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This evening's music features blues guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Enjoy!

"I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion."

-- Alexander the Great

News and Opinion

Matt Taibbi delivers an excellent pre-postmortem of the Sanders campaign. It's worth a click and a full read.

Bernie’s Last Chance

If Bernie Sanders believed he could win, he’d be trying harder to hype this weekend’s “virtual debate” with Joe Biden. ...
We’re in a rare moment when boxing clichés are appropriate to politics. Sanders needs a knockout to stay alive. More than that, he needs people to see the knockout. He needs to hype the fight, which he hasn’t, suggesting he’s already given up. ...

That Biden’s handlers aren’t ducking the showdown suggests they expect a PG-rated affair, in which the breadth of Democratic opinion will be rolled out in a display of congenial sparring. Key Sanders figures like Jeff Weaver have conceded in advance, reassuring all that Bernie will not be delivering an “all-out assault.” Biden himself is signaling that he’s thinking past the primary race with lines like, “I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion.”

The media herd is also mostly moving on, as headlines like, “Sanders offers Biden a path to win over his movement” are popping up more and more. Prominent Democrats are offering saccharine olive-branch comments like the following from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

“I don’t think Bernie Sanders should get out of the race…I’m a grassroots person… I know the enthusiasm of supporters for candidates and they want to see it play out for the ideas…”

Translation: We’re no longer worried, at all, about losing Sanders voters. Moreover, we think Bernie will be a good soldier and bring his followers in for the big win.

He shouldn’t. It would be a colossal betrayal of Bernie’s movement to cave now, rewarding four years of Democratic Party smears and scummery with a premature surrender that in one stroke would undo all the progress made in changing the national conversation. There’s a reason Democratic strategists of the James Carville type spend long careers fetishizing independents and “the middle”: they know “moderates” will take their votes elsewhere if they’re not happy. There’s no such fear with progressives. Liberalus Americanus is an animal that always hands you its vote in the end, even after you’ve kicked in all its teeth.

US House Rams Through Nicaragua Regime-Change Bill with Zero Opposition

As the Trump administration’s year-long coup attempt against Venezuela spirals out in failure, the U.S. government has taken aim at Nicaragua with increasing ferocity, in a bid to topple its democratically elected, leftist Sandinista government.

Washington’s pressure escalated further on March 9 when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution in a voice vote without any opposition that demanded more sanctions and aggressive actions against the Nicaraguan government of President Daniel Ortega.

This bill — which received no coverage in the English-language corporate media — refers to Nicaragua’s elected government as the “Ortega regime,” echoing the bellicose rhetoric of the right-wing opposition.

Video of the congressional session shows that the resolution was pushed through on a voice vote in just around eight minutes. There was no debate, and a grand total of zero members of Congress spoke in opposition.

The regime-change action in the House followed numerous rounds of suffocating U.S. sanctions on Nicaragua, a small Central American country of just around 6 million people. ...

U.S. sanctions have already caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Venezuela and Iran. Now that Nicaragua is in the crosshairs, the damage of Washington’s economic warfare has only just begun.

Iraq to complain to the U.N. over U.S. air strikes

Iraq will complain to the United Nations and the Security Council about overnight U.S. air strikes [against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq], a spokesman for the foreign ministry said on Friday.

The Iraqi military said earlier on Friday that the air strikes had killed six people and described them as a violation of sovereignty.

US sees new pressure point as coronavirus hits Iran

After months of piling pressure on Tehran, the United States is seeing an unexpected new variable -- the novel coronavirus, which has taken a substantial toll not just on Iran but inside its government. ...

COVID-19, which has infected tens of thousands of people around the world, has hit Iran's government unusually hard, with a number of senior politicians and officials killed or infected by the disease including a vice president, a senior adviser to the foreign minister and a powerful cleric.

General Kenneth McKenzie, head of Central Command which covers the Middle East, said the United States believed the impact was worse than the more than 500 deaths reported -- the world's third highest toll after China and Italy -- and said US policymakers were assessing the political ramifications. ...

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has described COVID-19 as a biological weapon, a charge Washington scoffed at.

Trump 'offers large sums' for exclusive access to coronavirus vaccine

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles.

The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

The German government was reportedly offering its own financial incentives for the vaccine to stay in the country.

The German health minister Jens Spahn said that a takeover of the CureVac company by the Trump administration was “off the table”. CureVac would only develop vaccine “for the whole world”, Spahn said, “not for individual countries”.

Coronavirus: US offer one billion dollar to German company to move its COVID-19 research

Coronavirus: Germany seals its borders as 100m Europeans on lockdown

Walls are being raised and mass quarantines enforced across Europe to combat the spread of the coronavirus, with Germany the latest to partly seal its borders, banning entrants from France, Switzerland and Austria from Monday.

More than 100 million people across the continent are on lockdown after Spain announced it would follow Italy in confining citizens to their homes for 15 days unless they had to buy food or medicine, go to work or seek medical treatment.

Spain’s death toll from the Covid-19 virus doubled on Sunday to 288 with more than 8,000 infections reported, the second-worst rates after Italy, where more than 1,400 people have died and more than 21,000 are sick. Italy announced a record one-day death toll of 368 on Sunday.

German media outlets said three of the country’s key borders would be closed amid more than 4,500 coronavirus cases and at least nine deaths, with exceptions made for cargo and commuters. Neighbouring countries Denmark, the Czech Republic and Poland have closed their borders to tourists.

Austria said gatherings of more than five people would be banned from Monday, part of a wave of restrictions across the continent the World Health Organization says has become the “epicentre” of the outbreak.

African Nations Turn the Tables, Imposing Travel Restrictions Against U.S., Europe, and China to Stave Off Coronavirus

As the novel coronavirus rages through the world and spreads rapidly in the U.S., Africa is the least-affected continent at the moment, with less than 300 reported cases in roughly half of its 54 countries so far. A number of media outlets have reacted with a confounded tone, surprised that Africa does not have more cases and wondering if the low numbers are due to a lack of testing.

Health officials say that the main reason the continent has thus far been spared major outbreaks is due to the infrastructure set up during the Ebola epidemic that is still in place, and lower overall international air travel rates. At the same time, they acknowledge that the picture is not all sunny — the virus in some countries is likely spreading unchecked. But in Nigeria, the continent’s largest country by population, investments in lab capacity and coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO) for testing have paid dividends. “Over the last three years, we have strengthened capacity at our National Reference Laboratory to provide molecular diagnosis for all epidemic prone diseases and highly infectious pathogens,” Chikwe Ihekweazu, the director of Nigeria’s Center for Disease Control, told The Conversation. ...

In a dramatic shift in fortunes, African countries — whose citizens often have to prove their health status to even get a visa to travel to Europe — have moved swiftly to control arrivals from European countries. Ghana and Kenya announced new measures prohibiting travelers from countries affected by Covid-19, the first two African nations to put in place blanket travel bans, while Senegal and Kenya also announced school closures. The Democratic Republic of Congo imposed quarantine measures on travelers from Italy, France, China and Germany. After restricting travelers from high-risk countries to quarantine, Mauritania deported 15 Italian tourists and Tunisia deported 30 other Italians for violating theirs. Rwanda, Uganda, Mali, and others have imposed similar quarantine measure for European travelers, while across the continent, passengers are screened for their temperature at international airports. A Cameroonian news outlet reported higher arrivals from Italy due to people trying escape their coronavirus-infected country.

Trump tells US 'relax, we're doing great' as his virus expert says worst is yet to come

Donald Trump urged Americans to refrain from panic buying basic supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the administration announced plans to expand testing for the virus and health officials were preparing to release “advanced guidelines” on how to mitigate its spread.

During a press briefing at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump again appeared to downplay the threat of the novel coronavirus. “Relax, we’re doing great,” he said, during short, meandering comments that focused mostly on celebrating a decision by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. “It all will pass.”

The president’s remarks stood in marked contrast to his lead infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, who used the same conference to warn: “The worst is ahead for us”, describing the crisis as reaching a “very, very critical point now”. Earlier in the day Dr Fauci had declined to rule out a “national lockdown” of bars and restaurants as he urged more aggressive measures, similar to those in Europe and elsewhere, to contain the virus.

Trump said he had hosted a call with grocery industry leaders earlier in the day who had pushed him to spread a message against hoarding.

There is a death star sized hole in the paid leave bill because Republicans insisted on exempting about 80 percent of workers from it and Dems capitulated. https://t.co/SpY0Ks37I7 pic.twitter.com/V1TnxYFbAK

— Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) March 14, 2020

America has no real public health system – coronavirus has a clear run

Dr Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just about the only official in the Trump administration trusted to tell the truth about the coronavirus, said last Thursday: “The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now … It is a failing, let’s admit it.” While we’re at it, let’s admit something more basic. The system would be failing even under a halfway competent president. The dirty little secret, which will soon become apparent to all, is that there is no real public health system in the United States. ...

Instead of a public health system, we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it and a rickety social insurance system for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job. At their best, both systems respond to the needs of individuals rather than the needs of the public as a whole. In America, the word “public” – as in public health, public education or public welfare – means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good.

Contrast this with America’s financial system. The Federal Reserve concerns itself with the health of financial markets as a whole. Late last week the Fed made $1.5tn available to banks, at the slightest hint of difficulties making trades. No one batted an eye. When it comes to the health of the nation as a whole, money like this isn’t available. And there are no institutions analogous to the Fed with responsibility for overseeing and managing the public’s health – able to whip out a giant checkbook at a moment’s notice to prevent human, rather than financial, devastation.

Healthcare in America is delivered mainly by private for-profit corporations which, unlike financial institutions, are not required to maintain reserve capacity. As a result, the nation’s supply of ventilators isn’t nearly large enough to care for projected numbers of critically ill coronavirus victims unable to breathe for themselves. Its 45,000 intensive care unit beds fall woefully short of the 2.9 million likely to be needed.

The Fed can close banks to quarantine financial crises but the US can’t close workplaces because the nation’s social insurance system depends on people going to work.

Banks Get $1.5 Trillion Bailout Over Coronavirus

Heh, I am old enough to remember a time when a trillion dollars was an imponderably large amount of money.

The Fed Has Pumped $9 Trillion into Wall Street Over the Past Six Months, But Mnuchin Says “This Isn’t Like the Financial Crisis”

On February 12, 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 29,551.42. Yesterday, March 13, the Dow closed at 23,185.62 -– a loss of 6,365.80 points in one month’s time, or 21.54 percent. In 2008, the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression, the Dow had lost 2,339.60 points or 21.4 percent one month after the frightening events of September 15, 2008 when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch had to be taken over by Bank of America, and one day before the U.S. government seized the giant insurer, AIG, because it couldn’t pay the tens of billions of dollars in derivative bets it had made with the mega banks on Wall Street.

On this past Friday morning, in what appeared to be an effort to restore confidence on Wall Street, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gave an interview on CNBC. Mnuchin said “there’s lots of liquidity” and “this isn’t like the financial crisis.” But savvy folks on Wall Street, and readers of Wall Street On Parade, clearly understand that there is not lots of liquidity and this is exactly like the financial crisis of 2008 in terms of mega Wall Street banks losing massive amounts of their common equity capital and being on a liquidity feeding tube inserted by the Federal Reserve.

Since September 17, 2019 – six months ago, the Federal Reserve has loaned billions of dollars to Wall Street every single business day that the stock market has been open. This is the first time this has been necessary since the financial crisis of 2008. That fact, in and of itself, makes this very much on a par with the financial crisis of 2008.

Since the Fed began its repo loan operations on September 17, the tally of the Fed’s cumulative loans to Wall Street’s trading firms comes to more than $9 trillion (using the Fed’s own Excel spreadsheet of the data; you have to manually remove the Reverse Repo dollar amounts.) ...

Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street, it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.

Washington crisis response is already picking Wall Street over workers

Federal Reserve cuts interest rates to near zero in attempt to prop up US economy

The US Federal Reserve stepped in on Sunday to prop up the US economy in the face of the escalating Covid-19 crisis.

In its most dramatic move since the 2008 financial crisis the Fed announced it is cutting its benchmark interest rate to near zero and said it would buy $700bn in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities as it attempts to head off a severe slowdown.

Investors were unimpressed with the move, however, and US stock market futures tumbled on the news, hitting their daily down limit of 5% shortly after trading began.

S&P 500 Futures Drops 5%; Hits Limit https://t.co/oG9qqKAOCl pic.twitter.com/6uL9pvKVhz

— Martin North (@DFA_Analyst) March 15, 2020

The outbreak has already led to large US companies including AT&T, Ford and General Motors sending workers home and has hit industries, especially the travel and leisure industry, particularly hard.

In a coordinated effort to see off a potential global economic crisis, the central bank also said it was working with the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and others to smooth out disruptions in overseas markets.

“Something Is Wrong in America”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor & Michael Eric Dyson Debate Sanders v Biden

Debating Bernie on Medicare for All and Coronavirus, Biden Declares: 'I Don't Want to Get This Into a Back and Forth in Terms of Our Politics'

As Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders debated Sunday night over the failures of the U.S. healthcare system that have been dramatically exposed by the current coronavirus pandemic rattling the nation, Biden argued against the need for Medicare for All, defended the private insurance industry, and said now was not the time to debate key ideological differences.

"This coronavirus pandemic exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality of our current health care system," Sanders said during an exchange early in the debate as he advocated for his Medicare for All plan in the context of the current crisis.

This coronavirus pandemic exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality of our current health care system.

We are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all our people.

We need Medicare for All. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/ifuI79NoDu

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 16, 2020

Biden argued coronavirus testing and treatment should be free to all Americans to combat the current outbreak, but continued to espouse his belief that such a policy should not be extended for other diseases or illnesses.

"Look, this is a national crisis," said Biden. "I don't want to get this into a back and forth in terms of our politics."

"This is like we are being attacked from abroad," Biden said. "This is a war. And in a war, you do whatever it takes to take care of your people."

Strikingly, as Sanders and others noted, the war analogy deployed by Biden does not—in the current for-profit system—extend to people at risk of economic bankruptcy or death from health threats other than COVID-19.

Biden says he doesn't want to get in a back-and-forth. That's the point. That is why you are on stage tonight. And this is what you say when you don't have a reasonable rebuttal to the thing that exposes your position as bullshit. Support Medicare For All, Joe #DemDebate

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) March 16, 2020

Krystal Ball debunks Biden's parade of lies

‘Go to the YouTube’: Bernie and Biden Finally Have it Out Over Social Security Cuts

After months of sniping back and forth from a distance over Social Security, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders finally had it out in person. In Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate, the first since Sanders and Biden became the sole serious candidates for the nomination, Sanders flayed Biden for being open to cutting the program while Biden hammered him for a misleading ad on the topic.

“America, go to the website right now, go to the YouTube right now,” Sanders said, arguing that “time after time” Biden supported Social Security cuts. Biden denied this, but Sanders pointed to Biden’s past support for the Balanced Budget Amendment, which would have frozen spending on the program and lowered in-person payouts, as well as his involvement in the 2010 bipartisan Simpson-Bowles negotiations to curtail deficit spending. That plan included potential cuts to Social Security including an increase in the retirement age, a GOP part of the plan that would have

Biden has regularly called for spending freezes to Social Security over his career, something he now tries to avoid mentioning as he argues for expanding the entitlement program. His past calls for changing Social Security he often did so by arguing it needed to be trimmed in order to protect the program’s solvency. By 2035, the Social Security Administration projects that the government will be taking in only three quarters of what it pays out on the program.

Sanders pushed him on that point.

“You were not a fan of Bowles-Simpson?” Sanders asked.

“I was not a fan of Bowles-Simpson,” Biden responded — even though as vice president he’d had a role in helping to negotiate the plan before it fell apart.

“You were not a fan of the Balanced Budget Amendment which called for cuts in Social Security? Cmon, Joe, you were. You’re an honest guy. Why don’t you tell the truth here?"

Biden sr. adv. Anita Dunn on post-debate call, "I think it’s fair to say that Vice President Biden showed up to a debate tonight and for two hours graciously dealt with the kind of protester who often shows up at campaign events on live television.”

— Ken Thomas (@KThomasDC) March 16, 2020

Bernie: "You helped write that bankruptcy bill."

Biden: "I did not."

Survey says, that's a lie. #DemDebate https://t.co/0BM51jRPCQ

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) March 16, 2020

Zaid Jilani: Biden's bailout comments will come back to haunt us

Foreign meddling in U.S. elections:

Tony Blair: nominating Bernie Sanders would be 'an enormous gamble'

Tony Blair has warned Democrats in the US that nominating Bernie Sanders to face Donald Trump for the presidency would be “an enormous gamble”, risking defeat on a similar scale to that suffered by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

The former prime minister told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “When I hear the rhetoric around Bernie Sanders, who by the way is obviously a very capable guy, it’s eerily familiar to anyone who’s just watched the debacle unfold in the British Labour party and our election defeat in the UK, which is essentially the worst in our 120-year history.” ...

“I just don’t think there’s an appetite for socialist revolution,” he said. “There wasn’t in Britain, I’d be surprised if there was in the US. And so I think … if they go down that path it’s an enormous gamble.

“Put it like this: you’re essentially saying, ‘Put aside the middle ground, we’re not really going to try to reach that, instead we’re going to up the turnout and that’s exactly the strategy of Corbyn’s Labour party in the UK and it failed, drastically.”

Can Biden earn Bernie voters’ trust?

Some folks at The Intercept have a tragically awful idea:

A Biden-Sanders Ticket: The Unthinkable May Be the Only Path Forward

On Sunday, Joe Biden posted a message on Twitter encouraging people to get out and vote in the upcoming primaries next week. “If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of being exposed to COVID-19: please vote on Tuesday,” he urged. He was rightly eviscerated, as it was public health misinformation: Everyone is at risk, and people without symptoms may still be contagious. It was a deeply irresponsible thing to post. But the criticism raises an uncomfortable set of questions. If it’s a risk to public health to vote in public, and states are refusing to get serious about mail-in voting, is it irresponsible to vote? Should the primaries be canceled?

Those questions may sound extreme today, but within just a few weeks, the answer may be an obvious yes. To avoid a scenario in which President Donald Trump uses the pandemic to his advantage, while risking the lives of millions of Americans, the Biden and Bernie Sanders campaigns could broker a split ticket of Biden-Sanders with a clear, publicly announced, historically powerful role for Elizabeth Warren — presumably secretary of the treasury. Such an arrangement would be infuriating to vast numbers of people in all three camps. It would anger the authors of this very article. ...

Many of Joe Biden’s supporters believe that Biden already has the nomination sewn up, and some have suggested that Bernie Sanders should drop out of the race. Sanders, who has run for five years on the central issue of Medicare for All and radically addressing the climate crisis, clearly believes that the coronavirus pandemic is a powerful illustration of why we need radical change in order to protect public health and the planet. With most delegates remaining to be won, the vast numbers of voters who have not yet cast their ballots deserve to be counted. The DNC has already been roundly criticized by Sanders and his supporters for how it handled the 2016 primary and, to an extent, the way it has governed the 2020 process. If the DNC were to take action to cancel the primaries and crown Biden with most states’ voters disenfranchised, it would shatter the party’s credibility and give concrete justification to voters who believe their votes were stolen by the DNC to do any number of things in November, including not voting for the Democratic nominee. ...

From Sanders’s perspective, he is at a moment of maximum leverage, but realistically has little path to the nomination. Many Sanders supporters have expressed concerns about Biden’s clear cognitive decline. The reality is that despite those concerns, many Democratic voters have made clear they want him as the nominee. If Biden continues to win primaries, he’s the nominee. If Sanders starts to upset Biden in low-turnout primaries, the party leadership will almost assuredly cry foul and move to invalidate the primaries; Sanders would lose even if he wins. And along the way, the curve of the pandemic would be ratcheted ever steeper, potentially adding hundreds of thousands to the death toll, if not more.

To make it work, this could not simply be a symbolic offering of the vice presidential nomination in an effort to placate Sanders supporters. There would need to be an agreement more akin to a parliamentary power sharing agreement among Biden, Sanders, and Warren. Biden simply pledging to adopt some of Sanders’s and Warren’s plans carries far less weight. At a minimum, Sanders’s plans on health care, the climate crisis, workers rights, immigration, and criminal justice ought to be accepted as the official platform of the ticket. Already, public opinion is swinging wildly toward a stronger government role in funding health care, guaranteeing sick leave, and broadly creating a more safe and secure society. It is encouraging that Biden recently stated that he was adopting Warren’s financial plan, however serious that support may be; Warren could play a central role in the brokering process. It is clear from the states that have voted and many national polls that Biden choosing Warren as his running mate would not have the same impact as choosing Sanders, given the overlapping coalitions of Warren and Biden. None of this makes it right, but it is empirically evident.

AOC Defends Party & Ignores Voter Suppression

Coronavirus 'Really Not the Way You Want To Decrease Emissions'

As the global economy shudders in reaction to the coronavirus, lessons are emerging about what that response can—and cannot—tell us about fighting climate change. Economists and policy analysts say they are most concerned about how the current financial disruption could harm the efforts of countries, international organizations and companies to reduce emissions. They think any drop in emissions tied to the virus will be short-lived, while the continuing drop in oil prices could encourage more consumption and hurt demand for low- or no-carbon products like electric vehicles.

At the same time, the response to COVID-19 is demonstrating that in the face of a large and imminent threat, it is possible to get people to change their behavior—something climate change activists have been trying to do for decades. Some of those changes—an increase in telecommuting, for example—have climate benefits that could last beyond the current crisis. "The plus side is, if there's a sense of social cooperation that emerges from this in response to a threat, that could be a very good sign for communities and leaders to come together," said Michael Lazarus, U.S. director at the Stockholm Environment Institute. ...

One of the greatest hazards for climate policy related to the coronavirus is that governments, international organizations and companies may have fewer resources and less time to focus on other thorny problems. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, made this point while talking this week about his office's new forecast that the world will see the first full-year decline in oil production in more than a decade, a drop that reflects the decrease in demand as coronavirus keeps people from traveling or even going to work.

"The impact of the coronavirus on oil markets may be temporary," he said on Twitter. "But the longer-term challenges facing producer countries are not going to go away, especially those heavily dependent on oil and gas revenues." In those countries, "sustained low prices could make it almost impossible to fund essential areas such as education, health care and public sector employment," he said.

Alaska judge stalls logging in Tongass National Forest

A U.S. District Court judge in Alaska ruled against the Trump administration late Wednesday, sidelining its plans to open logging in part of the state’s Tongass National Forest.

The decision delays U.S. Forest Service plans to open logging in more than 1.8 million acres over the next 15 years, a project that would have also green-lit the construction of 164 miles of road through the forest.

Judge Sharon Gleason wrote that the agency failed to fully consider the environmental impacts of the project as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), agreeing with the environmental groups that sued the Forest Service that its analysis had “serious shortcomings.”

The decision affects logging only on Prince of Wales Island, which is part of the national forest.

"What the court has cut short is flagrant attempts by the Forest Service to trample not only the remaining old-growth forest on Southeast Alaska's most heavily-logged major island, but also NEPA, which is America's bedrock law for protecting the environment from contrived decision-making," Larry Edwards, with Alaska Rainforest Defenders, said in a statement.

Climate change forces cognac makers to consider other grape varieties

Cognac makers are considering overturning longstanding tradition and turning to new grape varieties, as the main cultivar required to make the spirit struggles with the effects of global warming.

Cognac’s star grape, Ugni blanc, which accounts for 98% of the vines in the Cognac region, is ripening quicker and losing acidity as summers become hotter and drier.

The rules that govern the French brandy are among the strictest in the drinks world, and are subject to controlled appellation of origin (AOC) specifications.

Each stage of the spirit’s production, including the types of grapes that can be used, is outlined in its AOC. Cognac can only be made in one 78,000-hectare area of France, using grapes grown in six regions, or crus. This means distillers cannot move production to another part of the country to escape rising temperatures. ...

Extreme and unpredictable weather has blighted the region: in 2018, powerful hailstorms caused serious damage to 3,500 hectares of vineyards in the Cognac area. Hail and heavy rain also reduced the 2016 harvest, while 2017 was marred by frost.

“There is more extreme weather in Cognac than there used to be,” said Patrick Raguenaud, president of the BNIC, the governing body of Cognac. “We would sometimes have hail, but not this big.”

Also of Interest

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

Federal Government Delivers a Fraction of New Jersey’s Requests for Medical Equipment — and No Ventilators

As Coronavirus Grips US, Critics Remember Susan Collins' Insistence Pandemic Flu Funding Be Cut From 2009 Stimulus Package

Paid Sick Leave Loopholes: 'There’s a Giant Hole in Pelosi’s Coronavirus Bill'

Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death

Iraq's Resistance Reveals How U.S. Troops Will Be Removed From Its Country

A Cleveland Prosecutor Swept a Wrongful Conviction Under the Rug. Now He’s Running for Judge.

'I can't get above water': how America's chicken giant Perdue controls farmers

Can Bernie Save the Left?

Despicable: Joe Biden Promotes the Trumpian Conspiracy Theory That Joe Biden Has Dementia

Jimmy Dore: Health Insurance Stocks SURGE After Biden Wins

Rising: Did Biden give Trump major ammunition at the debate last night?

Illinois Dem party official pressed on why elections continue amid pandemic

Dem Congressman: Coronavirus stimulus should be bigger than 2008

Saagar Enjeti: Biden makes definitive case for why he'll lose

A Little Night Music

Scrapper Blackwell - Trouble Blues Pt. 1

Scrapper Blackwell - Blue Day Blues

Scrapper Blackwell - Kokomo Blues

Scrapper Blackwell - Blues Before Sunrise

Scrapper Blackwell - Hard Time Blues

Scrapper Blackwell - Goin' Where The Monon Crosses The Yellow Dog

Scrapper Blackwell - "A" Blues

Scrapper Blackwell - Little Girl Blues

Black Bottom McPhail - Down In Black Bottom

Scrapper Blackwell - My Old Pal Blues

Scrapper Blackwell - Nobody Knows When You're Down And Out