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This evening's music features blues rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Enjoy!

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.”

-- William O. Douglas

News and Opinion

US, UK and Australia urge Facebook to create backdoor access to encrypted messages

The United States, United Kingdom and Australia plan to pressure Facebook to create a backdoor into its encrypted messaging apps that would allow governments to access the content of private communications, according to an open letter from top government officials to Mark Zuckerberg obtained by the Guardian.

The open letter, dated 4 October, is jointly signed by the UK home secretary, Priti Patel; the US attorney general, William Barr; the US acting secretary of homeland security, Kevin McAleenan; and the Australian minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, and is expected to be released Friday.

It will call on Facebook not to “proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens”.

Also on Friday, the US and UK announced the signing of a “world-first” data access agreement that will allow law enforcement agencies to demand certain data directly from the other country’s tech firms without going through their governments first. The agreement is designed to facilitate investigations related to terrorism, child abuse and exploitation, and other serious crimes.

Prior to the agreement, requests for data from foreign technology companies were submitted to governments and frequently took between six months to two years. The new bilateral agreement is expected to speed this process significantly, to weeks or even days.

Google reportedly targeted people with 'dark skin' to improve facial recognition

Facial recognition technology’s failures when it comes to accurately identifying people of color have been well documented and much criticized. But an attempt by Google to improve its facial recognition algorithms by collecting data from people with dark skin is raising further concerns about the ethics of the data harvesting.

Google has been using subcontracted workers to collect face scans from members of the public in exchange for $5 gift cards, according to a report from the New York Daily News. The face scan collection project had been previously reported, but anonymous sources described unethical and deceptive practices to the Daily News.

The subcontracted workers were employed by staffing firm Randstad but directed by Google managers, according to the report. They were instructed to target people with “darker skin tones” and those who would be more likely to be enticed by the $5 gift card, including homeless people and college students. “They said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” a former contractor told the Daily News. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.”

“I feel like they wanted us to prey on the weak,” another contractor told the Daily News. ... The contractors also described using deceptive tactics to persuade subjects to agree to the face scans, including mischaracterizing the face scan as a “selfie game” or “survey”, pressuring people to sign a consent form without reading it, and concealing the fact that the phone the research subjects were handed to “play with” was taking video of their faces.

Federal Appeals Court Issues Mixed Decision on Net Neutrality

Russia is helping China build a missile defence system, Putin says

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is helping China build a system to warn of ballistic missile launches.

Since the cold war, only the United States and Russia have had such systems, which involve an array of ground-based radars and space satellites. The systems allow for early spotting of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Speaking at an international affairs conference in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said Russia had been helping China develop such a system. He added that “this is a very serious thing that will radically enhance China’s defence capability”.

His statement signalled a new degree of defence cooperation between the two former Communist rivals that have developed increasingly close political and military ties while ties between Beijing and Washington have been strained by the trade war. In June, Chinese president Xi Jinping called Putin his “best and bosom friend,” adding he cherished their “deep friendship.”

Earlier this week China debuted new military hardware including a “hypersonic” missile experts believe could be difficult for the US to counter. The missile, known as the DF-17, can in theory manoeuvre sharply at many times the speed of sound, making it extremely difficult to defend against.

New Study Warns India-Pakistan Nuclear War Could Kill 125 Million Immediately—Then Spark Global Mass Starvation

The U.S. and other nuclear powers should rapidly stop nuclear proliferation, researchers at Rutgers University said Wednesday as they released a study showing that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill 125 million people instantly before causing global mass starvation. Published in the journal Science Advances, the new research shows that rapidly growing nuclear stockpiles in India and Pakistan, which are currently in conflict over Kashmir, could release 16 million to 35 million tons of soot, or black carbon, into the atmosphere if the two countries escalated their standoff into nuclear strikes by 2025.

"Such a war would threaten not only the locations where bombs might be targeted but the entire world," said Alan Robock, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers. The only way to avoid such an outcome, said Robock, is to eliminate nuclear weapons.

"Nuclear weapons cannot be used in any rational scenario but could be used by accident or as a result of hacking, panic, or deranged world leaders," he said. "The only way to prevent this is to eliminate them."

The findings of Robock and other researchers are Rutgers represent an update to research published a decade ago by groups including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which found that 22 million people could die immediately the event of nuclear war in the region and two billion could starve as a result. Growing urban populations and nuclear arsenals in countries including India, Pakistan, and the U.S. would make such action even more deadly. ...

In the event of nuclear war, black carbon's spread across the globe over a matter of weeks would result in the absorption of solar radiation, slashing the sunlight that reaches Earth by 20 to 35 percent. Precipitation and vegetation growth would be reduced by up to 30 percent, and the planet would take more than a decade to recover as the soot would remain in the upper atmosphere for years. ...

The estimates were based on the possibility that India could use 100 weapons and Pakistan could use 150; by 2025, the researchers expect the two countries to have between 400 to 500 nuclear weapons combined.

America is likely complicit in war crimes in Yemen. It's time to hold the US to account

Since Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, the United States gave its full support to a relentless air campaign where Saudi warplanes and bombs hit thousands of targets, including civilian sites and infrastructure, with impunity. From the beginning, US officials insisted that American weapons, training and intelligence assistance would help the Saudis avoid causing even more civilian casualties.

But this was a lie meant to obscure one of the least understood aspects of US support for Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen: it’s not that Saudi-led forces don’t know how to use American-made weapons or need help in choosing targets. They have deliberately targeted civilians and Yemen’s infrastructure since the war’s early days – and US officials have recognized this since at least 2016 and done little to stop it.

A team of United Nations investigators, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, presented a devastating report in Geneva in early September detailing how the US, along with Britain and France, are likely complicit in war crimes in Yemen because of continued weapons sales and intelligence support to the Saudis and their allies, especially the United Arab Emirates. Despite pressure from Saudi Arabia, the Human Rights Council voted last Thursday to extend its investigation.

If the council pursues an aggressive investigation based on the 274-page report, the world might finally see some accountability for war crimes committed in Yemen over the past five years. The report’s authors submitted a secret list of individuals who may be responsible for war crimes to the UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, but it’s unclear if that list includes any western officials. The report said third states that have influence on Yemen’s warring parties – including the US, Britain, France and Iran – “may be held responsible for providing aid or assistance for the commission of international law violations”.

Pffffttt!!! Saudis blame "defect in the bomb" for "mistake" of bombing Yemen's national blood bank.

Saudi-led coalition: Yemen blood bank bombed by mistake

The Saudi-led coalition yesterday admitted it carried out an air strike on a blood bank in the Yemeni capital Sanaa earlier this year by “mistake”. The attack on the National Centre for Blood Transfusion and Research on 27 April was accidental, according to findings of the coalition’s investigative body, the Joint Incident Assessment Team (JIAT).

Spokesperson Mansour Al-Mansour, a notorious Bahraini military lawyer, made the announcement yesterday saying investigators had examined the scene of the air strike and had taken statements from medical and administrative staff who work at the building. A “defect in the bomb” was the cause for “the mistake”, he said, adding that members of the coalition will provide assistance in repairing the damage caused. ...

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), around 67 per cent of all reported civilian fatalities in Yemen since 2015 have been caused by Saudi-led coalition air strikes, making the coalition “the most responsible for civilian deaths”.

Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case

Brazilian opposition figures and human rights observers are seething after a photo emerged of the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, grinning and giving the thumbs up alongside a man arrested in connection with the murder of the Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco.

It was the second time the president has been photographed alongside a suspect in Brazil’s most high-profile political murder in a decade.

#EXCLUSIVO Preso no caso Marielle, lutador já postou fotos ao lado de Bolsonaro https://t.co/8TRssrFKEK pic.twitter.com/RCAzF1BKGq

— VEJA (@VEJA) October 3, 2019

“Another [suspect] who has a photo with the president. Bolsonaro’s relations with the militias need to be urgently investigated,” tweeted Guilherme Boulos, a leftwing politician.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, a friend of Franco, tweeted: “None of this means Bolsonaro was involved in Marielle’s assassination. That is unlikely. But it shows how intertwined, multi-pronged & close are the Bolsonaro Family’s ties to militias.”

Ecuador declares state of emergency as protesters decry end to fuel subsidies

Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, has declared a state of emergency amid nationwide protests over the end of decades-old fuel subsidies in a government fiscal reform package worth more than $2bn a year. ...

As the fuel measure came into effect on Thursday, taxi, bus and truck drivers blocked streets in the highland capital, Quito, and the second city, Guayaquil, on the Pacific coast, while bus stations were closed. Indigenous groups, students and unions joined the protest, blocking roads with rocks and burning tires. In Quito, masked demonstrators threw stones at riot police who responded with tear gas and deployed armored vehicles.

“It’s an indefinite action until the government overturns the decree on subsidies. We’re paralyzing the nation,” one bus transport leader, Abel Gómez, told Reuters. Moreno, who won election in 2017 to replace Rafael Correa, told reporters the “perverse” fuel subsidy, in place for 40 years, had distorted the economy and protests would not be allowed to paralyze Ecuador. ...

Moreno’s government reached a $4.2bn deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in February. But skepticism of the IMF runs strong in Ecuador and throughout Latin America, where many blame austerity policies for economic hardship.

Banksy's chimp parliament artwork sells for record €11 million

No Labour MP could support Johnson Brexit plan, says Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has claimed that no Labour MP could support Boris Johnson’s alternative to the backstop, amid a growing No 10 campaign to woo his backbenchers. The opposition leader told parliament the prime minister’s plans were simply unworkable and part of a cynical attack upon workers’ rights. ...

But, behind the scenes, Downing Street figures have approached Labour MPs in the hope of persuading them to vote for Johnson’s proposals. If Johnson is able to get a deal through parliament by 19 October, with the support of 322 MPs, it would release him from his obligations under the so-called Benn act to seek an extension to article 50.

Trump publicly calls on China to start investigating Biden

Trump calls on China to investigate Biden in extraordinary demand

Donald Trump has called for China to investigate his leading political rival, in defiance of impeachment proceedings in Congress, where he stands accused of abusing his office to put similar pressure on Ukraine. At the same time as calling for an investigation of the former vice-president and frontrunner in the Democratic primary, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter, Trump noted that the US was in trade talks with China and “if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous, tremendous power”.

Asked if he had already asked China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to start an investigation, the president said: “I haven’t, but it’s certainly something we can start thinking about.”

Later on Thursday, CNN reported Trump had brought up Biden in a June phone call with Xi, mentioning the former vice-president’s political prospects, as well as those of Senator Elizabeth Warren. Trump also told Xi he would remain quiet on the unfolding Hong Kong protests as long as trade talks between the US and China progressed, CNN said. The White House record of the June call was reportedly stored in the top restricted database that also contained the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. ...

On a 2013 trip to China, the then vice-president took his son with him on his official plane. The younger Biden was in the process of setting up a private equity fund, BHR, with money coming in part from Chinese investors. Hunter Biden later acknowledged having met a prospective partner during the trip, though a spokesperson told NBC News it was a social encounter. ...

Trump’s China comments seemed likely to broaden the impeachment inquiry, which is already at fever pitch in Congress.

The Hill's Editor in Chief: How will Dems deal with Hunter Biden during the next debate?

Ukraine to review legal cases amid Trump claims over Bidens

Ukraine’s highest prosecutor has said he is holding a broad review of investigations closed under his predecessors, including more than a dozen linked to the Ukrainian energy company where Joe Biden’s son served on the board of directors. The general prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, said the review was part of Ukraine’s reform process as investigative powers are handed over to another government agency by the middle of next month.

At a press conference on Friday, Ryaboshapka said he had no evidence of any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden and had not been contacted by Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has spearheaded an informal investigation into the Biden family for the US president.

Asked whether he would investigate the pair, Ryaboshapka said he was holding an “audit of all cases”, a docket numbering in the thousands, which could include about 15 relating to the energy company Burisma.

In a follow-up statement, Ryaboshapka said his office was reviewing “high-profile proceedings concerning senior officials” under the former president Viktor Yanukovych, including cases tied to Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. The statement stressed “no procedural decisions” had been made against Zlochevsky or “any persons related”.

Impeachment Scandal Shows Why Congress Desperately Needs to Reform What’s Kept Secret

It’s become clear to anyone with a pulse that President Donald Trump is exploiting the classification system that compartmentalizes secret information within the government. So far, the past several weeks have seen stories about the administration using the classification system to hide embarrassing or potentially illegal conversations Trump had with foreign leaders. ... After the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine was made public, we learned that the White House placed notes from conversations with other foreign leaders in a “code-word” computer system meant for highly classified national security information. The motive is obvious: to hide the conversations from all but a small circle of high-ranking White House staffers.

“White House officials are bound by Executive Orders governing the handling of classified materials,” Susan Hennessey, managing editor of the national security-focused website Lawfare, declared on Twitter last week. “This plainly violates the requirement that information not be classified to conceal crimes or avoid political embarrassment.” Clearly, many people were aghast that Trump is seemingly getting away with an unprecedented violation.

Except, as Hennessey likely knows — she used to work in the intelligence community, as a lawyer for the National Security Agency — administrations of both parties going back decades have frequently over-classified information to hide illegal conduct, waste, fraud, abuse, and embarrassing facts. Trump is not an anomaly when it comes to abusing the classification system; he is the norm, just a particularly public and brazen personification of it.

Consider that no one is ever punished for the types of classification abuse prohibited by the executive order Hennessy pointed to. J. William Leonard, the U.S. government’s classification czar under President George W. Bush, has testified before Congress many times about the dysfunctional nature of the classification system. He told a House oversight panel in 2016 that while there are countless instances of government employees being harshly punished for leaking secret information, “to my knowledge no one has ever been held accountable and subjected to sanctions for abusing the classification system or for improperly classifying information.” ...

The secrecy system is beyond dysfunctional; it’s a farce. Even former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden once made a stunning admission: “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”

'The Civil War Is Here'

Trump Tried Scaring Some Seniors About Socialism so You'll Forget About Impeachment

President Trump tried to pivot away from weeks of coverage of his impeachment Thursday afternoon by scaring senior citizens about what Democrats might do to their Medicare.

“Almost every major Democrat in Washington has backed a major government takeover that would totally obliterate Medicare,” Trump claimed during a speech to senior citizens in Florida. “They want to raid Medicare to fund a thing called socialism.”

The event was held at The Villages, a massive retirement community that’s a trove of aging Republicans in Florida, one of the key 2020 swing states. The audience was one of the reddest, and bluest-haired, he could find. And while it was ostensibly an official event about policy, Trump quickly turned it into a campaign rally with a lengthy harangue about his 2020 foes as the crowd chanted “four more years.”

“Today, standing in solidarity with our nation’s seniors I declare that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump bellowed during an hour-plus speech, just hours after he implored communist China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son as he departed the White House.

Warnings of 'Stealth Privatization' Effort as Trump Signs Executive Order Expanding Medicare Advantage Plans

President Donald Trump on Thursday delivered a speech bashing Medicare for All with right-wing talking points and signed an executive order aimed at steering more elderly Americans into the arms of the private insurance industry.

Trump signed the executive order during an event Thursday afternoon at The Villages, a large retirement community in central Florida. Under the new order, the government will encourage patients to consider private Medicare Advantage plans as alternatives to traditional Medicare, which covers tens of millions of elderly Americans and people with disabilities. The directive would also expand supplemental benefits Medicare Advantage can offer.

Michael Lighty, an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America's Medicare for All campaign, said Medicare Advantage plans "are the worst and most accurate example how we pay the wrong way for healthcare."

"The healthcare industry loves them, too—they are the fastest growing, most profitable private health plans, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers," Lighty told Common Dreams. "Compared to traditional Medicare, the Medicare Advantage plans cost more, and restrict access."

In a statement, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman called Medicare Advantage "a hustle designed to allow for-profit corporations to suck up public dollars."

"Medicare Advantage is stealth privatization intended to undermine traditional Medicare, which is an effective, popular government program and therefore loathed by Republican ideologues," said Altman. "Today's executive order is yet another giveaway to the corporations that run Medicare Advantage plans."

"Ironically," Altman added, "the Trump administration is framing the executive order as an attack on Medicare for All. In fact, the massive flaws of Medicare Advantage epitomize the need to get for-profit greed out of health care by improving Medicare and expanding it to cover all Americans."

"Reagan's wet dream of neoliberalism": The roots of San Francisco's homelessness crisis

'Stunning Rebuke to Predatory Wall Street Megabanks' as California Gov. Signs Law Allowing Creation of Public Banks

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed into law historic legislation that would allow the state's cities and counties to establish public banks as an alternative to private financial institutions, a move advocates hailed as a "stunning rebuke to the predatory Wall Street megabanks that crashed the global economy in 2007-08."

Trinity Tran, co-founder of Public Bank LA, said Newsom's decision to sign the Public Banking Act (A.B. 857) despite fervent opposition from the state's business lobby "is a testament to the power of grassroots organizing."

"The people of California just went up against the most powerful corporate lobby in the country—and won," Tran said in a statement. "Now is our moment in history to lead the nation by re-envisioning finance and recapturing our money to benefit our local communities by building a new system that works for the greater good."

The Public Banking Act—which was backed by a diverse coalition of labor unions, climate justice groups, and civil rights organizations—makes California the second state in the U.S. after North Dakota to allow the creation of public banks.

As the Los Angeles Times reported:

Public banks are intended to use public funds to let local jurisdictions provide capital at interest rates below those charged by commercial banks. The loans could be used for businesses, affordable housing, infrastructure, and municipal projects, among other things.

Proponents say public banks can pursue those projects and support local communities' needs while being free of the pressure to obtain higher profits and shareholder returns faced by commercial banks. Support for public banks also has grown since the financial crisis a decade ago and since Wells Fargo & Co. was embroiled in a slew of customer-abuse scandals in recent years.

The new law sets into motion a pilot program allowing 10 public bank charters in the state over seven years. "These banks can invest in local projects like affordable housing, small businesses, resilient infrastructure, and clean energy, giving communities a voice in their own economic futures," said the California Public Banking Alliance.

Panel: Tulsi shuts down Kamala on Twitter free speech

Out of Surgery, Dying Activist Ady Barkan Still Waiting to Talk With Joe Biden About Medicare for All

At home and recovering from recent tracheostomy surgery to improve his breathing, dying healthcare activist Ady Barkan on Wednesday issued a video message to remind former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden that he would still like to have meet in person to have a discussion about Medicare for All and the nation's ongoing crisis of unaffordable care.

An outspoken proponent of Medicare for All as the best and only solution to provide coverage to everyone in the country for less cost overall than the current for-profit system, Barkan noted Biden's opposition to that approach, but said: "We may disagree, but if you want to be president, you'll have to have some hard conversations."

While both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—the two other top-tier candidates in the Democratic primary—both support a Medicare For All, Biden has consistently attacked the plan and even adopted frequently parroted industry and Republican Party talking points against it.

As Common Dreams reported last month, Barkan prior to his surgery had implored Biden to meet with him like 2020 Democrats, including Warren and Sanders, have done in order to speak face-to-face about the nation's healthcare woes and what can be done to fix them.

"Look a dying man in the eyes and tell me how we fix this country," Barkan said to Biden at the time. "We may disagree, but that's okay."

Biden's refusal so far to accept the invitation has caused many to question why:

How long can @JoeBiden dodge this conversation? https://t.co/MhWRStlI0z

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) October 2, 2019

Dumbest Thing Ever Said On Meet The Press!

Here is an excerpt from an excellent article:

Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands

Right now there are construction crews at work on Organ Pipe, pumping water from a rare desert aquifer to mix concrete for Donald Trump’s long-promised border wall. The survival of a fragile and unique desert ecosystem hangs in the balance. Laiken Jordahl, a former employee of the U.S. National Park Service at Organ Pipe and now the borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, monitored the situation throughout the summer. Making the two-hour drive from Tucson to Organ Pipe, Jordahl would shoot video dispatches from the monument, detailing what was happening on the ground, cataloging the progress of the project and describing for viewers what was at stake. “It’s basically just an all-out attack,” Jordahl told me. “It’s unbelievable. This would never be conceivable if normal environmental laws were in place.”

Organ Pipe sits directly south of Ajo, an unincorporated community surrounded by a vast expanse of federally administered borderlands sometimes referred to as Arizona’s west desert. To the west of the monument is the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. To the east is the Tohono O’odham Nation, one of the country’s largest Native American reservations. The tribe’s ancestral homelands were split in two in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase, which established the current U.S.-Mexico dividing line. Descended from the first people of the Sonoran Desert, the O’odham have been living with, and in many cases resisting, U.S. government notions of border enforcement ever since. In 2016, Verlon Jose, the former vice chairman of the nation, responded to the suggestion that Trump would build a wall on the reservation with the words “Over my dead body.” ...

Jordahl bristles at the media’s habit of saying that much of Trump’s wall-building in places like Organ Pipe is merely the replacement of existing barriers, and thus not a win for the president. “That grossly misconstrues this issue,” he said. There’s a difference between a Normandy barrier, Jordahl noted, which people and animals can pass over and under and exists in many parts of Arizona, and the 30-foot steel bollard walls, topped with floodlights, that Trump administration contractors are planting deep into the ground. It’s all the more serious in the case of Organ Pipe, where the water used to mix the concrete to support those walls is sucked out of a rare aquifer. According to the Arizona Republic, U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that it will need 84,000 gallons of water each day to complete the Organ Pipe project, which was awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors, a New Mexico-based firm. At a rate of roughly 1.85 million gallons per mile, 43 miles of bollard fencing “could require a total of 79.56 million gallons of groundwater,” the paper reported.

“We’re literally mining it out of the earth here,” Jordahl said. “It will take generations to regenerate, if it does at all.” The drain on the groundwater could have disastrous consequences for Quitobaquito Springs, an oasis that provides the only source of natural, permanent fresh water for hundreds of species of animals. Some of those species are endangered. Others, like the Quitobaquito pupfish, exist nowhere else in the world. But the implications of the construction run even deeper. In Arizona, the federal government has long weaponized the desert as a tool to stop migration, one used in concert with an army of federal agents, the best technology money can buy, and network of immigrant detention centers. While these get-tough deterrence strategies rarely achieve their stated goals, they do provide powerful political fodder and line the pockets of those with a stake in the game, from government contractors to organized crime.

Facing up to the climate catastrophe

US Supreme Court to Decide Fate Of Baltimore v. Big Oil Suit

Baltimore just had it’s hottest October day ever. City officials are trying to hold big energy companies accountable for fueling the climate crisis, but the companies are pushing back.Last year, Baltimore sued 26 major oil and gas companies, alleging that they knowingly contributed to climate change. On Tuesday, the 26 companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to stop the suit from proceeding in state court, pending an appeal to the U.S. Fourth District Court.

City officials filed the suit in August 2018. “The aim here is to seek compensation to the city from the consequences of climate change,” City Solicitor Andre Davis, who brought the case, told the Real News last year. “The fossil fuel companies have known for decades of the catastrophic consequences of their market approach, their business model, and we don’t believe it’s fair or equitable for the taxpayers of Baltimore City to incur and bear all the costs that will be consequences of their business model.” Davis filed the suit in state court, but the companies argue that it should be heard at the federal level. ... In June, Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander rejected the companies’ argument, sending the case back to state court. But the energy giants appealed that decision to the ruling to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it’s still being considered.

On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit ruled against issuing a stay in the case in the lower courts. That decision would have allowed city officials to begin the discovery process, which would compel the companies to turn over evidence supporting the state case, including documents showing their knowledge of the catastrophic climate impacts of burning fossil fuels. ... But to environmental advocates dismay, the companies fought back: They filed for an emergency stay from Supreme Court and a stay on the ruling to move the case to the state level, arguing that the city’s allegations must be heard in a federal forum, especially because several other similar cases are pending in federal appellate courts.

Judge Hollander accepted another request from the companies—she extended the stay she placed on her order to keep the lawsuit in state court, which gives the Supreme Court more time to respond. “At this point, we are simply waiting for the Chief Justice to act on the request made by the defendants to stay the order returning the case to state court,” said City Solicitor Andre Davis in an email. “Until he acts of the request, we are at a standstill at least until Monday. We hope he denies the request and soon.”

The Plastics Industry’s Long Fight to Blame Pollution on You

Ocean cleanup device successfully collects plastic for first time

A huge floating device designed by Dutch scientists to clean up an island of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean that is three times the size of France has successfully picked up plastic from the high seas for the first time.

Boyan Slat, the creator of the Ocean Cleanup project, tweeted that the 600 metre-long (2,000ft) free-floating boom had captured and retained debris from what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ...

Our ocean cleanup system is now finally catching plastic, from one-ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics!

Also, anyone missing a wheel? pic.twitter.com/Oq0rkXO3TH

— Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) October 2, 2019

The vast cleaning system is designed to not only collect discarded fishing nets and large visible plastic objects, but also microplastics.

The plastic barrier floating on the surface of the sea has a three metre-deep (10ft) screen below it, which is intended to trap some of the 1.8tn pieces of plastic without disturbing the marine life below. The device is fitted with satellites and sensors so it can communicate its position to a vessel that will collect the gathered rubbish every few months.

Also of Interest

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

The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism

A father's grief and the Made in USA bomb dropped in Yemen

When Ukraine's Prosecutor Came After His Son's Sponsor Joe Biden Sprang Into Action

Getting medieval: impeachment's roots go back to 14th-century England

Johnson faces new constitutional crisis over claim of ‘no Brexit delay’

Do Trump’s sanctions on foreign countries work? The government doesn’t know.

Turkey Again Complains About Syria Safe Zone, Threatens to Act Unilaterally

Federal Lawsuit Naming Top Trump Officials Seeks Damages for 'Horrific' Trauma Imposed on Separated Children and Families

Thatcher sent Pinochet finest scotch during former dictator's UK house arrest

Derivative Risks Rising: Sell-Off in Interconnected Mega Banks and Insurers

Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work

Blocked sidewalks: how boulders became a flashpoint in San Francisco's homeless crisis

Scientists observe mysterious cosmic web directly for first time

A Little Night Music

Jimi Hendrix - The Wind Cries Mary

Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child

Jimi Hendrix - Hey Joe

Jimi Hendrix - Freedom

Jimi Hendrix - Fire

Jimi Hendrix - Like a Rolling Stone

Jimi Hendrix - Little Wing

Jimi Hendrix - Red House

Jimi Hendrix - Blue Suede Shoes

Jimi Hendrix - Hound Dog - Acoustic