Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features "Wizard of the Strings," Roy Smeck. Enjoy!

"Living through another Cuba
It's 1961 again and we are piggy in the middle
While war is polishing his drum and peace plays second fiddle
Russia and America are at each other's throats
But don't you cry
Just on your knees and pray, and while you're
Down there, kiss your arse goodbye"

-- Andy Partridge

News and Opinion

Ukrainians Doubt a Russian Invasion Is Imminent as U.S. Peace Groups Urge Biden to Halt Escalation

The US Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine

So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.

U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

“The Minsk Agreement hasn’t been applied by both sides,” Stegner explained, “and it just doesn’t make any sense to think that forcing up the military possibilities would make it better. Rather, I think it’s the hour of diplomacy.”

By contrast, most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of U.S. military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time?

The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West’s political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia’s 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Viktor Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand. 

The remaining members of parliament voted to form a new government, subverting the political transition and plans for a new election that Yanukovich had publicly agreed to the day before, after meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland.

The U.S. role in managing the coup was exposed by a leaked 2014 audio recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt working on their plans, which included sidelining the European Union (“Fuck the EU,” as Nuland put it) and shoehorning in U.S. protege Arseniy Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) as Prime Minister.

At the end of the call, Ambassador Pyatt told Nuland, “…we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.”

Nuland replied (verbatim), “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note, [Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan's come back to me VFR [very quickly?], saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details?] to stick. So Biden's willing.”

It has never been explained why two senior State Department officials who were plotting a regime change in Ukraine looked to Vice President Biden to “midwife this thing,” instead of to their own boss, Secretary of State John Kerry.

Now that the crisis over Ukraine has blown up with a vengeance during Biden’s first year as president, such unanswered questions about his role in the 2014 coup have become more urgent and troubling. And why did President Biden appoint Nuland to the # 4 position at the State Department, despite (or was it because of?) her critical role in triggering the disintegration of Ukraine and an eight-year-long civil war that has so far killed at least 14,000 people?

Both of Nuland’s hand-picked puppets in Ukraine, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and President Poroshenko, were soon mired in corruption scandals. Yatsenyuk was forced to resign after two years and Poroshenko was outed in a tax evasion scandal revealed in the Panama Papers. Post-coup, war-torn Ukraine remains the poorest country in Europe, and one of the most corrupt.

The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for a civil war against its own people in Eastern Ukraine, so the post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the separatist People’s Republics. The infamous Azov Battalion drew its first recruits from the Right Sector militia and openly displays neo-Nazi symbols, yet it has kept receiving U.S. arms and training, even after Congress explicitly cut off its U.S. funding in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation bill.

In 2015, the Minsk and Normandy negotiations led to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a buffer zone around the separatist-held areas. Ukraine agreed to grant greater autonomy to Donetsk, Luhansk and other ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine, but it has failed to follow through on that.

A federal system, with some powers devolved to individual provinces or regions, could help to resolve the all-or-nothing power struggle between Ukrainian nationalists and Ukraine’s traditional ties to Russia that has dogged its politics since independence in 1991.

But the U.S. and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The U.S. coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of U.S. and NATO military trainers.

Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

In October, Ukraine launched new attacks in Donbass. Russia, which still had about 100,000 troops stationed near Ukraine, responded with new troop movements and military exercises. U.S. officials launched an information warfare campaign to frame Russia’s troop movements as an unprovoked threat to invade Ukraine, concealing their own role in fueling the threatened Ukrainian escalation that Russia is responding to. U.S. propaganda has gone so far as to preemptively dismiss any actual new Ukrainian assault in the East as a Russian false-flag operation.

Underlying all these tensions is NATO’s expansion through Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia, in violation of commitments Western officials made at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO’s refusal to acknowledge that they have violated those commitments or to negotiate a diplomatic resolution with the Russians is a central factor in the breakdown of U.S.-Russian relations.

While U.S. officials and corporate media are scaring the pants off Americans and Europeans with tales of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials are warning that U.S.-Russian relations are close to the breaking point. If the United States and NATO are not prepared to negotiate new disarmament treaties, remove U.S. missiles from countries bordering Russia and dial back NATO expansion, Russian officials say they will have no option but to respond with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

This expression may not refer to an invasion of Ukraine, as most Western commentators have assumed, but to a broader strategy that could include actions that hit much closer to home for Western leaders.

For example, Russia could place short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad (between Lithuania and Poland), within range of European capitals; it could establish military bases in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other friendly countries; and it could deploy submarines armed with hypersonic nuclear missiles to the Western Atlantic, from where they could destroy Washington, D.C. in a matter of minutes.

It has long been a common refrain among American activists to point to the 800 or so U.S. military bases all over the world and ask, “How would Americans like it if Russia or China built military bases in Mexico or Cuba?” Well, we may be about to find out.

Hypersonic nuclear missiles off the U.S. East Coast would put the United States in a similar position to that in which NATO has placed the Russians. China could adopt a similar strategy in the Pacific to respond to U.S. military bases and deployments around its coast.

So the revived Cold War that U.S. officials and corporate media hacks have been mindlessly cheering on could very quickly turn into one in which the United States would find itself just as encircled and endangered as its enemies.

Will the prospect of such a 21st Century Cuban Missile Crisis be enough to bring America’s irresponsible leaders to their senses and back to the negotiating table, to start unwinding the suicidal mess they have blundered into? We certainly hope so.

‘They Said One thing, And Did Another’: Putin on NATO Expansion

“It’s Not About Security”: Belgian Peace Activist Says NATO Has Outlived Its Purpose

Moscow warns Ukraine may ‘destroy itself’ as Russia and US clash at UN

Ukraine will be responsible for its own destruction if it undermines existing peace agreements, a senior Russian diplomat has warned at a UN security council debate on the crisis. The warning from Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, during a combative council session, came on a day of continued high-level diplomacy aimed at defusing the Ukraine crisis. The state department confirmed it had received a response from Moscow to a document the US delivered in Moscow last week, formally outlining areas where the Biden administration believes the two countries could find common ground. US officials would not disclose the contents of the Russian letter, saying they would not “negotiate in public”.

The US secretary of state Tony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, are due to talk on Tuesday, in the wake of the Russian letter and the security council session. Meanwhile on Monday, Vladimir Putin talked to Emmanuel Macron in the second phone conversation between the Russian and French leaders since Friday. “The two leaders agreed to continue contacts by telephone and to promptly consider the possibility of meeting in person,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

Monday’s security council session did nothing to narrow the wide divide between Russia and the west, but did provide a test of diplomatic strength on the world stage. Nebenzya began the meeting by deriding western claims of a planned Russian attack as “hysterics” and blamed Ukraine for not abiding by the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, which were supposed to end the conflict between the Kyiv government and the Russian-backed separatists in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

Nebenzya, Russia’s permanent representative at the UN, also blamed western nations for “actively pumping Ukraine full of weapons” which he said would be used against civilians in the east of the country and were “in violation of the Minsk agreements”. He ended his address to the security council with a warning. “If our western partners push Kyiv to sabotage the Minsk agreements, something that Ukraine is ... willingly doing, then that might end in the absolute worst way for Ukraine,” Nebenzya said. “And not because somebody has destroyed it, but because it would have destroyed itself and Russia has absolutely nothing to do with this.”

Germany Refuses to Send Arms to Ukraine Despite Pressure from U.S. & NATO

Hungarian PM Orbán to visit ally Putin in Moscow

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will travel to Moscow on Tuesday in a visit that has drawn criticism from the country’s political opposition and is being watched nervously in other European capitals.

Orbán, who has developed a reputation as Vladimir Putin’s closest ally inside the European Union, is due to meet the Russian president just as other EU leaders are trying to hash out a coordinated position on Russia’s menacing moves around Ukraine’s borders.

“In this tense situation, it is simply treasonous to go to Moscow,” said a statement released on Sunday and signed by representatives of the six opposition parties that have joined forces to face Orbán in April elections.

Orbán first came to public attention in 1989 when, as a young democracy activist, he called on Soviet troops to leave the country. But during his time as prime minister over the last 12 years he has cultivated warm relations with Putin, at the same time as his relations with Brussels have become ever more fractious.

Nathalie Loiseau, the chair of the European parliament’s subcommittee on security and defence, said it was clear Putin was trying to divide Europe. “I sincerely hope that Viktor Orbán is aware of what is at stake, and that he sticks to the EU’s message of unity,” she said at a press conference late last week, according to Hungarian news outlets.

Putin on US Response to Russian Security Proposals

Liz Truss vows ‘nowhere to hide’ for Putin allies if Ukraine invaded

Liz Truss, the British foreign secretary, has said Russian oligarchs and key supporters of Vladimir Putin will be targeted by UK sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine, but left Britain’s existing much-criticised anti-corruption laws largely untouched.

Insisting that the Russian president’s allies would have nowhere to hide their assets if an invasion went ahead, the Foreign Office, clearly working in lockstep with the US, threatened to seize the wealth of Putin’s inner political circle and business backers.

The Biden administration has drawn up a list of potential sanctions targets among Russian oligarchs and their families, who Washington deems to be in the Kremlin’s orbit or “complicit in the Kremlin’s destabilising behaviour,” according to a US official quoted by Reuters news agency.

“Putin’s cronies will no longer be able to use their spouses or other family members as proxies to evade sanctions”, the official said. “Sanctions would cut them off from the international financial system and ensure that they and their family members will no longer be able to enjoy the perks of parking their money in the west and attending elite western universities.”

US officials would not provide names, but said sanctions targets were vulnerable because of their investments and residencies in the west.

The United States to Russia: Do as We Say, Not as We Do

Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

Aiding and abetting a potentially catastrophic—and I do mean catastrophic—confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers are lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the media they echo and vice versa, members of Congress, including highly touted progressives, can scarcely manage more than vague comments that they want diplomacy rather than war. ...

Are they bowing to public opinion? Not really. It’s much more like they’re cowering to avoid being attacked by hawkish media and militaristic political forces.

On Friday, the American Prospect reported: “A new Data for Progress poll shared exclusively with the Prospect finds that the majority of Americans favor diplomacy with Russia over sanctions or going to war for Ukrainian sovereignty. Most Americans are not particularly animated about the escalating conflict in Eastern Europe, the poll shows, despite round-the-clock media coverage. When asked, 71 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans said they support the U.S. striking a diplomatic deal with Russia. They agreed that in the effort to de-escalate tensions and avoid war, the U.S. should be prepared to make concessions.”

The magazine’s reporting provides a portrait of leading congressional progressives who can’t bring themselves to directly challenge fellow Democrat Joe Biden’s escalation of the current highly dangerous conflict, as he sends still more large shipments of weaponry to Ukraine with a new batch worth $200 million while deploying 8,500 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

Asked about the issue of prospective Ukraine membership in NATO sometime in the future, Rep. Ro Khanna treated the situation as a test of superpower wills or game of chicken, saying: “I would not be blackmailed by Putin in this situation.”

Overall, the American Prospect ferreted out routine refusal of progressive icons in Congress to impede the spiraling crisis:

• “The 41 co-sponsors of a sanctions package moving through the Senate include progressive heavyweights like Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. In a press release on the bill, Markey said the legislation was designed to ‘work in concert with the actions the Biden administration has already taken to demonstrate that we will continue to support Ukraine and its sovereignty.’”
• “Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put out a statement on Wednesday with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). ‘Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy,’ the representatives said. The statement raises concerns over ‘sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions.’ But pressed on what, exactly, the United States should be prepared to offer in diplomatic talks, a spokesperson for Lee did not respond.”
• “Reached by the Prospect, spokespeople for leading progressives, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), declined to comment on questions including whether the U.S. should commit not to bring Ukraine into NATO and whether it should provide direct military aid to Ukraine. Sanders declined to weigh in. In a statement, Warren said, ‘The United States must use appropriate economic, diplomatic, and political tools to de-escalate this situation.’”
• “Spokespeople for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who have previously criticized American interventionism in the Middle East, did not respond to questions from the Prospect, including ones on sanctions policy and NATO commitments.”

Progressives in Congress have yet to say that Biden should stop escalating the Ukraine conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. Instead, we hear easy pleas for diplomacy and, at best, mildly worded “significant concerns” about the president’s new batch of arms shipments and troop deployments to the region. The evasive rhetoric amounts to pretending that the president isn’t doing what he’s actually doing as he ratchets up the tensions and the horrendous risks.

All this can be summed up in five words: Extremely. Irresponsible. And. Extremely. Dangerous.

Israel attempted to assassinate Soleimani in 2018: ex-military chief

The Israeli army launched a large-scale operation in 2018 to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, but was unsuccessful, former Israel military Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot has revealed in an interview with Israeli publication Maariv.

Israel tried to kill the Iranian commander in 'Operation House of Cards’, when 100 Iranian sites in Syria were targeted, following the firing of rockets at the Golan Heights, Eisenkot said.

"We decided that if he was in a command center or operations room or somewhere in the area, we would take him out. And we had approval for that. But we could not close the circle on him," Eisenkot told Maariv.

A number of Iranian targets in Syria were hit but Soleimani survived the attack. He was later killed in 2020 in a US drone strike on Baghdad.

Starbucks Union Sweeps The Nation

Workers at Over 50 Starbucks Seeking Unions

What began last month with a promising trickle has turned into a torrent as workers in at least 16 Starbucks stores on Monday moved to unionize.

Starbucks Workers United—which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—announced Monday that workers at 16 of the coffee chain's locations filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). ...

According to More Perfect Union, workers at more than 50 Starbucks stores in 19 states have now moved to unionize following the successful unionization of employees at two Buffalo, New York-area stores. ...

Speaking at a rally in support of the Starbucks workers last week, Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant (Socialist Alternative-District 3)—who is donating $10,000 from her Solidarity Fund to the employees' organizing effort—said that "it is extremely critical that we build on the success of Buffalo for a nationwide almighty battle to unionize and follow that up with a class-struggle-based approach to winning contracts."

Krystal Ball: GUTLESS California Dems BRIBED to Kill HealthCare Bill

California Single-Payer Bill Withdrawn

Minutes before A.B. 1400—the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act—was scheduled for a floor vote in the California State Assembly, co-author Ash Kalra (D-27) pulled the measure from consideration. Monday was the last day for the bill on the legislative calendar.

In a statement, California Nurses Association (CNA)—the bill's sponsor—said: "Today, elected leaders in California had the opportunity to put patients first and set an example for the whole country by passing A.B. 1400... in the state Assembly. Instead, Assembly Member Ash Kalra, the main author of the bill, chose not to hold a vote on this bill at all, providing cover for those who would have been forced to go on the record about where they stand on guaranteed healthcare for all people in California."

The statement continued:

Nurses condemn this failure by elected representatives to put patients above profits, especially during the worst surge of Covid-19 yet, at a time when it's more clear than ever before that healthcare must be a right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it.

Nurses are especially outraged that Kalra chose to just give up on patients across the state. Nurses never give up on our patients, and we will keep fighting with our allies in the grassroots movement for CalCare until all people in California can get the care they need, regardless of ability to pay.

Kalra issued a statement explaining that "it became clear that we did not have the votes necessary for passage and I decided the best course of action is to not put A.B. 1400 for a vote today."

While Lobbying to Kill Build Back Better, Pharma Hikes Costs of 866 Drugs

Major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. hiked the prices of nearly 870 prescription medications during the first month of the new year as lock-step Republicans and right-wing Democrats—flush with cash from drugmakers—continue to block legislation aimed at reining in the industry.

Through January 20 of this year, according to an analysis released Sunday by Rx Savings Solutions, drugmakers raised the costs of 866 of their products in the U.S. by an average of 6.6%.

"Over the same period last year, drugmakers raised prices by an average of 4.5% on 893 drugs," observed the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the new study.

"There were some large price increases. AmerisourceBergen Corp.'s Blue Point Laboratories, a seller of generic drugs, more than doubled the price of the cancer chemotherapy drug cisplatin to $30," the Journal noted. Exelan Pharmaceuticals Inc. raised the price of its generic lisinopril to treat high blood pressure by 536% to a range of $6.17 to $549.85, depending on the dosage and package size."

The latest data on Big Pharma's 2022 price hikes drew the attention of members of Congress who are working—in the face of a record-shattering industry lobbying blitz—to pass legislation to curb sky-high drug costs, a problem that's far worse in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries.

"There is something profoundly wrong in America when a company like Exelan can raise the price of a generic drug to treat high blood pressure (lisinopril) by 536% to as much as $550," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee. "How many more Americans have to die and suffer before Congress has the guts to end this greed?"

Federal judge rejects plea deal for Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers

A federal judge has rejected a plea deal that would have averted a hate crimes trial for two of the men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased by three white men and fatally shot in a Georgia neighborhood while he was jogging two years ago.

US District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood issued her decision on the proposed deal for Travis McMichael, 36, on Monday, after Arbery’s family reacted furiously to the agreements reached with McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael. Though her decision concerned the younger McMichael, his father had been offered the same deal.

The proposed agreements concern a federal hate crimes trial due to start next month, and were filed late Sunday in US district court in southern Georgia. There was no mention of a deal with the McMichaels’ co-defendant, William “Roddie” Bryan. All three men were sentenced to life in prison on 7 January after they were found guilty of murder following a trial last fall. ...

As part of the deal, Travis McMichael had agreed to plead guilty, admitting for the first time that he was motivated by race when he attacked Arbery. The agreement would have allowed McMichael to spend 30 years in federal prison, rather than in state prison, where conditions are tougher.

After rejecting the agreement, the judge gave Travis McMichael until Friday to decide whether to move ahead with a guilty plea. She acknowledged Greg McMichael had been offered the same deal and also gave him until Friday to make a decision.

Holocaust book Maus hits bestseller list after Tennessee school board ban

The Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has become a bestseller on Amazon, after a Tennessee school board banned it. Last week, according to meeting minutes, 10 school board members in McMinn county agreed to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing “rough, objectionable language” and sketches of naked women they deemed unsuitable for 13-year-old students.

By the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman and first published in 1986, Maus describes the experiences of Spiegelman’s parents in Nazi concentration camps and his mother’s suicide. The book depicts Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats.

“We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” McMinn county board member Tony Allman said, adding in reference to the murder of 6 million Jewish people in the second world war: “I am not denying it was horrible, brutal and cruel. It shows people hanging,” he said. “It shows them killing kids. Why does the education system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.”

Another board member, Mike Cochran, said: “If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.” ...

As news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. In history, it ranked first. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.

Beach in Thailand declared disaster area after oil pipeline leak

A beach in eastern Thailand has been declared a disaster area as oil leaking from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Thailand continues to wash ashore and blacken the sand.

The leak, from a pipeline owned by Star Petroleum Refining, started late on Tuesday and was brought under control a day later after spilling an estimated 50,000 litres (11,000 gallons) of oil into the ocean about 12 miles (20km) from the country’s industrialised eastern seaboard.

Some of the oil reached the shoreline at Mae Ramphueng beach in Rayong province late on Friday after spreading over 18 sq miles (47 sq km) of sea in the gulf.

The Thai navy is working with the company to contain the leak and said the main oil mass was still offshore, with only a small amount washing up on at least two spots along the seven-mile beach.

Global count estimates Earth has 73,000 tree species – 14% more than reported

There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species.

Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38m trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them. The study found there are about 14% more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis.

“It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests,” said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US. “Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece.”

Despite being among the largest and most widespread organisms, there are still thousands of trees to be discovered, with 40% of unknown species believed to be in South America, according to the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Some of these undocumented species would probably have been known to indigenous communities but some, in the most inaccessible regions, may have never been found before.

The Amazon basin appears to have the highest diversity of tree species at local level, with 200 tree species a hectare. Researchers believe this could be because it is a warm, wet environment suited to supporting a wider range of species. To estimate the number of unknown species, scientists used the Good-Turing frequency estimation, which was created by the codebreaker Alan Turing and his assistant Irving Good when trying to crack German codes for the Enigma machine during the second world war.

Also of Interest

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

Let’s Back Up A Sec And Ask Why Free Speech Actually Matters

NATO Chief: No Plan to Deploy Combat Troops to Ukraine If Russia Invades

Saudis Want to End Yemen War ‘With Dignity’

Biden's Yemen betrayal: US continues backing Saudi-led war

New Gates Foundation trustee led plot to overthrow Zimbabwean leader alongside US gov’t

Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

The Pipeline Trap

So Much for Transparency: Navy Unwilling To Release Report on Oahu, Hawaii Red Hill Contamination of Aquifer

Where to build in a state on fire? California housing projects face growing challenges

Ruling on Rooftop Solar Called a 'Game-Changer' for Clean Energy

EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT: Maddow Takes 'Hiatus' From MSNBC

Rogan SMEARED As Racist As CNN Goes To War

Ukraine: Boris Johnson meets with Volodymyr Zelensky

Ryan Grim: In NEW Video, Joe Rogan Thanks “The Haters” For Checking Him, Invites Alt Views On Show

A Little Night Music

Roy Smeck - Tiger Rag

Roy Smeck - Twelfth Street Rag

Roy Smeck – Bye Bye Blues

Roy Smeck & Art Kahn – Itchin' Fingers

Roy Smeck - Ukulele Bounce

Roy Smeck With Martha Ray - How'm I Doin'/Dinah

Roy Smeck - Laughing Rag

King Oliver & His Orchestra (w Roy Smeck) - Frankie And Johnny

Roy Smeck & Art Kahn - The Ghost of the Banjo

Roy Smeck - Little Grass Shack