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This evening's music features blues guitarist Kenny Neal. Enjoy!

"CALLOUS, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another."

-- Ambrose Bierce

News and Opinion

Colombia politician tells protesters hurt by police to ‘stop crying over one eye’

After a month of protests in which 46 people have suffered eye injuries from police teargas rounds and rubber bullets, a Colombian politician has prompted outrage by saying that supporters of the anti-poverty demonstrations should “stop crying over one eye”.

“Don’t fool Colombians and don’t fool the international community and stop crying over one eye,” said Paola Holguín, a senator from the ruling Centro Democrático party, to opposition politicians during a virtual floor speech on Wednesday afternoon.

Since protests erupted in April, the police response has been brutal. At least 43 protesters have been killed by officers, according to local human rights monitor, Temblores, with mounting reports of arbitrary detention, torture and sexual abuse of protesters at the hands of police. Forty-six people have suffered eye injuries, prompting speculation that police were intentionally seeking to blind protesters. A similar tactic was used by police in Chile during a wave of unrest that began there in late 2019.

“We worry that Holguín’s speech legitimizes the violent actions of state forces,” said Alejandro Lanz, the director of Temblores. “These expressions of violence, coming from representatives of governing parties, are generating material impacts on the streets.”

Chile’s political establishment has been swept away – now there’s hope for change

In a political landscape in which democratic power was long rigged so that left and right coalitions would obtain roughly half of the votes, Chile's election results were nothing short of an earthquake – one that no pollster or pundit had foreseen. Support for the rightwing coalition of President Sebastián Piñera plummeted to 24% of the vote. This devastating result was compounded by the loss of many municipalities that have traditionally voted for the right. Central Santiago even swung from the extreme right to the Communist party. Like the social protests that led to this moment, the election results are an indictment of the political establishment, particularly of its centre-right wing, which over 30 years persistently blocked progressive reforms.

Most of the remaining 76% of the elected assembly can be placed somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. However, the main centre-left coalition, which had successfully governed Chile for 24 of the last 31 years, was equally decimated, achieving only 16% of votes. By contrast, a new leftwing coalition composed of the Communist party and the Frente Amplio (the former student leaders who led the protest movements in 2006 and 2011) obtained 18%, while independent candidates and indigenous leaders (for whom a proportion of seats was reserved) won the remaining 42%. Put differently, only 40% of the votes went to establishment candidates, while 60% went to independents or newcomers linked to a fragmented spectrum of leftwing parties and social movements. ...

Crucially, the rightwing defenders of the Pinochet constitution of old did not achieve the one third of votes necessary to veto clauses in the new constitution, which will have to be approved by a further referendum in 2022. Neither did any other coalition. This means that all issues are on the table, and its members will have to listen and debate each other until they achieve agreement.

Abby Martin WINS Anti-BDS Lawsuit Against Georgia

Journalists in Australia Censured for Demanding Better Coverage of Israel and Palestine

Journalists in Australia are facing backlash after asking their newsrooms to improve coverage of Israel and Palestine.

Five journalists in Australia published an open letter on May 14 calling on news outlets to “do better” coverage of Israel and Palestine by actively including Palestinian perspectives in coverage and refraining from “both-siderism that equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators.” More than 720 journalists and media staffers have since signed the letter criticizing coverage of the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Israel has killed over 240 Palestinians, 66 of them children, and has left parts of Gaza completely destroyed, including a tower that housed offices for the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, among other media and nongovernmental organizations. Hamas, meanwhile, has killed 12 Israelis, including two children.

Already some of those journalists have faced consequences. At least a dozen staffers at two of Australia’s largest public broadcasting corporations, Special Broadcasting Service and Australian Broadcasting Corporation, were asked by management to remove their signatures from the letter, according to letter organizers and the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, an Australian media union. Several staffers at both SBS and ABC said they were also told that their contracts might not be renewed. “The people who are being particularly pressured are younger journalists, and often people of color, and people who are from an Arab background,” said Antony Loewenstein, a journalist based in Sydney, Australia, and previously in East Jerusalem who helped organize the letter. “There’s not a suspicion of Jewish journalists doing their job, whereas there is for Arab journalists,” added Loewenstein, who is Australian and Jewish. ...

The authors asked that newsrooms “consciously and deliberately make space for Palestinian perspectives” and avoid “frameworks that rely on passive formulation and weasel words (clashes, etc) to obscure the reality of a violence disproportionately endured by Palestinians.” Authors also asked that employers respect the rights of journalists and other staff “to publicly and openly express personal solidarity with the Palestinian cause without penalty in their professional lives.” ...

Letter organizers sought to position the “culture of silence” in media around coverage of Israel and Palestine as both a class and workplace issue, said one person who helped to organize it and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Many journalists don’t think their outlets cover the region in a factual or balanced way, they said, adding that “media companies have consistently, over decades, bowed to massive external pressure to skew their reporting in this way.”

Going against Israel's mainstream media practices, today's Hebrew edition of Haaretz publishes the photos of the 67 children who were killed in Gaza.#Gaza https://t.co/lEk9FEN0mN

— Khaled Diab (@DiabolicalIdea) May 27, 2021

Israeli Bombs Killed 66 Kids in Gaza Including 12 Who Were Getting Help for Trauma from Past Attacks

UN to launch inquiry into ‘systematic discrimination’ in Israel and Palestine

The UN’s main human rights body will launch an investigation into “systematic discrimination and repression” in Israel and Palestine, with the aim of identifying what it said were the root causes of recent Gaza bloodshed. The proposal for unprecedented levels of scrutiny of alleged abuses, called at the request of Muslim states, was passed by the 47-member UN human rights council on Thursday.

Opening the session in Geneva, the UN rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, said Israel’s attacks on Gaza this month could constitute war crimes if they were found to be disproportionate, and accused Hamas of firing indiscriminate rockets on Israel. “There is no doubt that Israel has the right to defend its citizens and residents. However, Palestinians have rights too – the same rights,” said Bachelet, a former president of Chile. “The death of and injury of children in this escalation is a source of shame for all.” ...

The commission would investigate “all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity”. ...

Bachelet said two factors led to the escalation – the imminent eviction of Palestinians “under forced displacement” in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah; and Israel’s use of “excessive force” against Palestinian protesters, including at the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. ...

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, criticised what he said was a “shameful” example of the council’s “blatant anti-Israel obsession”.

Biden’s Top Man in Asia Says the Era of Engagement With China Is Over

The U.S. is entering a period of intense competition with China as the government running the world’s second-biggest economy becomes ever more tightly controlled by President Xi Jinping, the White House’s top official for Asia said Wednesday.

“The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end,” Kurt Campbell, the U.S. coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, said at an event hosted by Stanford University. U.S. policy toward China will now operate under a “new set of strategic parameters,” Campbell said, adding that “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”

Chinese policies under Xi are in large part responsible for the shift in U.S. policy, Campbell said, citing military clashes on China’s border with India, an “economic campaign” against Australia and the rise of China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Beijing’s behavior was emblematic of a shift toward “harsh power, or hard power” which “signals that China is determined to play a more assertive role,” he said.

The blunt comments by Campbell came as President Joe Biden said he ordered the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts to determine where the Covid-19 virus came from, after conflicting assessments of whether its origins are natural or from a lab accident in China.

Worth a full read, here's a bit to get you started:

Eisenhower rejected military chiefs’ demand for nuclear war on China, classified account of ’58 Taiwan Strait crisis reveals

A previously censored account of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis that was sponsored by the Pentagon has been published in full by the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. The report provides a hair-raising portrait of a reckless US military leadership relentlessly pressing President Dwight Eisenhower for the authority to carry out nuclear attacks on communist China. After holding the still-classified version of the account in his possession for fifty years, Ellsberg said he decided to release it because of the growing threat of US war with China over Taiwan, and the danger that such a conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange.

A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as well as other evidence now available that from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs aimed first and foremost to exploit the tensions to carry out nuclear strikes against Chinese nuclear military targets deep in highly-populated areas.

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang regime and the Joint Chiefs were allies in wanting to embroil the United States in a war with China. Deputy Secretary of State Christian Herter feared that the Nationalist regime was determined to drag the US into conflict, according to the Pentagon-sponsored account. The reason, according to the author of the account, Morton Halperin, was that involving the United States in a war with the Chinese Communists “was clearly their only hope for a return to the mainland.”

Quemoy and Matsu, the two main offshore islands occupied by Nationalist troops, were less than five miles from the mainland and had been used by Chiang’s forces as bases to mount unsuccessful commando raids inside the mainland. And Chiang, who was still committed to reconquering the mainland China with the ostensible support of the United States, had stationed a third of his 350,000-man army on those two islands. In May 1958, the Joint Chiefs adopted a new plan (OPS PLAN 25-58), ostensibly for the defense of the offshore islands. In fact, the plan provided a basis for attacking China with atomic weapons. It was to begin with a brief preliminary “Phase I”, which it called “patrol and reconnaissance” and was said to be already underway. “Phase II”, which would have been triggered by a Chinese attack on the offshore islands, would involve US air forces wiping out the attacking forces.

But the new plan envisioned a possible third phase, in which the Strategic Air Command and forces under the command of the US Pacific Command would carry out strategic attacks with 10 to 15 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons “to destroy the war-making capability” of China. According to the account authored by Halperin, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, told State Department officials in an August meeting that the third phase would require nuclear strikes on Chinese bases as far north as Shanghai.

The Joint Chiefs played down the threat to civilian casualties from such tactical atomic weapons, emphasizing that an airburst of tactical atomic explosions would generate little radioactive fallout. But the account indicates that they provided no concrete information on expected civilian casualties. Given the fact that both the Chinese gun emplacements across the Taiwan Strait and a key airbase serving the Chinese military forces in any conflict over the offshore islands would have been located close to significant population centers, such atomic explosions would have certainly caused civilian casualties on a massive scale.

The Joint Chiefs did not acknowledge that the bombs they planned to detonate with airbursts would have had the same potential lethality as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nor would they concede that the targets of such bombings were located in the immediate vicinity of Chinese cities that were roughly the same population as Hiroshima. ... Despite the acceptance of the likelihood that it would lead to nuclear retaliation by China, JCS Chairman Twining expressed no hesitation about the plan, asserting that in order to defend the offshore islands, “the consequences had to be accepted”.

David Sirota: Disproving Once And For All Biden Is FDR

Unionized but impotent? Row erupts over gig workers’ labor proposal

A huge controversy has erupted among labor unions after several unions joined with Uber and Lyft to develop legislation in New York state that would deliver on one of labor’s major goals: giving many gig workers a quick path to unionization.

The legislation would make good on another labor objective: allowing industrywide bargaining for gig workers, specifically the roughly 250,000 app-based drivers and food delivery workers in New York. But many union officials and worker advocates have denounced the legislation, saying it comes at too steep a price.

The legislation falls short of labor’s goal of defining these gig workers as employees, a move that would give them protections under minimum wage and anti-discrimination laws. They also complain that the legislation contains language that would prohibit app-based drivers and delivery workers from going on strike. Critics further assert that the legislation would undermine labor’s No 1 goal nationwide: getting Congress to enact the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act), a bill that would make it considerably easier to unionize workers.

Amazon workers: Literally dying in stressful conditions.

Amazon: Have a phone booth with a mindfulness video for “wellness”!https://t.co/jnZI8cujAZ

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) May 27, 2021

Progressive Groups Push for New Rule That Could Break Up Big Banks

More than a dozen progressive organizations are pressuring the Biden administration to enact a rule that would force banks to give customers access to their own financial data. The rule would make it easier for consumers to switch to smaller, independent banks — posing a threat to America’s most powerful banking institutions and potentially refiguring the United States’ financial landscape.

Eighteen consumer advocacy groups and progressive think tanks, including the American Economic Liberties Project and Public Citizen, signed onto a May 27 letter urging the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to implement the new regulation. Known as Section 1033 in reference to a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the reform seeks not only to ban banks from hoarding customers’ data, but also to introduce competition in a sector that is largely controlled by Wall Street interests. The progressive groups argue that this could bring down costs and improve services for consumers.

“A strong implementation of Section 1033 will be critical to beating back anti-competitive, data-hoarding behavior and putting safeguards in place to protect consumers’ access and control over their data in their financial lives,” reads the letter addressed to Dave Uejio, the acting director of the CFPB. “The massive amount of consumer data that large financial institutions have accumulated gives them a significant built-in advantage over competitors.” ...

Big banks, meanwhile, have pushed back against the new rule. Organizations like the Clearing House, whose members include industry giants like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan, argue that opening up access to financial data makes users more susceptible to security risks. Progressives have acknowledged the potential security risk of making financial data more readily available, but antitrust advocates say that such a risk could be mitigated if the CFPB issued firmer guidelines to regulate data aggregators while allowing consumers to move their information to trustworthy third-party apps without the roadblocks banks typically put in place.

“There’s always a security risk, but that’s not really a reason to not allow portability, not allow people to use the information they have about themselves,” said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel with Americans for Financial Reform.

'End This Game': Dems Urged to Ditch GOP After 'Woefully Inadequate' Infrastructure Offer

Republican senators on Thursday unveiled an infrastructure counteroffer calling for just $257 billion in new spending over the next eight years, a proposal that intensified pressure on the Biden administration and Democratic leaders to abandon their push for bipartisan compromise and unilaterally press ahead with a sufficiently bold package.

While a group of four Senate Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia presented the GOP offer as a "serious" $928 billion plan that "delivers on much" of what President Joe Biden requested in earlier talks, roughly $700 billion of the money in the proposal would be repurposed from unspent coronavirus relief funding that was approved to help cash-strapped state and local governments, bolster Covid-19 testing, and expand the child tax credit.

The Republican blueprint also omits green energy investments and elder care funds included in Biden's $2.2 trillion opening bid. Progressive members of Congress and advocacy groups have criticized Biden's initial plan as inadequate and called for $10 trillion in spending on infrastructure and clean energy over the next decade.

Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, said in a statement Thursday that lawmakers "cannot afford to waste any more time on this Republican scheme—families need our help now."

"Another day, another offer from Republicans that falls well short of meeting the needs of this moment," said Epting. "This is a classic Washington trick—attempt to run out the clock with budgetary gimmicks and inadequate counteroffers and call it bipartisanship. It is time Democrats end this game." ...

The GOP unveiled its counterproposal following weeks of fruitless infrastructure talks with the White House, which has publicly remained committed to seeking a deal with Republicans even as the right-wing party's leadership bashes the president's plan as excessive.

Capito said Thursday that the "human infrastructure" investments that Biden is proposing as part of his jobs plan—including money for home and community-based services for elderly adults—is a "nonstarter" for the GOP. The West Virginia senator has also said that Republicans won't accept any changes to the GOP's 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich and large corporations. ...

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is "concerned" that the GOP plan doesn't include adequate funding for "fixing our veterans' hospitals, building modern rail systems, repairing our transit systems, removing dangerous lead pipes, and powering America's leadership in a job-creating clean energy economy." Psaki went on to say that talks with Republicans will continue into next week.

U.S. Marks 100th Anniversary of Tulsa Race Massacre, When White Mob Destroyed "Black Wall Street"

Black Lives Matter co-founder to step down as foundation’s executive director

A co-founder of Black Lives Matter announced Thursday that she is stepping down as the executive director of the movement’s foundation following what she has called a smear campaign from a far-right group and recent criticism from other Black organizers.

Patrisse Cullors, who has been at the helm of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for nearly six years, said she is leaving to focus on other projects, including the upcoming release of her second book and a multi-year TV development deal with Warner Bros. Her last day with the foundation is Friday.

“I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave,” Cullors told the Associated Press. “It feels like the time is right.”

Cullors’ departure follows a massive surge in support and political influence in the US and around the world for the BLM movement, which was established nearly eight years ago in response to injustice against Black Americans. The resignation also comes on the heels of controversy over the foundation’s finances and over Cullors’ personal wealth.

Squad Finally Strategized Votes -- To Fund The Police!?!?

Three Tacoma police officers charged in killing of Manuel Ellis

The Washington state attorney general’s office has filed felony charges against three police officers in the killing of Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old Black father of two, who, moments before his death, called out: “I can’t breathe.” This is the first time the office has filed criminal charges against police officers for unlawful use of deadly force.

Tacoma police officers Christopher Burbank and Matthew Collins, who are white, were charged with second-degree murder, while Timothy Rankine, who is Asian, was charged with first-degree manslaughter. The maximum sentence for both offenses is life in prison. ... The decision came more than a year after the Pierce county medical examiner’s office ruled Ellis’s death a homicide, and followed months of contradicting information from law enforcement officials, who framed Ellis as the aggressor, and eyewitness testimony and video that showed the opposite.

According to the statement of probable cause, Ellis had been heading home about 11.20pm on 3 March in Tacoma, about 35 miles south of Seattle, after getting a snack from a convenience store on 3 March when he encountered Tacoma police officers Burbank and Collins. The three of them were seen talking when witnesses described one of the officers using his police car door to shove Ellis to the ground.

Video of the scene and statements from eyewitnesses depict the officers tackling and repeatedly striking Ellis. He was hit with a taser multiple times, hog-tied, and at least one officer’s knee was put on his neck or back. Collins also reportedly applied a “lateral vascular neck restraint”, or chokehold to him. In a series of Ring videos previously released, Ellis can be heard screaming: “I can’t breathe, sir. I can’t breathe,” followed by an officer saying: “Shut the fuck up.” ...

James Bible, a lawyer for Ellis’ family, highlighted the narrative initially presented by law enforcement during a press conference Thursday: “The narrative was that those officers were in a struggle for their life. It wasn’t until videos started to come forward that showed a different story. It wasn’t until witnesses started to come forward that showed a different story.”

Senate Republicans will likely sink Democrats’ bid to set up Capitol attack commission

Senate Republicans were poised on Thursday to kill an attempt by Democrats to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the 6 January attack on the Capitol in which a pro-Trump mob ransacked the building in an attempt to disrupt the formalization of Joe Biden’s winning of the presidency.

The bill was intended to set up a 9/11-style commission that would examine its causes and impact and exactly who was involved.

Donald Trump is still powerful in the Republican party and has reacted angrily to the idea of such a commission. Observers believe that many top Republicans are fearful of antagonizing Trump and his loyal followers and also worried about what such a commission might uncover, including potential links between Republican lawmakers and some of those who invaded the building.

The Thursday vote would mark the first successful use of a filibuster in the Biden presidency to halt Senate legislative action, and is likely to boost pressure on the president to get rid of the Senate tradition that requires a vote by 60 of the 100 senators to cut off debate and advance a bill.

Hunter Biden CAUGHT Again Selling Access

Still no plans to rein in President Manchin.

The Democrat standing in the way of his party’s efforts to protect voting rights

For months, Democrats in Congress have remained united behind passing the For the People Act, legislation that would amount to the most sweeping protections for voting rights in a generation. But those efforts – which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, limit severe partisan gerrymandering and mandate new transparency in political donations – appear to be hitting a wall. “Failure is very much an option – it is, in fact, the most likely one,” the Washington Post reported bluntly earlier this month.

The senator getting in Democrats’ way is one of their own: Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who has publicly signaled recently that he does not back the bill and wants bipartisan support for it. Manchin also does not favor getting rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes for legislation to advance in the Senate, making it nearly impossible for Democrats to pass this bill or any other without support from 10 Republicans. Even after six months of an unprecedented Republican effort to restrict voting rights across the country, Manchin still isn’t budging. ...

We asked senators and voting rights groups how exactly they might win over Manchin and how they plan to move forward. They told us they were still optimistic about the bill’s prospects and they thought Manchin would ultimately come around as public pressure grew.

Kyle Kondik: Are Dems Screwed In Senate For 2022?

Biden officials condemned for backing Trump-era Alaska drilling project

Joe Biden’s administration is facing an onslaught of criticism from environmentalists after opting to defend the approval of a massive oil and gas drilling project in the frigid northern reaches of Alaska. In a briefing filed in federal court on Wednesday, the US Department of Justice said the Trump-era decision to allow the project in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s north slope was “reasonable and consistent” with the law and should be allowed to go ahead.

This stance means the Biden administration is contesting a lawsuit brought by environmental groups aimed at halting the drilling due to concerns over the impact upon wildlife and planet-heating emissions. The US president has paused all new drilling leases on public land but is allowing this Alaska lease, approved under Trump, to go ahead. The project, known as Willow, is being overseen by the oil company ConocoPhillips and is designed to extract more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years. Environmentalists say allowing the project is at odds with Biden’s vow to combat the climate crisis and drastically reduce US emissions.

“It’s incredibly disappointing to see the Biden administration defending this environmentally disastrous project,” said Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that have sued to stop the drilling. “President Biden promised climate action and our climate can’t afford more huge new oil-drilling projects.”

The Arctic is heating up at three times the rate of the rest of the planet and ConocoPhillips will have to resort to Kafkaesque interventions to be able to drill for oil in an environment being destroyed by the burning of that fuel. The company plans to install “chillers’ into the Alaskan permafrost, which is rapidly melting due to global heating, to ensure it is stable enough to host drilling equipment.

Monsell said the attempts to refreeze the thawing permafrost in order to extract more fossil fuel “highlights the ridiculousness of drilling in the Arctic”. Kirsten Miller, acting executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, said Willow “is the poster child for the type of massive fossil fuel development that must be avoided today if we’re to avoid the worst climate impacts down the road”.

Much more at the link:

Bolsonaro’s Environment Minister Bulldozed the Amazon. Now He’s Under Investigation for Corruption.

Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s environment minister, was frustrated. Not because of record fires and deforestation in the Amazon, but because many of his attempts at deregulation had been thwarted. “Everything we do is shot down by the judiciary the next day,” Salles complained in a video recording of a Cabinet meeting in 2020 that was later made public by the Supreme Court. However, he also saw a fantastic opportunity in the pandemic that was just taking hold in Brazil. “We have the possibility at this moment that the press attention is exclusively focused almost exclusively on Covid,” he told his colleagues and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. It was time, he said, to “let the cattle loose and change all the rules and simplify the regulations.”

Over the last year, that is exactly what the Bolsonaro administration has done: kneecapped regulatory bodies, signed wide-ranging executive decrees, drafted new laws, and encouraged illegal miners, ranchers, and loggers to be even bolder in their race to strip the Amazon of its resources. These policies have been catastrophic for the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Brazilians who live on federally protected lands that are increasingly under attack by bands of heavily armed criminals with ties to powerful elites. Many scientists believe that the Amazon is dangerously close to reaching a level of deforestation that would provoke a rapid and irreversible collapse of the region’s complex ecosystem, with wide-ranging implications for the continent and the globe.

But the effort to push back against Bolsonaro’s environmental policies has just gotten an unexpected boost from Brazil’s Supreme Court. Last week, the Supreme Court granted search warrants for Salles’ homes and financial records and ordered that the country’s top environmental regulator, Eduardo Bim, be temporarily removed from his position while the investigation is underway. Salles reportedly did not turn over his cellphone to the police and began using a new phone and number the day the investigation was announced, which could be considered obstruction of justice. Bim has temporarily stepped down.

The Supreme Court decision highlighted $2.6 million in suspicious transactions by a law firm co-owned by Salles and his mother. The Federal Police are investigating Salles and 10 officials under his command for alleged participation in a criminal logging syndicate, corruption, money laundering, and interfering in a police operation that resulted in the largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazilian history, among other crimes. The timber, enough to fill 6,243 trucks, was destined for the U.S. and Europe.

The investigation began after the U.S. Embassy informed the Brazilian government of a seizure of three containers of timber in Savannah, Georgia, believed to be of illicit origin due to lack of proper documentation. Bim tried and failed to convince the U.S. authorities to clear the containers, then changed the regulations to no longer require the missing documents. According to Brazilian news reports, the U.S. notified the Federal Police of concerns about “possible inappropriate actions or corrupt behavior” by representatives of the importing company “and/or public officials” responsible for overseeing the extraction and export of wood products from the Amazon region.

Photos at the link.

Brazil aerial photos show miners’ devastation of indigenous people’s land

Rare and disturbing aerial photographs have laid bare the devastation being inflicted on Brazil’s largest reserve for indigenous people by thousands of wildcat goldminers whose illegal activities have accelerated under the country’s far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.

Activists believe as many as 20,000 garimpeiro prospectors are operating within the Yanomami reserve in northern Brazil using speedboats and light aircraft to penetrate the vast expanse of jungle near the border with Venezuela.

Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly bemoaned the size of the Yanomami territory and been accused of emboldening environmental criminals with his pro-development rhetoric, was due to make a provocative trip to ​a village in the reserve’s south-western tip​ on Thursday – his first to an indigenous community since becoming president in January 2019. Yanomami leaders denounced the visit as an unwanted attempt to promote illegal mining in their ancestral land.

The images, captured during flyovers early last month, leave no doubt about the intruders’ impact on the 9.6m-hectare (24m-acre) Amazon enclave – nor the impunity with which they are allowed to act in a supposedly protected reserve.

Several photographs show areas where the miners, whose trade Bolsonaro has vowed to legalise, have obliterated the dense, pine-green forest and replaced it with immense bronze-coloured gashes littered with felled trees and pools of stagnant water. Others depict bustling riverside encampments where the garimpeiros live and work, featuring bars, restaurants, shops, houses and even a snooker table. In some pictures it is possible to make out single-engine planes and helicopters – used to smuggle workers, supplies and equipment into the reserve – positioned beside clandestine airstrips near the Venezuelan border.

Rapid heating of Indian Ocean worsening cyclones, say scientists

India’s cyclone season is being made more intense by the rapidly heating Indian Ocean, scientists have warned.

Last week India was battered by Cyclone Tauktae, an unusually strong cyclone in the Arabian Sea, resulting in widespread disruption. This week, another severe storm, Cyclone Yaas, formed in the Bay of Bengal, leading to more than a million people being evacuated into safe shelters.

The Indian subcontinent has been facing the brunt of costly and deadly tropical cyclones for decades. But scientists say global heating is accelerating the rate of ocean warming, leading to an increased number of cyclones and rapid intensification of weak storms, with severe repercussions for the country.

Cyclones are much more likely to gather intensity over warmer waters. The Arabian Sea, part of the west Indian Ocean, generally has a sea surface temperature of below 28C (82F), and recorded just 93 cyclones between 1891 and 2000. By comparison, the warmer Bay of Bengal in the east Indian Ocean, where temperatures are permanently above 28C, recorded 350 cyclones over the same period.

Between 2001 and 2021, 28 cyclones formed in the Arabian Sea, along with a marked increase in storm intensity, fuelled by rising sea surface temperatures which reached as high as 31C (88F). A 2016 Nature study found anthropogenic global heating had contributed to the increased frequency of extremely severe cyclonic storms over the Arabian Sea.

Also of Interest

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

With Thousands Left Homeless, Gaza Reconstruction Faces Familiar Obstacle: Israeli Siege

How To Sabotage The Pro-Palestine Movement

Blinken Says Israel Took ‘Significant Steps’ to Avoid Killing Civilians in Gaza

Taliban Warns Afghanistan’s Neighbors Against Hosting US Bases

How Finance Sharks Destroy Industries: Chicago Tribune Edition

Led by Jayapal, Broad Coalition of 156 House Dems Demands Medicare Expansion in Infrastructure Bill

Federal Judge Nixes Proposed Monsanto Glysophate Settlement, Deepening Black Hole for Bayer

World Edging 'Inexorably' Closer to 1.5°C Warming Threshold: WMO

Jimmy Dore: Cenk Uygur's Family Dunks On Him Over Palestine

Grayzone: US meddling in Belarus to push regime change: NED president spills the beans

Krystal Ball: Rachel Maddow Finally Criticizes Biden BUT It’s Over Russiagate

Saagar Enjeti: Bezos Buys MGM, OFFICIALLY The Most Powerful Person In America. That Should Worry You

A Little Night Music

Kenny Neal - Right Train, Wrong Track

Kenny Neal - Baby Bee (Be Good To Me), The Blues is Alright!

Raful & Kenny Neal - Rainin' In My Heart

Kenny Neal - Going To The Country

Kenny Neal - Howling At The Moon

Kenny Neal - You've Been Spying On Me

Kenny Neal - Funny How Time Slips Away

Kenny Neal - Never Thought About Growing Old

Kenny Neal - Devil Child

Billy Branch & Kenny Neal - My Babe, Little Red Rooster

Kenny Neal - Full Set - Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival