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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Big Smokey Smothers

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Big Smokey Smothers. Enjoy!

^{Big Smokey Smothers - Do Your Thing}

"Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today. Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them."

-- Jawaharlal Nehru

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News and Opinion

Report Reveals 'Breathtaking Cover-Up' of US Airstrike That Killed Syrian Civilians

Advocacy groups, human rights defenders, fellow reporters, and other readers of The New York Times were outraged Saturday after journalists Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt published their investigation into a deadly 2019 U.S. airstrike in Syria and all that followed.

"This NYT report on the cover-up of U.S. war crimes in Syria should make your blood boil," Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, tweeted Sunday. "The U.S. wantonly kills civilians, covers it up, and then tells other countries how 'democracy' works. Infuriating."

Evan Hill, a journalist on the Times' visual investigations team, said that "this is a long, complicated story, but it's one that touches on nearly every problem with the global U.S. air war. At every attempt, the military tried to cover it up."

The Times began by detailing the scene over two years ago, when the U.S. military was using a drone near the Syrian town of Baghuz to search for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants, and encountered women and children along a river bank:

Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone's high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.

It was March 18, 2019. At the U.S. military's busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there.

"Who dropped that?" a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, "We just dropped on 50 women and children."

An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.

After the strike, civilian observers "found piles of dead women and children," reported Philipps and Schmitt, who spent months investigating one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against ISIS, relying on confidential documents, descriptions of classified reports, and interviews.

"A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike," the pair explained. "The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified."

Gene Tate, a former U.S. Navy officer who worked on the Defense Department inspector general's inquiry into the strike, told the Times that he criticized the lack of action and was ultimately forced out of his position.

"Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it," Tate said. "It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what's right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it."

According to Philipps and Schmitt:

This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.

"We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them," Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. "In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life."

The only assessment done immediately after the strike was performed by the same ground unit that ordered the strike. It determined that the bombing was lawful because it killed only a small number of civilians while targeting Islamic State fighters in an attempt to protect coalition forces, the command said. Therefore no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation, or disciplinary action was warranted, it said, adding that the other deaths were accidental.

Both Tate and an Air Force lawyer—who didn't respond to the Times' requests for comment—reached out to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee to share concerns. Chip Unruh, a spokesperson for the panel's chair, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), declined to comment on the incident.

However, Unruh told the Times more broadly that "when tragic errors occur on the battlefield, the United States, as the leader of the free world, has an obligation to be transparent, take responsibility, and do everything we can to learn from and prevent future mistakes."

The "breathtaking cover-up," as Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock called it, sparked criticism of the Defense Department as well as demands for accountability and reforms.

Nahal Toosi, senior foreign affairs correspondent at Politico, asked what the point is of having a Defense Department inspector general "if they a) don't do their job b) never release public reports of what they find in a case like this."

"This is nothing short of criminal conspiracy," said Daniel Mahanty of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. "They bulldozed the strike site and manipulated logs. Who is going to jail for this?"

"The U.S. needs to leave Syria ASAP," declared Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. "Our military presence there makes us LESS safe!"

CodePink reached the same conclusion of the U.S. presence in the Middle East, tweeting Saturday: "Make no mistake. There will be more of these atrocities and more dirty cover-ups if we if stay. We cannot allow that."

Krystal Ball: Pentagon CAUGHT Covering Up MASS ATROCITY To Protect Themselves

US Coverup Of Syria Massacre Shows The Danger Of The Assange Precedent

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

NYT revealed that the US bombed 70 Syrian civilians & covered it up. The Baghuz massacre likely only came to light because of whistleblowers, Pentagon investigator Gene Tate & Air Force lawyer Lt. Col. Dean Korsak, who challenged the cover-up from within. https://t.co/jKDOkOtXyR

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) November 14, 2021

Asked by The Times for a statement, Central Command gave the laughable justification that maybe those dozens of women and children killed in repeated bomb blasts were actually armed enemy combatants:

“This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.“

I mean, how do you even address a defense like that? How do you get around the “Maybe those babies were ISIS fighters” defense?

Reading the report it becomes apparent how much inertia was thrown on attempts to bring the massacre to light and how easy it would have been for those attempts to succumb to the pressure and just give up, which naturally leads one to wonder how many other such incidents never see the light of day because attempts to expose them are successfully ground to a halt. The Times says the Baghuz massacre “would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged,” but it’s clear that that “acknowledged” bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

And it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into getting information like this in front of the public eye, and how important it is to do so, and how tenuous the ability to do so currently is.

Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.

The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.

This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.

Rights Group Says Israel Uses Settler Violence Against Palestinians to Take Over West Bank Land

The Jerusalem-based rights group B'Tselem released a report Sunday that accuses Israel's "​​apartheid regime" of using settler-colonist violence to take control of Palestinian farmland and pastureland, focusing on nearly 11 square miles in the illegally occupied West Bank.

"Settler violence against Palestinians serves as a major informal tool at the hands of the state to take over more and more West Bank land," says the report. "The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly."

B'Tselem released its report—entitled State Business: Israel's misappropriation of land in the West Bank through settler violence—amid a recent rise in anti-Palestinian attacks enabled by what Haaretz called a "hands-off" approach of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

During the first half of 2021, there were at least 416 anti-Palestinian incidents in the West Bank, more than double the figure for the same period the previous year, and more than all of the 363 known incidents from 2019, the Israeli newspaper reported last month.

The new B'Tselem report says that "state violence—official and otherwise—is part and parcel of Israel's apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea."

Israel, which has illegally occupied the West Bank since 1967, "treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones," the report continues. "At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land, and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves."

State Business specifically details how Israel "has misappropriated land from Palestinian shepherding and farming communities in the West Bank through systemic, ongoing violence perpetrated by settlers living near them, with the full support of state authorities." B'Tselem collected testimonies from several Palestinians and, in its report, presents five case studies. ...

B'Tselem spokesperson Dror Sadot told The Times of Israel that the group did not contact Israeli security forces about its findings because "we understood they do nothing about our accusations." The newspaper noted that the IDF did not respond to a request for comment about the report.

In the report, B'Tselem takes direct aim at both the Israeli government and IDF, saying that settler attacks on Palestinians "are not perpetrated by 'bands of outlaws' or 'bad seeds,' nor are they simply 'violent outbursts' or 'unusual incidents."

Instead, such attacks "are a strategy employed by the Israeli apartheid regime, which seeks to advance and complete its misappropriation of more and more Palestinian land," State Business says. "As such, settler violence is a form of government policy, permitted and aided by official state authorities with their active participation."

The Israeli state, the report explains, not only "allows settlers to live, farm, and graze livestock on land from which Palestinians have been violently ejected, and to that end pays for security, paves roads, provides infrastructure, and supports financial enterprises in these outposts through various government ministries," it also "gives settlers free rein to commit violent acts against Palestinians."

"The military does not confront violent settlers," according to the report. "It does not prevent the attacks, and in some cases, soldiers even participate in them. The Israeli law enforcement system does not take action against settlers who harm Palestinians after the fact and whitewashes the few cases it is called upon to address."

US officials say Iran government likely did not order drone attack on Iraqi PM

Iran likely did not greenlight the attack on Iraq's prime minister, current and former U.S. officials told NBC News.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an alleged assassination attempt earlier this month. The prime minister said that he survived explosions from a drone attack, though several of his security guards were injured in the event. ...

Iran, for its part, has denied responsibility.

A senior U.S. official at the Department of Defense as well as former officials told NBC News the attack was likely not sanctioned by Iran, adding that the Iranian government doesn't have much control over militias in the area.

"It's fair to say that Iran does not have as much control over these groups since [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani was killed," a Defense official said, according to NBC.

Son of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi runs for president

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of the sons of the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has confirmed that he is to run for the presidency of Libya in elections due to start on 24 December. He registered his nomination in the southern city of Sebha, the High National Electoral Commission has confirmed.

Video showed him signing his papers, spectacled with a white beard, and with traditional brown robe reminiscent of his father’s clothes. It remains to be seen how much popular support he has in the country, or whether the interest in his candidacy is largely based in western media.

His aides in London have for some time been suggesting that he will stand and insist that anyone who has read his remarks before his father’s death would know that he has different politics from those of his father, who ruled the country until his death at the time of the overthrow of his brutal regime in 2011. ...

It is not known if he will be allowed to stand. The High National Electoral Commission has deleted information saying he was seeking the required 5,000 nominations. His election would also be resisted by Turkey, which has a large number of troops in the country and is refusing to withdraw them despite European pressure. The Gulf states will back Saif, with some claiming that it would take Saudi pressure on France to see him win European backing.

On trial for saving lives: the young refugee activist facing a Greek court

Seán Binder belongs to the band of committed humanitarians who rushed to Greece at the height of the refugee crisis. In other countries, and at other times, his idealism might have been celebrated.

But the 27-year-old law student, who has spent the past two years in London, is a man living in fear. Though forced to abandon volunteering, the German-born Irishman and his Syrian friend, Sarah Mardini, are perhaps the most famous aid workers in Greece, for all the wrong reasons: a criminal investigation has hung over their heads for the past three years.

“There’s nothing criminal, or heroic, about helping people in distress at sea,” he tells the Observer. “Legally and morally, it is the right thing to do.” The activists have been accused of human trafficking, money laundering, fraud and espionage – the last charge based on allegations that, while on Lesbos, the Aegean island at the centre of refugee flows, they monitored coastguard radio channels and vessels to gain advance notification of the location of smugglers’ boats.

In an 86-page report, police also accuse them of being members of a criminal organisation that posed as an NGO with the aim of profiteering by bringing people illegally into Greece. The charges followed a six-month police inquiry: human rights groups championing the pair have called them “farcical”.

Ken Klippenstein: How Saudis Are SPIKING Gas Prices on US

Kim Iversen: FBI TARGETS Project Veritas In Political HIT JOB Reminiscent Of Assange Witch Hunt

Biden’s approval ratings continue to plunge amid crisis over inflation

Aides to Joe Biden took to the political talk shows on Sunday in a bid to talk up the US economic recovery despite confidence in the president continuing to plunge amid a crisis over inflation and supply chain problems. In alarming news for the White House, only 41% of voters approved of Biden in a Washington Post/ABC survey published on Sunday, continuing a steady downward trend in the president’s ratings.

The new numbers, which come despite a victory lap over the passing of a $1.2tn infrastructure package and growing confidence over the prospects for a $1.75tn social spending bill, are a growing worry for Democrats with less than a year to the midterm elections. Only 39% approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, their confidence shaken by inflation surging to 30-year highs and the supply chain crisis threatening the availability of food and other essentials with the holiday season approaching.

Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, and Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, tried to reassure voters that Biden’s policies had the US on the right track, amid warnings of inflation remaining high well into next year. “We will still have an economic recovery that will be strong and support ongoing growth,” Yellen told CBS’s Face the Nation when asked about the likely dropping of paid family leave – forced by moderate Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin – from Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending package.

GREAT RESIGNATION: MILLIONS QUIT For Higher Wages

Kaiser Permanente strike off after deal between unions and healthcare giant

An alliance of unions representing 50,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in California, Oregon and six other states called off strike set for Monday, after reaching a tentative labor deal with the healthcare network.

The Alliance of Health Care Unions and Kaiser Permanente jointly announced the agreement, staving off a potentially crippling strike in which 32,000 employees, most of them in southern California, threatened to walk off the job to protest understaffing and wage cuts for new hires. ...

Agreement on the four-year contract includes annual wage increases, while maintaining health benefits for employees, and new staffing language to continue to protect employees and patients, the statement said.

“Blackness Itself Is the Crime”: Bishop William Barber on Racism in the Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial

Kyle Rittenhouse trial: yelling, tears and surprises reflect divided America

As testimony wrapped up this week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a wary America has realized that the trial of the young man on charges linked to his killing of two racial justice protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has not played out like many people expected. With more than 30 witnesses taking the stand throughout a tumultuous week, a few called on by the state appeared to help Rittenhouse’s legal team with its claim that he was acting in self-defense. That added to notable errors made by prosecutors, as well as a judge with a simultaneously stern and flamboyant courtroom style who has shocked with controversial comments and outbursts.

With closing arguments set to begin on Monday the US has been gripped by the highly contentious case and many people are slowly understanding that the verdict in the trial is far from certain. ... The case has come to symbolize different things for different slices of America. Many see Rittenhouse’s popularity on the right as a racist affront to the protests against police brutality and note how he and other armed white vigilantes were treated very differently by police when compared with protesters. Meanwhile, conservatives have raised huge amounts of money for Rittenhouse’s legal defense and see him as a hero. ...

Schroeder has set time limits of two and a half hours for each side’s closing arguments on Monday, saying: “The brain cannot absorb what the seat cannot endure.”

pic.twitter.com/PvlCs2BVb1

— kismet (@_SemaHernandez_) November 14, 2021

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Indictment of Steele dossier source humiliates its media, intel cheerleaders

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There has been progress at Cop26, but the planet’s fate is still in the balance

This was never going to be a summit that would solve the planet’s woes with a single wave of a diplomatic wand. The best that was expected for this month’s Cop26 meeting in Glasgow was for an agreement to set up a tight timetable that would commit the world to gathering regularly and frequently to hammer out even tighter agreements in future. And at least that provision – yearly revisits to strengthen previous deals – looks as if it going to be approved in some form in Glasgow.

Whether such a provision is enough to head off global temperature rises of only 1.5C later this century remains to be seen. At present, most analysis indicates that we are heading for a greater rise, around 2.4C, a level of heating that could have devastating consequences for low-lying nations – including many island states in the Pacific and Caribbean. They face major sea-level rises triggered by melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic. At the same time, across the globe, storms could worsen, heatwaves increase in number and intensity, and floods and droughts spread – unless we follow up Cop26 with tighter and tighter deals.

Whether we can now avoid breaking the 1.5C limit is therefore an issue that still hangs in the balance after Glasgow. Over the next 12 months nations are now going to be called on to announce individual, tighter emission goals. However, it should be noted at Glasgow, that for the past two weeks delegates have announced, one by one, that their nations could go no further in the deals they were offering.

The inference is straightforward. Unless they change their minds in 2022, there is little chance of nations improving their offers and so avoid a world that heats up by 2C or more. As one observer put it: “The 1.5C goal is alive but only just. Effectively it is taking its last breaths and unless something remarkable happens next year, it will be dead by the next Cop meeting in Egypt.”

Glasgow Pact Slammed for Betraying the Global Poor Who Suffer Most from the Climate Emergency

Cop26 president ‘deeply frustrated’ by India and China over coal

India and China will “have to explain themselves to poor nations” after watering down the Glasgow climate pact, warned the Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, adding that their actions had left him “deeply frustrated”. He told the Guardian: “We are on the way to consigning coal to history. This is an agreement we can build on. But in the case of China and India, they will have to explain to climate-vulnerable countries why they did what they did.”

Boris Johnson, the prime minister, also said the Glasgow deal, even with the weaker wording, “sounded the death knell for coal power”. He told a press conference in Downing Street on Sunday: “The conference marked the beginning of the end for coal. For the first time ever, the conference published a mandate to cut the use of coal power.”

In the closing stages of the Cop26 summit, Sharma told the Guardian he feared that the deal would be lost when China and India – both heavily dependent on coal power – attempted to reopen the text of the deal by objecting to a commitment to “phase out” coal. They proposed instead the slightly weaker “phase down”, which implies that they could still carry on using coal in some way. The commitment, contained in the “cover decision” from the Cop26 summit, does not attach any deadline to the use of coal, but is regarded as significant as it marks the first time such a resolution has been agreed by a UN climate conference.

Sharma accepted the compromise, he said, because “it was my view that otherwise we might end up with no deal at all. We would have lost two years of really hard work, and would have ended up with nothing to show for it for developing countries.”

It is insane how condescending it is for the global elite – the people who brought us to this point, and refuse to do anything about it! – to say, "actually, it's on young people! Good luck!" https://t.co/q5hp8839B7

— Gravel Institute (@GravelInstitute) November 14, 2021

We’re going to need a bigger planet: the problem with fixing the climate with trees

As the United Nations Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow winds down, many world leaders and corporate boards are embracing an increasingly popular idea to solve climate change: trees.

The United Arab Emirates – one of the biggest oil producers in the world – promised to plant 100m mangroves by 2030. India said it aims to plant enough trees to cover a third of its land area with forests. Earlier this month the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, announced a $1bn fund towards planting trees, “revitalizing” grasslands in Africa and restoring landscapes across the US. And at the start of the conference, more than 100 countries pledged to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. “These great teeming ecosystems – these cathedrals of nature – are the lungs of our planet,” Boris Johnson said, exalting the effort.

Trees and forests, which absorb carbon dioxide, are indeed crucial to slowing global heating.

But environmental groups and climate change researchers say there’s a serious problem with overrelying on such pledges: there just isn’t enough land on Earth to plant enough trees to soak up all the carbon that big polluters keep spewing into the atmosphere.

To achieve “net zero” by 2050 using “land-based” carbon removal methods – a category that includes tree-planting, reforestation projects and land management techniques that help lock more carbon in soil – “would require at least 1.6bn hectares of new forests, equivalent to five times the size of India or more than all the farmland on the planet”, a recent analysis by Oxfam found.

As Climate Emergency Worsens, Freak Storm Sends Snow, Scorpion Plague on Egypt's Aswan

How freakish and biblical our climate emergency could become was illustrated this week in the Upper Egyptian city of Aswan, which was struck in November by rolling lightning storms, downpours, snow, and a plague of scorpions. High winds blew the deadly Egyptian black, fat-tailed scorpions from the surrounding desert into the city and into people’s homes. The scorpions killed three persons with their venom and left hundreds sickened, as Egyptian rescue crews tried to distribute the antidote.

The Egyptian fat-tailed or black scorpion is one of the deadliest of its species.

Snow and scorpions and downpours. In November. In Upper Egypt.

The average high in November in Egypt is 86°F. with an average low of 61°F. Not really what you would call snow weather. The average rainfall in November in Aswan is 0.0 millimeters. That is, none, zero, zilch, nada.

Maine’s lobster fishers caught up in fierce fight with conservationists over entangled whales

A fierce fight is being waged in the Gulf of Maine between lobster fishers desperate to maintain their way of life and conservationists who argue that the waters are a vital haven for the threatened North Atlantic right whale. Last month, a federal judge in Maine rejected a federal ban on lobstering in a section of the Gulf of Maine that is meant to protect the whales. The decision reflects the tense battle between a centuries-long lobstering industry – and bedrock of the local economy – that is fighting for its survival and conservation groups, who argue lobster fishing in the area has had detrimental effects on an endangered species who have been injured and killed by the fishing equipment.

On 17 October, District Judge Lance Walker ruled in favor of several lobstering bodies including the Maine Lobstering Union when he rejected a four-month federal ban that would have prevented lobstering from continuing on offshore fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine. Lobster industry advocates argued that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the whales frequented the area. Walker questioned the federal statistical models used to evaluate the risk of whales becoming entangled in lobster fishing equipment. According to him, federal regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration used “markedly thin” modeling to prove the whales’ presence in the thousand-square mile area off the Maine coast. ...

In data released last month, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium revealed that in 2019, the right whale numbered 366, before dropping to 336 in 2020, the lowest number in nearly 20 years. Entanglement is a leading cause of death among right whales. The consortium cited human activities as the driving force behind the species’ extinction, as 86% of identified right whales have been entangled one or more times in fishing gear. ...

Noaa has appealed Walker’s order, arguing that the lobster unions and dealers failed to provide evidence of irreparable harm that the closure of the waters would have on them. It also argued that the lobstering bodies did not provide hard evidence that the closure would result in economic havoc.

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Also of Interest

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

Justice In America: Unfit Judges, Lying Thugs, Screamingly Racist Lawyers and Only So Many Black Pastors Please

Call It The Department Of Aggression, Not ‘Defense’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Ilhan Omar Unveils Resolution to Block 'Unconscionable' Saudi Arms Sale

In Ukraine The U.S. Is Risking War

Julian Assange’s Extradition to the United States Would Result in Serious Human Rights Violations

Too Big to Sail: How a Legal Revolution Clogged Our Ports

Wall Street Is Not Only Rigging Markets, It’s Also Rigging the Outcome of its Private Trials

It could have been worse, but our leaders failed us at Cop26. That’s the truth of it

COP-26: UN Secretary General Blasts Climate Agreement

MSNBC Host Says INFLATION Not A Problem For Regular Folks

Elon Musk Takes SHOTS At Bernie Sanders Over Taxes, "Bernie Is A Taker, Not A Maker"

Ryan Grim: BERNIE Or BUST? Leahy Expected To Retire, Sanders KEY To Filling Vacant VT Senate Seat

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A Little Night Music

Otis "Big Smokey" Smothers - I've Been Drinking Muddy Water

Smokey Smothers - I can't judge nobody

Smokey Smothers - Blind and Dumb Man Blues

Smokey Smothers - Come on rock little girl

Smokey Smothers - Got my eyes on you

Smokey Smothers - Honey I Ain't Teasin'

Boston Blackie & Otis 'Big Smokey' Smothers - ABC Blues

Barrelhouse Chuck & Big Smokey Smothers - Searching For My Baby

Smokey Smothers - Twist With Me Annie

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