and Janet Africa are likely to return to live in Philadelphia. The Move organization still exists in the city, where it continues to campaign on issues of racial justice and environmental protection.

Oh looky, the fundamentalist lunatics have worked themselves into a froth again and are ready, in fact itching, to demonstrate their Hairy Thunderer's boundless love for mankind by engaging in mass killings and destruction.

Christian rightwingers warn abortion fight could spark US civil war

Prominent figures on the Christian right in the US ranging from religious magazines to authors to elected politicians have warned that the fight over abortion rights could lead to a new civil war. Though such dire predictions are not necessarily new on the extreme right wing in the US, the passing of a wave of hardline anti-abortion laws in numerous states this year appears to have amped up the conspiracy-minded predictions that depict abortion squarely as a root cause of a coming conflict.

Republican lawmakers such as Ohio’s Candice Keller have openly speculated that the divide over abortion rights might lead to civil war. Last month, Keller drew explicit comparisons with the antebellum situation over slavery, telling the Guardian: “Whether this ever leads to a tragedy, like it did before with our civil war, I can’t say.”

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the Washington state republican legislator Matt Shea had also speculated about civil war, and the “Balkanization” of America, predicting that Christians would retreat to “zones of freedom” such as the inland Pacific north-west, where Shea is campaigning for a new state to break away from Washington. Asked on a podcast if the two halves of the country could remain together, Shea said: “I don’t think we can, again, because you have half that want to follow the Lord and righteousness and half that don’t, and I don’t know how that can stand.”

Along with legislators, the notion of a civil war over abortion has been finding traction in the media organs of the Christian right. In the past year, Charisma magazine, the leading media voice of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, has run at least half a dozen articles contemplating the possibility of an imminent civil war in America. One recent article profiles pastor, broadcaster and author Michael L Brown, who blames a “coming civil war” on “militant abortionists”. Brown told Charisma: “A civil war is coming to America, only this time, it will be abortion, rather than slavery, that divides the nation”.

“Here We Go Again:” This Judge Blocked Another Mississippi Abortion Ban and He’s Tired

A U.S. district judge temporarily blocked a Mississippi law that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy Friday evening, after the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi sued to stop the law from going into effect.

And in his sarcastic, searing opinion, Judge Carlton Reeves makes it clear that he’s fed up with the Mississippi legislature’s attempts to restrict access to abortion. “Here we go again,” Reeves wrote in his opinion’s very first line. “Mississippi has passed another law banning abortions prior to viability.”

Late last year, Reeves struck down another Mississippi law that sought to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In his Friday opinion, Reeves pointed out that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that a woman has a right to get an abortion prior to fetal viability — which generally occurs at 24 weeks. “If a fetus is not viable at 15 weeks LMP, it is not viable at six weeks LMP,” Reeves wrote, referring to “last menstrual period,” a common method of dating a pregnancy’s age. ...

Reeves’ temporary stay on the six-week ban is scheduled to remain in place while litigation over the ban continues.

Real Reason Elizabeth Warren Is Boycotting Fox News

Bernie Sanders to demand Walmart raise 'poverty wages'

Bernie Sanders, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, is preparing to gatecrash Walmart’s annual meeting to demand the world’s biggest retailer increase its 2.2 million workers “poverty wages”.

Walmart workers are sick and tired of being paid poverty wages, while the Walton family is worth over $170 billion. I’m honored to have been invited by Walmart workers to demand they have a seat on the company’s board. https://t.co/hIYWI3hSbw

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 21, 2019

Sanders is expected to attack the multi-billionaire Walton family, who own Walmart, for paying its full-time workers an average of just $14.26 per hour (£11.25) while handing the chief executive, Doug McMillon, a $23.6m pay package.

McMillon’s pay is 1,076 times that collected by the median worker, and makes him by far the best paid person in Arkansas, where Walmart is based and where the AGM will be held. ...

Sanders, a longtime critic of working conditions at the nation’s biggest private employer, will introduce the workers proposal at the annual meeting in Rogers, Arkansas, on 5 June. However, there is very little chance of the proposal attracting enough votes.

Tornadoes Cut Across Unusually Wide Swaths of US, Raising Alarm for Climate Scientists

As the death toll in Oklahoma rose to six Monday amid an outbreak of nearly 200 tornadoes across the Midwest in recent days—as well as in areas far less accustomed to them—climate scientists said such patterns may carry warnings about the climate crisis and its many implications for extreme weather events.

In Oklahoma, tornadoes touched down in at least two cities, including El Reno and Sapulpa, over the weekend, injuring dozens and leveling a number of homes. The tornado that hit El Reno, a suburb of Oklahoma City, was given an EF3 rating, with wind speeds up to 165 miles per hour. Only about five percent of tornadoes are given an EF3 rating or higher. The tornadoes hit after much of the state endured severe flooding last week, following powerful storms that overflowed the Arkansas River and damaged about 1,000 homes. ...

While tornadoes have long been a fixture in the Midwest, meteorologist Eric Holthaus tweeted last week that there is "reason to believe major outbreak days...are getting worse," while climate scientists are examining links between the storms and the climate crisis. The so-called "Tornado Alley," which covers parts of Texas and Kansas as well as Oklahoma, appears to be growing, according to a study published in Nature last year—making tornadoes more frequent in states that rarely saw them previously including Arkansas, Mississippi, and eastern Missouri.

"What all the studies have shown is that this particular part of the U.S. has been having more tornado activity and more tornado outbreaks than it has had in decades before," Mike Tippett, a mathematician who studies the climate at Columbia University told PBS Newshour earlier this year. As the Kansas City Star reported on Sunday, scientists believe the warming of the globe—fueled by human activities like fossil fuel extraction—is contributing to higher amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere, causing heavier rainfalls which can spawn tornadoes.

World's rivers 'awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics'

Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found.

Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Prof William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at the University of Exeter who studies antimicrobial resistance but was not involved in the study.

The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a global health emergency that could kill 10 million people by 2050, the UN said last month.

The drugs find their way into rivers and soil via human and animal waste and leaks from wastewater treatment plants and drug manufacturing facilities. “It’s quite scary and depressing. We could have large parts of the environment that have got antibiotics at levels high enough to affect resistance,” said Alistair Boxall, an environmental scientist at the University of York, who co-led the study.

The research, presented on Monday at a conference in Helsinki, shows that some of the world’s best-known rivers, including the Thames, are contaminated with antibiotics classified as critically important for the treatment of serious infections. In many cases they were detected at unsafe levels, meaning resistance is much more likely to develop and spread.

The Electric Vehicle Revolution Will Come from China — not the US

The electric vehicle revolution is coming, but it won’t be driven by the U.S. Instead, China will be at the forefront. My research on EVs, dating back a decade, convinces me that this global transformation in mobility, from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric ones, will come sooner than later. The shift is already happening in China, which is the world’s largest automobile market, with 23 million cars sold in 2018. As Western countries approach peak car ownership, there are still hundreds of millions of Chinese families that don’t own a car at all – much less two or more.

Many of them are buying electric cars. By 2015, electric vehicle sales in China had surpassed U.S. levels. In 2018, Chinese sales topped 1.1 million cars, more than 55% of all electric vehicles sold in the world, and more than three times as many as Chinese customers had bought two years earlier. U.S. electric vehicle sales that year were just 358,000.

A key element of an electric vehicle’s price is the cost of its batteries – and China already makes more than half of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. Battery prices continue to fall; industry analysts now suggest that within five years it will be cheaper to buy an electric car than a gas- or diesel-powered one. Forecasts predict the Chinese producing as much as 70% of the world’s electric vehicle batteries by 2021, even as the demand for electric car batteries grows.

Russia launches new nuclear-powered icebreaker in bid to open up Arctic

Russia launched a nuclear-powered icebreaker on Saturday, part of an ambitious programme to renew and expand its fleet of the vessels in order to improve its ability to tap the Arctic’s commercial potential.

The ship, dubbed the Ural and which was floated out from a dockyard in St Petersburg, is one of a trio that when completed will be the largest and most powerful icebreakers in the world.

Russia is building new infrastructure and overhauling its ports as, amid warmer climate cycles, it readies for more traffic via what it calls the Northern Sea Route (NSR) which it envisages being navigable year-round. ...

President Vladimir Putin said in April Russia was stepping up construction of icebreakers with the aim of significantly boosting freight traffic along its Arctic coast.

Also of Interest

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

Iran Tensions Are Reason to Revoke ‘9/11 AUMF’

'Troops To Iran' Scare - The Mountain Brings Forth A Mouse

NYT Parrots US Propaganda on Hezbollah in Venezuela

Professional Assange Smearers Finally Realize His Fate Is Tied To Theirs

Guantánamo lawyers see issues in torture exhibit at spy museum

Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails?

The Worst 2020 Election Interference Will Be Perfectly Legal

In Show of Demand for Climate Action, Green Parties Surge in EU Elections

Residents of Welsh Village Set to Become UK's First Climate Refugees As Soon As 2042

A Little Night Music

Willie Kent - I Had A Dream

Willie Kent - Someone Like You

Willie Kent + Willie James Lyons - Nineteen Years Old

Willie Kent - I Can't Stop Loving You

Willie Kent - A Man And The Blues

Willie Kent - I'm What You Need

Lil Ed Williams & Willie Kent - Your Love Is So Strong

Willie Kent - What You Doin' To Me

Willie Kent - Boogie All Night Long