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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Billy Wright

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jump blues singer Billy Wright. Enjoy!

^{Billy Wright - Blues For My Baby}

"When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled. It has no apparatus to deal with the boor, the liar, the lout, and the antidemocrat in general."

-- J. William Fulbright

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News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Assange would never receive a fair trial in the U.S., but he’s not receiving one in Britain either.

Over the 17 days of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange’s right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America’s and Britain’s intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. The governments had the edge, like the white man of whom Malcolm X wrote, “He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.”

The deck was clearly stacked. Assange’s antagonists were marking the cards as early as February 2008, when the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center set out, in its words, to “damage or destroy this center of gravity” that was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, from the time Assange and his friends created it in 2006, was attracting sources around the world to entrust them, securely and anonymously, with documents exposing state crimes. The audience for the documents was not a foreign intelligence service, but the public. In the governments’ view, the public needed protection from knowledge of what they were doing behind closed doors and in the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq. To plug the leaks, the governments had to stop Assange. The Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department soon followed the Counterintelligence Center’s lead by establishing their own anti-Assange task forces and enlisting the aid of Britain, Sweden, and Ecuador. ...

Legal experts testified that Assange would not receive a fair trial in the U.S., but at London’s Central Criminal Court it was becoming apparent that he was not receiving one in Britain either. The first magistrate assigned to his case, Emma Arbuthnot, in 2017, turned out to have a husband and a son with links to people cited for criminal activities in documents published by WikiLeaks. When her family’s additional connections to the intelligence services and defense industries became public, she withdrew from the case for what she told Private Eye magazine was a “perception of bias.” She did not formally recuse herself or declare a conflict of interest. As Westminster’s chief magistrate, she nonetheless oversees the conduct of lesser magistrates. One is Vanessa Baraitser, who presided at Assange’s hearing. Records uncovered by the Declassified website showed that of her 24 previous extradition hearings, she ordered extradition in 23. Not a bad record from the prosecution’s point of view, but appeals courts subsequently reversed her verdict in six of the 23.

When Assange’s hearing convened on September 8, the defense applied for more time to prepare their case. The government had had 10 years of preparation and access to defense lawyers’ correspondence with their client. Assange’s advocates were permitted to see him only rarely and under observation at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, a maximum-security facility in south London for prisoners who “pose the most threat to the public, the police or national security.” Vital documents were not reaching him. Baraitser rejected the request. She also forced Assange to observe the hearing from a glass cage, usually reserved for violent offenders, at the back of the courtroom where he could not confer with his lawyers. Technical problems interrupted sound transmission to Assange, causing him to miss much of the testimony. When Assange addressed his lawyers across the room, the prosecution could hear what he said. Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lead barrister and one of Britain’s best, was in the ring with his hands tied. ...

The maltreatment of Assange revealed at London’s Central Criminal Court will not end if he is extradited. Extradition will intensify his “cruel and unusual punishment.” The prohibition of such punishment appears in both the Eighth Amendment of the American Constitution and its predecessor, Clause Ten of England’s 1689 Bill of Rights. That fundamental protection has applied to everyone in Britain and America for centuries. Once again, though, they may make an exception for Assange.

Daniel Ellsberg on the Assange Extradition and Growing Fascism

Bad apples turn up in Germany:

Hundreds of rightwing extremist incidents by German security services revealed

Germany’s first nationwide report into rightwing extremism in the security services has revealed hundreds of incidents across the police and military that contravened the country’s constitution. Horst Seehofer, the interior minister, sought to downplay the incidence of extremism in the forces, at the same time as insisting that each case was a “disgrace” and that a “no tolerance” policy would be exercised against personnel who broke the rules. ...

The 98-page report itself stated that while the absolute figures appeared low compared with the number of employees in the security forces, “it can basically be assumed that there is also a dark field” of unknown extremists. It recommended the security forces take the problem more seriously, saying both “state and society are in considerable danger if an official who is armed becomes an extremist”. ...

The report comes after a series of recent revelations that have exposed racist chat groups and other activities within security authorities, mainly involving the police. The report was commissioned following several violent incidents that shocked the nation last year, including the fatal shooting of a pro-immigration politician by a suspected far-right extremist outside his home near Kassel, and a murderous attack targeting a synagogue and a kebab store in the city of Halle by a gunman with antisemitic views. Questions have been asked as to whether authorities did enough to stop the attackers. ...

Anti-racism campaigners poured scorn on [Seehofer's] analysis, after it was revealed that there were 1,064 cases among military personnel, compiled separately by the military secret service MAD, 550 of which are being actively pursued, and 370 separate incidents among police and intelligence officers.

No, wait, the bad apples are in Oklahoma, now:

'On the Level of Guantánamo': Oklahoma Jail Guards Accused of Torturing Inmates With 'Baby Shark' Song

Two former Oklahoma correctional officers and their supervisor were charged Monday after an investigation found they tortured inmates with a popular children's song.

The Oklahoman reports 21-year-old Gregory Cornell Butler Jr., Christian Charles Miles, also 21, and their supervisor, 50-year-old Christopher Raymond Hendershott, were charged with misdemeanor cruelty to a prisoner and conspiracy.

Investigators found that the officers forced at least four inmates at the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City to stand with their hands cuffed behind their backs and shackled to a wall while the song "Baby Shark" was played on a loop for hours on end at high volume.

According to investigators, Miles confessed that he and Butler "systematically worked together... to discipline inmates and 'teach them a lesson'" by subjecting them to the abuse, which occurred last November and December.

"The playing of the music was said to be a joke between Miles and Butler," the investigators wrote. They added that the music caused "undue emotional stress on the inmates who were most likely already suffering from physical stressors."

The investigators found that Hendershott learned of the torture last November 23 but "took no immediate action to either aid the inmate victim or discipline the officers," which apparently "led to the officers continuing to mistreat inmates."

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater told reporters on Tuesday that "it was unfortunate that I could not find a felony statute to fit this fact scenario."

"I would have preferred filing a felony on this behavior," said Prater.

The use of music to torture prisoners has been reported on numerous occasions during the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror. Documents including a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report (pdf) and a 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report (pdf) detail how loud music—usually in concert with other "enhanced interrogation techniques"—was used to torture CIA and military detainees.

Detainees at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba—many of them held without charge or trial for years—were tortured with songs including Metallica's "Enter Sandman," Eminem's "White America," the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," and even hits by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Children's songs, including the theme from Sesame Street and "I Love You" from the television show Barney & Friends, were favorites of GITMO torturers.

Greensboro apologizes for some of their bad apples after 41 years:

Greensboro Massacre: City Apologizes 41 Years After Cops Allowed Klan, Nazis to Kill 5 Antiracists

Congress should rein in top US tech companies, lawmakers' inquiry finds

Companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have amassed too much power and should be reined in, US lawmakers concluded in a major report resulting from a 16-month inquiry into America’s largest tech platforms.

These companies “wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press,” the House judiciary committee concluded in its nearly 500-page report.

“The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy.”

The historic investigation is the most significant effort to check big tech’s power since the government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations in the 1990s. It follows the committee’s lengthy inquiry into the effects of market dominance by major web platforms. That investigation saw the country’s leading tech figures – including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai – testify before lawmakers during historic congressional hearings in July. However the report was critical of their testimony, saying that the CEOs’ “answers were often evasive and non-responsive … raising fresh questions about whether they believe they are beyond the reach of democratic oversight”.

To address the alleged monopolistic behavior from these companies, the committee offered a list of nearly a dozen sweeping changes, including “structural separations” of some of the companies. It also suggested the prevention of future mergers that could lead to monopolization, and to reform antitrust laws to better rein in such explosive growth and domination before businesses are able to grow to this size.

I thought it only affected humans

— AlMustashriq (@AlMustashriq) October 6, 2020

Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller tests positive for coronavirus

Stephen Miller, a top aide to Donald Trump, has tested positive for Covid-19, joining a growing a growing list of figures close to the president who have contracted the virus as the White House scrambles to contain a growing outbreak.

“Over the last 5 days I have been working remotely and self-isolating, testing negative every day through yesterday. Today, I tested positive for Covid-19 and am in quarantine,” Miller said in a statement.

More than a dozen White House officials and others in the president’s orbit have tested positive for the virus. Earlier this year, Miller’s wife, Katie Miller – who is Mike Pence’s press secretary – contracted the virus.

Miller, who has served as a policy adviser and speechwriter for Trump, was among the most ardent defenders of the administration’s policy to separate children from parents.

An immigration hardliner who has publicly espoused racist and white nationalist ideas that migration and amnesty for immigrants would “decimate” the US, Miller was also a key player in the president’s decision to ratchet up zero tolerance policies that resulted in at least 5,400 children being separated from their parents.

CrossTalk | Quarantine Edition | Permanent Inequality?

Bolstering Progressive Demand, Fed Chair Says More Stimulus Crucial to Avoid Even More 'Unnecessary Hardship'

Bolstering progressive demands for policymakers to provide greater stimulus to avoid worsening the already catastrophic economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Tuesday that insufficient government intervention "would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses."

In a speech delivered virtually at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, Powell said that public support and financial aid has helped soften some of the negative impacts of the coronavirus crisis on households and businesses, with the "infusion of funds" preventing "a downward spiral in which layoffs lead to still lower demand, and subsequent additional layoffs."

While the unemployment rate has fallen from nearly 15% in April to just under 8% now, Powell explained that a "broader measure that better captures current labor market conditions—by adjusting for mistaken characterizations of job status, and for the decline in labor force participation since February—is running around 11 percent," signaling the "need for further support."

"The burdens of the downturn have not been evenly shared," Powell said. "The initial job losses fell most heavily on lower-wage workers in service industries facing the public—job categories in which minorities and women are overrepresented. In August, employment of those in the bottom quartile of the wage distribution was still 21% below its February level, while it was only 4% lower for other workers."

"Combined with the disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on communities of color, and the overwhelming burden of child care during quarantine and distance learning, which has fallen mostly on women," Powell said, "the pandemic is further widening divides in wealth and economic mobility."

Powell explained that when the Covid-19 relief programs contained in the CARES Act were passed in March, legislators were responding to a "disaster hitting a healthy economy," but now, the U.S. economy has severe weaknesses that make it extremely vulnerable to a "tragic" intensification of inequalities.

The Fed chair insisted that the ongoing economic recovery process is a fragile, uphill battle and that too little federal support for a robust recovery is a genuine risk whereas strong state intervention comes with few, if any, downsides.

"The risks of policy intervention are still asymmetric," Powell said. "Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses. Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth."

"By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller," he continued. "Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side by side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods."

Media Elites Say If You Make $400,000 You’re Middle Class

Democrats outraged as Trump halts Covid stimulus talks until after election

Donald Trump on Tuesday called off negotiations with Democratic lawmakers on coronavirus relief legislation until after the election, even as cases of the virus are on the rise across much of the country before flu season. “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,” Trump wrote on Twitter a day after emerging from a hospital stay for Covid-19 treatment.

The news triggered an immediate stock market selloff. Following Trump’s announcement breaking off negotiations, US stocks were down more than 2% in late afternoon trading. ...

Pelosi issued a thundering statement in the wake of the announcement, accusing Trump of “putting himself first at the expense of the country” by halting negotiations over a new coronavirus aid package from Congress.

Pelosi said Trump “showed his true colors” in stopping the talks between congressional leaders and the White House that have been aimed at bringing $2tn in new aid to fight the coronavirus. The Democratic leader said by “walking away” Trump was “unwilling to crush the virus” and is abandoning the needs of children and other Americans.

In late-night tweets, Trump changes course on coronavirus relief talks

In a pair of late-night tweets, President Donald Trump, changed course on negotiating coronavirus relief that he had earlier announced he was calling off until after the election.

"The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!" he posted shortly before 10 p.m.

"If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?" he posted about 20 minutes later.

If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy? @MarkMeadows @senatemajldr @kevinomccarthy @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

The late-night change came after a surprise announcement that he was calling off the talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"Nancy Pelosi is asking for $2.4 Trillion Dollars to bailout poorly run, high crime, Democrat States, money that is in no way related to COVID-19. We made a very generous offer of $1.6 Trillion Dollars and, as usual, she is not negotiating in good faith. I am rejecting their......request, and looking to the future of our Country," Trump tweeted earlier on Tuesday.

Unbelievable. Millions falling into poverty, millions on the edge of eviction, millions going hungry, millions losing their healthcare & this megalomaniac dime store dictator puts his knee of the neck of a nation. We need more than an election; we need a revolution. https://t.co/xPy0FBwrzj

— Keeanga-Yamahtta T. (@KeeangaYamahtta) October 6, 2020

NEW DATA: Trump Reduced Safety Enforcement As Workers Died of COVID While Begging For Help

To help their corporate donors boost profits and stock prices, Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have pushed hard to force workers back into unsafe workplaces. During the pandemic, the GOP has brushed off science and reopened economies, demanded liability shields for employers, ended special pandemic unemployment relief, helped Amazon block a worker safety initiative and encouraged states to punish workers who don’t return to their jobs.

For those forced back to COVID-infected workplaces, the Trump administration has weakened the agency that is supposed to be policing workplace safety. And now a new study shows the results: death rates spiked almost immediately after workers pleaded with that agency to help, but were likely ignored.

The analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data comes from researchers at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. It shows that “there is a correlation between OSHA complaints and COVID-19 mortality” -- in specific, COVID-related complaints to the agency “are correlated with (COVID-related) deaths 17 days later.”

During the pandemic, researchers note that OSHA “has not issued any emergency or permanent standard specific to COVID-19 exposure at the workplace” and “had issued only four citations related to COVID-19.” Meanwhile, the report notes that “the total number of federal OSHA inspections (of any kind) during 2020 has been reduced by two-thirds, compared to the same period in prior years.”

Sirota, worth a full read:

'Major Breach of Public Trust': Siding With Big Pharma, Trump Overrules FDA on Stricter Covid-19 Vaccine Standards

Taking the advice of profit-driven pharmaceutical corporations over that of his own public health agencies and experts, President Donald Trump is blocking the Food and Drug Administration from imposing tougher safety requirements on the authorization of a coronavirus vaccine after drug company executives privately voiced disapproval with the push for stricter federal standards.

Politico reported late Monday that the White House's "decision to halt release of new standards for emergency authorization of a Covid-19 vaccine came after officials close to [Trump] told the FDA that the pharmaceutical industry had objected to the tougher requirements."

"The White House cited the private-sector opposition as a chief reason for blocking the guidelines, which aim to hold companies' vaccines to a higher bar for safety and effectiveness and would likely push any authorization beyond Election Day," according to Politico. "The fact that the president was siding with drug makers over his own regulators in shelving the guidance... adds a new dimension to concerns about White House interference in the FDA."

Trump's stonewalling of more stringent federal standards comes amid widespread concerns that the president's politically motivated push for approval of a coronavirus vaccine before November 3 could result in a product that is insufficiently tested and unsafe. Late Monday, shortly after his release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the president declared that "vaccines are coming momentarily"—a timeline scientists have rejected.

During the presidential debate last week with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump dismissed more cautious vaccine timelines suggested by experts in his own administration as "very political" and said pharmaceutical executives have personally told him that "they can go faster than that by a lot."

Glenn Greenwald: Why Did Maddow Wish Trump Well If She Thinks He’s A Fascist Dictator

Amy Coney Barrett lived in home of secretive Christian group's co-founder

Amy Coney Barrett lived in the home of one of the founders of the People of Praise while she was a law student, raising new questions about the supreme court nominee’s involvement with the secretive Christian faith group that has been criticized for dominating the lives of its members and subjugating women. Public records examined by the Guardian show that Barrett ... lived in a nine-bedroom South Bend, Indiana, residence owned at the time by Kevin Ranaghan, a religious scholar and a co-founder of Barrett’s faith group, during law school.

Public records – and a record of a speeding ticket – show that Barrett’s husband, Jesse, apparently also lived in the home in the years before their 1999 marriage. ... Amy Barrett, who as Amy Coney graduated from Notre Dame Law in 1997 at the top of her class, has said she met Jesse while she was in law school but has not offered other details. Records show that other individuals who appear to be members of the People of Praise have also gotten married following periods of living in the Ranaghan household.

Insider accounts by former members who are now critical of the organization suggest that the group has “well-developed courtship and marriage traditions” which are closely followed. One critic, former member Adrian Reimers, has said in writings about his experience that people who are in the community do not usually date until the matter has been prayed upon by an individual’s “head” – or spiritual leader – who helps make decisions about whether a couple ought to get married. ...

Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have emphatically stated that Barrett’s faith was not an issue that would be raised in upcoming confirmation hearings. Pressed on the issue recently by the Guardian, the Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, a member of the committee, said he had “no intention” of questioning Barrett about her “religious faith or religious affiliation”.

“I think the arguments against her are so powerful and persuasive on the merits, that we should focus on them,” he said.

Homeland Security Wants to Erase Its History of Misconduct

Agencies under the Department of Homeland Security have been accused of performing forced hysterectomies on detained immigrants, deporting witnesses to systemic sexual abuse in immigration detention, and defying federal court orders to halt deportations. They have separated children from their families at the border, used the Covid-19 pandemic as justification to turn them back altogether, killed people on both sides of the border, and abducted protesters against police violence from the streets of an American city.

As The Intercept has reported, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two of DHS’s most abuse-ridden agencies, have long resisted public scrutiny of their record by stonewalling calls for transparency and defying demands for accountability, including by Congress. But a full accounting of DHS agencies’ misconduct may be impossible not just in real time but well into the future. The Border Patrol has petitioned the National Archives and Records Administration to designate thousands of its internal records documenting abuse as “temporary,” slating them for destruction in as early as four years. A similar request by ICE was granted last year.

When unidentified federal agents later determined to be Border Patrol agents dragged protesters into unmarked vans in Portland, Oregon, this summer, U.S. citizens got a rare glimpse of the impunity with which the agency treats migrants and their advocates on the border. With 44,000 agents and a budget of $17 billion, CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the United States. It has also long been one of its most lawless — with a long history of corruption, neglect, racism, violence, and sexual abuse.

The Border Patrol’s proposal to the National Archives, which makes decisions about the retention of U.S. government documents, would designate as temporary all records regarding CBP’s dealings with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: a recipient of complaints of civil rights abuses from across the department. These records include reports on concluded investigations, sworn witness statements, and transcripts of interviews — material that constitutes invaluable testimony of CBP’s conduct. The proposal would also mark as temporary internal records concerning administrative and criminal investigations of CBP agents, as well as records collected by CBP in connection to the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA. Designating these records as temporary would then allow the agency to schedule their destruction — in as little as four years for the complaints of civil rights violations, and in 25 years for the remaining records.

“It’s a pretty striking proposal: It would erase a lot of historical memory of CBP abuses that are very systemic in the agency,” Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The Intercept. “An institution that’s supposed to be in charge of preserving historical memory and historical record of agencies of the U.S. government shouldn’t be considering a proposal that would allow an agency — and particularly an agency with such dark history of abuse — to be able to destroy records that encompass really important, really critical, historical value.”

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The Reason HALF of Americans DON'T Vote!

Republican operatives indicted in voter suppression scheme in Michigan

Two Republican political operatives are facing multiple felony charges for their role in orchestrating an automated voter intimidation scheme that sought to dissuade working class voters from submitting mail-in ballots for the November election. The allegations highlight the illegal, unconstitutional and racist methods by which the Trump administration is seeking to suppress turnout, particularly among big-city African-American voters, ahead of the election. Jack Burkman, 54, and Jacob Wohl, 22, are each being charged with four felonies, including voter intimidation, conspiracy to commit an election law violation, using a computer to commit an election law crime and using a computer to commit a conspiracy crime. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced the charges on October 1. ...

Potential voters reported receiving voicemails that identified the caller as “Tamika Taylor from Project 1599,” described as a “civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl.” The voicemail from “Tamika” warned that if the individual chose to vote by mail, his or her personal information would be uploaded to a public database “that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants.” The message also threatened that “credit card companies” would use the database to “collect outstanding debts.” It added that “the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines,” and advised, “Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home safe and beware of vote by mail.”

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Hillary Clinton's gift that keeps on giving (and killing people):

How Honduras became one of the most dangerous countries to defend natural resources

Gabriela Sorto has not seen or spoken to her father in six months, since the Honduran government’s draconian Covid-19 measures banned most travel and prison visits. Porfirio Sorto Cedillo, a 48-year-old builder and farm worker, is one of eight protesters held in pre-trial detention since 2019 for alleged crimes linked to their opposition to an iron oxide mine which threatens to contaminate their water supply. ...

In response to criminal complaints filed by the company Inversiones Los Pinares, 31 people, including one man who died three years before the alleged incidents, have been charged with multiple offences and the community’s grassroots group falsely accused of ties to organized crime. The community has been militarized, and its leaders subjected to threats, harassment and smear campaigns. Several residents fled, seeking asylum in the US to escape criminal persecution, in a case widely condemned by lawyers, rights groups and US and European lawmakers. ...

Honduras became one of the most dangerous countries in the world to defend natural resources and land rights after the 2009 [Hillary Clinton -js] coup ushered in an autocratic pro-business government – which remains in power despite multiple allegations of corruption, electoral fraud and links to international drug trafficking networks.

Since then, hundreds of defenders have been killed, and many others silenced as a result of trumped-up criminal charges. According to a recent report by the UN Working Group on business and human rights, the “root cause of most social conflicts [in Honduras] is the systematic lack of transparency and meaningful participation” of communities affected by the exploitation of natural resources.

September was world's hottest on record, EU climate change service says

California wildfires spawn first ‘gigafire’ in modern history

California’s extraordinary year of wildfires has spawned another new milestone – the first “gigafire”, a blaze spanning 1m acres, in modern history. On Monday, the August complex fire in northern California expanded beyond 1m acres, elevating it from a mere “megafire” to a new classification, “gigafire”, never used before in a contemporary setting in the state.

At 1.03m acres, the fire is larger than the state of Rhode Island and is raging across seven counties, according to fire agency Cal Fire. An amalgamation of several fires caused when lightning struck dry forests in August, the vast conflagration has been burning for 50 days and is only half-contained.

The August complex fire heads a list of huge fires that have chewed through 4m acres of California this year, a figure called “mind-boggling” by Cal Fire and double the previous annual record. Five of the six largest fires ever recorded in the state have occurred in 2020, resulting in several dozen deaths and thousands of lost buildings.

There is little sign of California’s biggest ever fire season receding. The state endured a heatwave this summer, aiding the formation of enormous wildfires even without the seasonal winds that usually fan the blazes that have historically dotted the west coast.

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Also of Interest

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

Caitlin Johnstone: US Politics Isn’t ‘Polarized’; It’s In Almost Universal Agreement

What Would Biden’s Foreign Policy Look Like? Just Look at His Supporters

Thomas Frank’s Essential Insight – True Populism Is Transracial: An Interview + Review of The People, No! A Brief History of Anti-Populism

As 98,000 Businesses Permanently Closed, the Fed and Treasury Have Sat on $340 Billion of Untapped Money from the CARES Act

Why Trump Returned To The White House

OPCW Syria whistleblower and ex-OPCW chief attacked by US, UK, France at UN

In Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Erdogan eyes Turkey's "place in world order"

Krystal and Saagar REACT: Stephen Miller Gets COVID As Joint Chiefs Of Staff Go Into Quarantine

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A Little Night Music

Billy Wright - Billy's Boogie Blues

Billy Wright - Live The Life

Billy Wright - Turn Your Lamps Down Low

Billy Wright - After Dark Blues

Billy Wright - Let's Be Friends

Billy Wright - You Satisfy

Billy Wright - Don´t You Want a Man Like Me

Billy Wright - Man's Brand Boogie

Billy Wright - Gotta Find My Baby

Billy Wright - Hey Little Girl

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