Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues singer Jimmy "T-99" Nelson. Enjoy!

"Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day."

-- Benito Mussolini

News and Opinion

Trump consults Bush torture lawyer on how to skirt law and rule by decree

The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding on how the president might try to rule by decree.

John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws. “If the court really believes what it just did, then it just handed President Trump a great deal of power, too,” Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law, said.

“The supreme court has said President Obama could [choose not to] enforce immigration laws for about 2 million cases. And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.”

In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. The White House consultations with Yoo were first reported by the Axios news website.

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.

This is how it begins. The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 20, 2020

pic.twitter.com/xQXCuNaJYv

— iDG (@iDGRic) July 20, 2020

Watching Trump's paramilitary squads descend on Portland, it's hard not to feel doomed

A new word, doomscrolling, describes the way we compulsively tickle our phones into providing a non-stop stream of dire health and disease statistics, grim economic predictions, images of food lines and exploding emergency rooms. With so much doom to scroll through, it’s hard to know when to stop and pay attention, but one story that jumped out at me – and, I hope, at many others – is the account of how demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, protesting racism and police brutality earlier in July, were tear-gassed, beaten, seized off the street by unidentified, masked federal agents in camouflage and fatigues, hustled into unmarked vans and detained for hours. The agents were reported to work with the US Marshals Special Operations Group and Bortac, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit. ...

One can track the violence to Trump ordering the governors to “dominate” their cities, of which, he claimed, they’d lost control. But the governor of Oregon, the mayor of Portland and other local officials insisted that they don’t want federal agents gassing their citizens. So who does? A US Customs and Border Protection internal memo, obtained by the Nation and dated 1 July, offers some answers. In response to a presidential order “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Activity, “ the acting director of homeland security has created the “DHS Protecting American Communities Task Force (Pact) to provide an ongoing assessment of potential civil unrest and property destruction”. ...

“CBP will be supporting this effort by deploying personnel to provide support over the Fourth of July holiday weekend which has the potential for increased disruptive activity at specific locations across the country that could threaten our personnel and the federal facilities and property they protect.” Like potential, support is a questionable word, since Portland never asked for the troops’ support or presence. As for potential disruptive activity, two of the men whisked into unmarked vans were quietly leaving the demonstration, which was winding down.

Is all that manpower necessary to protect statues? Who knew White House was so invested in art, culture – or American history? These attacks are about exerting power, bullying dissenters, intimidating Americans into giving up their first amendment protections, their constitutional rights. Robert Evans, a Portland-based freelance journalist and conflict reporter, told the New York Times: “Portland is being used as a bellwether to see what this administration can get away with. And also what works to quell protest.”

Is all that manpower necessary to protect statues? Who knew White House was so invested in art, culture – or American history? These attacks are about exerting power, bullying dissenters, intimidating Americans into giving up their first amendment protections, their constitutional rights. Robert Evans, a Portland-based freelance journalist and conflict reporter, told the New York Times: “Portland is being used as a bellwether to see what this administration can get away with. And also what works to quell protest.” ... If we let the increasingly empowered paramilitary arms of the government deny our right to assemble and speak freely, to circumvent our legal system and eliminate the writ of habeas corpus, we won’t need to scroll down our phones to know that we are doomed.

Portland Protests Grow Despite Violent Crackdown from Militarized Federal Agents & Local Police

U.S. Department of Homeland Security is crafting plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago this week, the Chicago Tribune has learned, a move that would come amid growing controversy nationally about federal force being used in American cities. https://t.co/PpUgLTtD6E

— Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) July 20, 2020

“Camouflaged Goon Squads”: Outrage, Legal Challenges in Portland as Federal Agents Snatch Protesters

Portland Wants Trump's Federal Cops Out, But They Won’t Leave

After a particularly violent weekend that saw nonviolent protesters shoved, pepper-sprayed, and beaten by the police, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler repeated his demand for the Trump administration to recall the federal police it deployed in the city earlier this month. Wheeler, whose own police have been heavily criticized by activists for brutal tactics, said during media rounds on Sunday that the federal troops, many of whom are from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) division, have only made the situation in the city worse.

“Before the federal troops got here, violence was way down, vandalism was way down,” Wheeler told CNN. “We had hoped [the demonstrations] would end within a matter of days, and what happened instead is the federal troops came in, they used their unconstitutional tactics, they injured nonviolent demonstrators, and the whole thing blew up again like a powder keg.”

“The reason we want those federal troops out of our city is that they are making the situation much more dangerous,” he added. Wheeler has been joined in his calls for the administration to withdraw the troops by both of Oregon’s U.S. senators, its governor, and its attorney general, who sued the Department of Homeland Security on Friday for violating the civil rights of protesters. ...

Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli said on Sunday that DHS received “locally generated” intelligence about alleged “planned attacks” on federal buildings in Portland, and indicated that the administration has plans to similarly invade other American cities if they “get the same kind of intelligence.”

Federal agents snatching people in Portland mirror longstanding U.S. foreign policy

'Fascism Coming to a City Near You': Trump Pledges to Deploy Secret Police Units to Major US Cities

In comments from the Oval Office on Monday, President Donald Trump intensified rising fears that his administration will deploy federal agents to Democrat-led cities across the country to replicate a widely condemned crackdown in Portland, Oregon that critics charge is not only authoritarian but part of the president's effort to win a second term by stoking division and chaos.

Trump told reporters that in cities which have seen Black Lives Matter protests since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in late May, police are "restricted from doing anything" and "weak" local politicians are "afraid" of demonstrators, whom he described as "anarchists" who "hate our country."

"I'm gonna do something, that I can tell you," the president said before naming New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland as potential targets, echoing his remarks from the weekend. "We're not gonna let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats."

Asked by a reporter whether he will send federal law enforcement to some of these cities, Trump said that "we'll have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you. In Portland, they've done a fantastic job... in a very short period of time. No problem."

Politicians, journalists, activists, and advocacy groups responded with alarm to a video from The Hill of president's latest comments. ...

Out in Portland, federal officers are waging war on protestors rightfully in the streets in defense of Black life. People are being attacked w war weapons. People are being disappeared under the cloak of night. We cannot allow this to happen here or anywhere. #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/YoIMEibGc4

— Tiffany Cabán (@tiffany_caban) July 20, 2020

"Fascism coming to a city near you," tweeted writer Thor Benson, also sharing the video. Alex Kotch, an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy, similarly said: "Watch Fascism™ spread in real time!" ...

The Nation reported Monday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) will respond this week to the conditions in Portland by introducing legislation—a draft of which the outlet published—that "would require on-duty federal agents display not just the name of their agency, but the individual agent's last name and identification number."

Trump to Send Federal Troops to Protests in Chicago & Seattle Amid Violent Crackdown by Local Police

'No Tactics... Just Seemed Like a Gang': Navy Veteran Speaks Out After Attack by Secret Police in Viral Video Viewed Nearly 10 Million Times

The U.S. Navy veteran who was brutally attacked by unidentified federal police in Portland, Oregon over the weekend is speaking out about the incident—a video of which has gone viral online—and explained that he traveled to the site of local protests to get some answers directly from the personnel in the secretive units after becoming outraged over their deployment by the Trump administration.

"I was enraged simply because I did not think they were taking their oath of office seriously or they were compromising their oath of office," Christopher David, a 53-year-old disabled veteran who served in the Navy for eight years, told The Independent in an interview. "So I actually went down because I wanted to talk to them about it."

The assault caught on film by local journalist Zane Sparling—and as of this writing viewed more than 9.6 million times on social media—shows David withstanding several blows from one office before another pepper sprays him in the face from close range.

According to The Oregonian, it was the first such protest David had attended in his life. As the newspaper reports:

David was home watching television on Saturday, the 52nd straight night of protests in the city, getting angrier by the moment when he learned that unidentified federal officers had been sent to Portland by President Donald Trump to deal with local protestors.

He decided to take the bus downtown to talk with the officers. David, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, wore his Navy sweatshirt and Navy wrestling hat, thinking they'd respect him because of he was a veteran.

"I thought the clothing would be a shield," he said. "Turns out it had zero effect. They didn't care."

"I stood my ground at that point and just stayed there ... I did nothing provocative. They just started whaling on me with batons, and I let them," David told The Independent.  "I probably could've taken a lot more baton blows if they had not sprayed pepper spray all over my eyes."

Explaining the incident to The Oregonian, David said after several hours of listening to speeches but not seeing the federal police units that had spurred him to attended, he was just about to get on a bus to leave the protest area late Saturday night when the officers suddenly appeared.

"Literally at that moment a bunch of guys came out of the courthouse and ran into the street," David explained. "I was in the park and watched these guys body blast the protestors. I walked over and stood there in the street. I wanted to ask them about the oath they took. Everyone was screaming. No one heard me. Then one of the officers hit me hit me and kept hitting me. It didn't seem like any of them were trained for this."

David told the newspaper that as a former wrestler who stands 6-foot-2 and weighs about 280 pounds he did not feel intimidated by the officers.

"The video makes me look even bigger than I am," he confessed. "Those officers were small. They seemed scared. They had no tactics, just seemed like a gang."

Federal agents deployed to Portland did not have training in riot control

The federal agents deployed to Portland, Ore., amid nationwide protests did not have riot and mass crowd control training, according to an internal memo that was circulated at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and obtained by The New York Times.

The memo, compiled for acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf was dated for Thursday just as Wolf traveled to Portland to view firsthand the situation between protesters and federal authorities. The memo reportedly listed federal buildings and the officers deployed to defend them.

In addition, the memo suggested that should federal law enforcement be deployed to other U.S. cities that are experiencing unrest that, "if this type of response is going to be the norm, specialized training and standardized equipment should be deployed to responding agencies.”

DHS expands authority of personnel to collect information on people threatening monuments

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanded the authority of personnel to collect information on people they say are threatening to harm or destroy public monuments, The Washington Post reported Monday. The guidance obtained by the Post allows DHS to expand beyond its traditional authority to keep landmarks safe from terrorist attacks. The document comes as federal officers have been sent to Portland, Ore., to respond to those demonstrating against police brutality.

The guidance, first reported by the blog Lawfare, is described as “job aid” for enforcing President Trump’s executive order last month that protects monuments from vandalism, as protests had targeted monuments for Confederate officers or other historical figures that demonstrators consider problematic.

The document appears to reference current intelligence activities for “personnel collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials, and statues,” according to the Post. The guidance also seems to allow personnel to monitor social media posts and other public information sources to watch individuals or groups DHS says might “damage or destroy any public monument, memorial, or statue.”

Republican leaders to meet Trump as talks begin on new Covid-19 relief bill

Donald Trump said discussions about the coronavirus relief package were going well at the White House on Monday, as Congress began negotiations on how best to address the public health and economic crises in the US. Republican leaders joined Trump for the Oval Office meeting, where the president said he also planned to bring back daily coronavirus briefings. “I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching,” Trump said. “Record numbers watching in the history of cable television, and there’s never been anything like it.”

Democrats were meeting separately as the two sides lined up demands for what could be the last major relief package before the November elections. Congress had previously allocated about $3tn for coronavirus relief in four legislative packages. Points of early disagreement included Republican demands for liability protections for businesses and Democratic demands for more money for states. Democrats also want an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits currently set at $600 a week. Republicans have reportedly eyed reductions, to between $200 and $400.

Argument between the parties could be overshadowed by disagreement between Trump and Republicans. The president is seeking to block billions of dollars in funding for coronavirus testing and contact-tracing efforts, sparking objections from Republicans representing states badly hit by Covid-19, according to multiple reports.

Georgia's Governor Is Suing Atlanta's Mayor to Stop Her Contradicting Him About Masks

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is stepping up his war against Atlanta: He’s not only blocking the city’s mask mandate but now he’s trying to put a gag order on Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to keep her from contradicting him. ...

Last week, Kemp issued an executive order overriding decisions made by several Georgia cities including Atlanta, Savannah, August, and Athens to require face coverings in public, replacing it with language saying Georgia residents are “strongly encouraged to wear face coverings as practicable.”

On Thursday, Kemp took it a step further, suing Bottoms and the Atlanta City Council to stop them from implementing a mask requirement. As part of that lawsuit, Kemp asks the court to “issue an interlocutory and permanent injunction to restrain Mayor Bottoms from issuing press releases, or making statements to the press, that she has the authority to impose more or less restrictive measures than are ordered by Governor Kemp related to the Public Health Emergency."

Trump Holds Up a Chart on Fox News That Shows He’s Lying, Then Lies About What It Says

The whole pathology of Donald Trump’s presidency — his inability to accept facts that are not flattering to him, his resort to lying to cover up his mismanagement of the federal government, his staff’s desperate efforts to manufacture evidence to help him mislead the country and the conservative media’s role in enabling all of this — was on full display in just one 63-second exchange with the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace broadcast on Sunday.

Less than two minutes into the interview, Wallace confronted Trump with a damning statistic about his failure to contain the Covid-19 pandemic, relative to other nations. “We have the seventh-highest mortality rate in the world,” Wallace noted, accurately. “Our mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than Russia and the European Union has us on a travel ban.”

Chris Wallace is getting praise for trying to fact-check Trump during an interview, but he let Trump blatantly lie about the U.S. mortality rate being the world's lowest while holding up a chart that showed the U.S. being 4th best of 7 countries *in a totally different category* pic.twitter.com/B58aLmawiP

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) July 19, 2020

As I explained last week, Trump has spent the past three months trying to disguise his failure to keep Americans from dying of Covid-19 by telling the same lie: that the per capita death toll in the United States, known as the mortality rate, is among the lowest in the world. As of Friday, the day Wallace sat down with Trump, there were indeed just six countries in the world with more than 100,000 citizens that had more per capita deaths than the U.S. according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. (Over the weekend, Chile moved up the rankings, so the U.S. currently has the eighth-highest mortality rate in the world, excluding the tiny states of San Marino and Andorra.)

Trump, however, refused to let Wallace’s completely accurate statement go unchallenged by alternative facts. “When you talk about mortality rates, I think it’s the opposite,” he said. “I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.” When Wallace replied, “That’s not true, sir,” Trump demanded that his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, produce the misleading chart she has been using to try to prove, through sleight-of-hand, that the seventh-worst mortality rate in the world is really something to be proud of. ... Trump glanced at the chart quickly, realized that it was upside down, and then displayed it for a fraction of a second before pronouncing, falsely, that it was proof that the U.S. had the “number one low mortality rate.” The chart, however, proved nothing of the kind. That’s because it was not a measure of global mortality rates at all. It was, as the title visible in a freeze-frame showed, a chart looking at an entirely different metric: the “Case Fatality Rate of Covid-19.”

While the mortality rate is a straight-forward measure of how many citizens per capita have died from a disease, the case-fatality rate is something entirely different: the ratio between deaths from a disease and the total number of confirmed cases. As the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. has skyrocketed, the nation’s case-fatality rate has indeed gone down, to just 3.8 percent, but that number is still higher than in dozens of other countries. It is also essentially meaningless, since nations are testing at different rates and researchers warn that the case-fatality rate is unknowable until after a pandemic ends, when the full death toll is known.

Coronavirus Is Devastating the Navajo Nation

Michael Begay, who owns and operates the only funeral home on the western part of Navajo Nation, usually processes about 270 bodies a year. But by the time coronavirus had exploded across the U.S. in June, he’d already surpassed that.

He’s had to hire more staff and even acquire a freezer trailer to fit all the bodies of local people lost to the virus.

“We run out [of caskets] every week, basically,” said Begay, who owns and operates Valley Ridge Mortuary in Tuba City. “In fact, I [have] to send staff down to Phoenix to collect more caskets. We get our order biweekly and we run out every week.”

The Navajo reservation, about the size of West Virginia, has had one of the highest per-capita rates of COVID infection in the U.S. As of July 19, Navajo Nation tallied 8,593 cases and 422 deaths — that's more confirmed cases than 10 states and more deaths than 16. About 30% to 40% of residents in the reservation don’t have running water, which makes following basic CDC guidelines, such as handwashing, almost impossible. On top of that, there are only 12 healthcare centers and 13 grocery stores for the 173,000 people who live on the reservation.

The Reality of America -- A Tale of Two Economies!

Tens of thousands of Americans strike in protest over racial inequality

Organisers of the Strike For Black Lives said tens of thousands of Americans walked out of work in more than two dozen cities at noon on Monday, to protest against systemic racism and economic inequality.

At noon in each time zone, workers took a knee for just short of nine minutes, the amount of time prosecutors say the white police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck before Floyd died in Minneapolis on 25 May.

Labour unions and social and racial justice organizations from New York to Los Angeles took part. Where work stoppages were not possible for a full day, participants were planning to either picket during a lunch break or observe moments of silence to honour black lives lost to police violence, organisers said.

“We are … building a country where black lives matter in every aspect of society, including in the workplace,” Ash-Lee Henderson, an organiser with the Movement for Black Lives, told the Associated Press.

“The Strike for Black Lives is a moment of reckoning for corporations that have long ignored the concerns of their black workforce and denied them better working conditions, living wages and healthcare.”

Criminal Charges for White St. Louis Couple who Pointed Guns at Protesters

The white couple who pointed guns at the racial justice protesters marching through their gated community in St. Louis are now facing criminal charges.

St. Louis’ top prosecutor said that Mark and Patricia McCloskey “are facing a single felony count unlawful use of a weapon — exhibiting,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

McCloskeys charged with felonies for waving guns during protests https://t.co/v3I8P8y02v

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch (@stltoday) July 20, 2020

The husband and wife, who are both personal injury attorneys in their 60s, also face a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.

While the prosecutor who announced the charges against the McCloskeys said she is recommending community service rather than jail time if they are convicted, the case is likely to fuel continued partisan debate over gun rights and racial violence.

Missouri’s Republican governor said Friday he would likely pardon the couple if they were to be convicted.

This may be the best 14 seconds in the history of CNN.pic.twitter.com/v4K6LV0ACu

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 20, 2020

Ryan Grim: Establishment Dems SHOOK After New Group Highlights Their Corporate Ties

Rep. Lacy Clay’s Clash With Obama Administration Over Wall Street Reform Haunts His Reelection Fight

A clash between Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr. and the Obama administration over a key Wall Street reform rule is set to reemerge as a flashpoint in the final weeks of the St. Louis congressman’s fight for an 11th term, courtesy of a six-figure ad buy from an anti-monopoly group. Clay is locked in a rematch with nurse and Black Lives Matter leader Cori Bush, a would-be member of the so-called Squad who lost the 2018 Democratic primary to Clay by a 20-point margin.

In 2009, as the Obama administration was working with Congress to rewrite the rules of the economy to strip out the predatory behavior that helped fuel the financial crisis, the Department of Labor zeroed in on what became known as the fiduciary rule. Put simply, there was no rule that required financial advisers to have the best interests of their clients at heart when making investment decisions or recommendations. Instead, advisers could offer clients high-fee, low-performing investments that would do more to benefit the adviser than the client: a problem that particularly plagued workers at the lower end of the income scale, given their reduced power in relation to advisers, who are generally chosen for them by employers.

The Obama administration proposed a rule that would require financial advisers to have the best interests of their clients in mind, the so-called fiduciary rule. Lobbyists for the investment industry immediately began an assault from all sides on the proposed rule, leading a drawn-out, six-year battle. Central to that strategy was allying with key Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, who could give a bipartisan gloss to the effort. Clay, a senior member of that committee, played a leading role in the effort. In return, he was flooded with campaign cash from donors in the investment industry, many of whom hadn’t given to his campaign previously.

Here's the anti-corruption ad running against Rep. Lacy Clay starting this week pic.twitter.com/8ms0VcbXG1

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 20, 2020

A new anti-monopoly group, Fight Corporate Monopolies, is launching a six-figure ad buy this week focusing on Clay’s role in fighting against Obama’s conflict-of-interest rule, according to Faiz Shakir, an adviser to the group and the former presidential campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders. ... Ahead of the Missouri primary on August 4, significant firepower is headed for St. Louis in support of the insurgent Bush, according to sources familiar with the planning. Sunrise Movement, fresh off an election victory in Texas and a near miss in Kentucky, is placing its next big bet on St. Louis, throwing in behind Bush. The youth-led climate group also has a well-funded independent expenditure arm that may spend on the race.

Most polar bears to disappear by 2100, study predicts

Scientists have predicted for the first time when, where and how polar bears are likely to disappear, warning that if greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory all but a few polar bear populations in the Arctic will probably be gone by 2100.

By as early as 2040, it is very likely that many polar bears will begin to experience reproductive failure, leading to local extinctions, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change.

The study examines how the bears will be affected under two different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The researchers found that under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, polar bears will likely probably only remain in the Queen Elizabeth Islands – the northernmost cluster in Canada’s Arctic archipelago – at the end of the century. And even if greenhouse gases are moderately mitigated, it is still likely that the majority of polar bear populations in the Arctic will experience reproductive failure by 2080.

Scientists estimate that there are fewer than 26,000 polar bears left, spread out across 19 different subpopulations that range from the icescapes of Svalbard, Norway, to Hudson Bay in Canada to the Chukchi Sea between Alaska and Siberia. Polar bears are unable to find enough sustenance on land and rely on sea ice from which to hunt. They often stake out seal breathing holes in the ice, waiting hours for a blubbery meal to break the surface. But as that sea ice declines because of climate change, so, too, will the polar bears.

Flooding in Assam and Nepal kills hundreds and displaces millions

Severe flooding in India’s tea-growing state of Assam and neighbouring Nepal has killed at least 200 people and displaced millions, severely hampering efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus.

In Assam, heavy monsoon rains burst the banks of the Brahmaputra River, causing more than 2,000 villages to be enveloped in floods and mudslides and displacing 2.75 million people in the past two weeks. There have been 85 deaths reported in the state. Keshab Mahanta, Assam’s water resources minister, said: “The flood situation remains critical with most of the rivers flowing menacingly above the danger mark.”

Officials voiced concern that the flooding and hurried evacuation of millions of Assam residents would cause a significant rise in cases of coronavirus in the north-eastern state, known for its tea plantations. At the moment, 50,000 people are sheltered in cramped relief camps but because of the scale and urgency of the evacuations, officials admitted that no physical distancing measures were being enforced. ...

Authorities confirmed that hundreds of animals had drowned in the flooding, including nine endangered rhinos living in Kaziranga national park, a Unesco world heritage site.

Kaziranga national park and tiger reserve, which is home to 2,400 of the one-horned rhinos – the largest concentration of them in the world – has been severely affected by the flooding, with 85% of the 407 sq mile (1,055 sq km) park underwater. Officials said that 59 of the 223 anti-poaching camps had been inundated and as well as the rhinos, among the dead animals were deer, porcupines and Asiatic water buffalo.

Also of Interest

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

House Votes to Block Funding for US Nuclear Test

Chinese Ambassador Says US Must Make a ‘Fundamental Choice’

'Feds Stay Clear, Moms Are Here': Portland Mothers Form Human Shield to Protect Protesters from Federal Agents

In Memo, DHS Chief Says Portland Crackdown ‘Going to Be the Norm’

Protestantism’s Troubling History with White Supremacy in the US

How the SARS-COV-2 Virus Gets In and How to Block It: Aerosols, Droplets, Masks, Shields (with Discussion of Reinfection)

The Fed Rides to the Rescue of JPMorgan and Citi Again – This Time It’s Their Commercial Real Estate Mortgages

Keiser Report | Economic Blitzkrieg?

Krystal and Saagar: Dems Embrace John Kasich Endorsement After FREAK OUT Over Rogan’s Bernie Support

Krystal and Saagar: Hillary FANS Russiagate Conspiracy On Joy Reid's First Primetime Show

Krystal and Saagar: CONFIRMED, Next GOP 'Bailout' Plan Will Crash The Economy

A Little Night Music

Jimmy "T99" Nelson - I Sat And Cried

Jimmy 'T99 'Nelson - Second hand fool

Jimmy T99 Nelson - T-99 Blues

Jimmy T99 Nelson - She Was So Good To Me bw What Was I Supposed To Do?

Jimmy T99 Nelson - Meet Me With Your Black Dress On

Jimmy T99 Nelson - The Wheel

Jimmy T99 Nelson - She Moves Me

Jimmy T-99-Nelson - Hot Tamale Man

Jimmy T99 Nelson - Lucille