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"The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either."

-- Aristotle

News and Opinion

From Mosul to Raqqa to Mariupol—Killing Civilians Is a Crime

Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than has so far disfigured Ukraine.

As we recently reported, the U.S. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone. Senior U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that the first 24 days of Russia's bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.

The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria bombarded those countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, the heaviest bombing anywhere in decades. U.S. military officers told Amnesty International that the U.S. assault on Raqqa in Syria was also the heaviest artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War.

Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.

Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A UN assessment mission reported that 70-80% of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent.

The Pentagon promised to review its policies on civilian casualties in the wake of these massacres, and commissioned the Rand Corporation to conduct a study titled, "Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications For Future Conflicts," which has now been made public.

Even as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the premise of the Rand Corp study is that U.S. forces will continue to wage wars that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas, and that they must therefore try to understand how they can do so without killing quite so many civilians.

The study runs over 100 pages, but it never comes to grips with the central problem, which is the inevitably devastating and deadly impacts of firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas like Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Sanaa in Yemen or Gaza in Palestine.

The development of "precision weapons" has demonstrably failed to prevent these massacres. The United States unveiled its new "smart bombs" during the First Gulf War in 1990-1991. But they in fact comprised only 7% of the 88,000 tons of bombs it dropped on Iraq, reducing "a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society" to "a pre-industrial age nation" according to a UN survey.

Instead of publishing actual data on the accuracy of these weapons, the Pentagon has maintained a sophisticated propaganda campaign to convey the impression that they are 100% accurate and can strike a target like a house or apartment building without harming civilians in the surrounding area.

However, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of an arms trade journal that reviews the performance of air-launched weapons, estimated that 20 to 25% of U.S. "precision" weapons missed their targets.

Even when they do hit their target, these weapons do not perform like space weapons in a video game. The most commonly used bombs in the U.S. arsenal are 500 lb bombs, with an explosive charge of 89 kilos of Tritonal. According to UN safety data, the blast alone from that explosive charge is 100% lethal up to a radius of 10 meters, and will break every window within 100 meters.

That is just the blast effect. Deaths and horrific injuries are also caused by collapsing buildings and flying shrapnel and debris - concrete, metal, glass, wood etc.

A strike is considered accurate if it lands within a "circular error probable," usually 10 meters around the object being targeted. So in an urban area, if you take into account the "circular error probable," the blast radius, flying debris and collapsing buildings, even a strike assessed as "accurate" is very likely to kill and injure civilians.

U.S. officials draw a moral distinction between this "unintentional" killing and the "deliberate" killing of civilians by terrorists. But the late historian Howard Zinn challenged this distinction in a letter to the New York Times in 2007. He wrote,

"These words are misleading because they assume an action is either 'deliberate' or 'unintentional.' There is something in between, for which the word is 'inevitable.' If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not 'intentional.'

Does that difference exonerate you morally? The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time."

Americans are rightfully horrified when they see civilians killed by Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but they are generally not quite so horrified, and more likely to accept official justifications, when they hear that civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Gaza. The Western corporate media play a key role in this, by showing us corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, but shielding us from equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces.

While Western leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for war crimes, they have raised no such clamor to prosecute U.S. officials. Yet during the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) documented persistent and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions by U.S. forces, including of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention that protects civilians from the impacts of war and military occupation.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups documented systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, including cases in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners to death.

Although torture was approved by U.S. officials all the way up to the White House, no officer above the rank of major was ever held accountable for a torture death in Afghanistan or Iraq. The harshest punishment handed down for torturing a prisoner to death was a five-month jail sentence, although that is a capital offense under the U.S. War Crimes Act. 

In a 2007 human rights report that described widespread killing of civilians by U.S. occupation forces, UNAMI wrote, "Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area."

The report demanded "that all credible allegations of unlawful killings be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force."

Instead of investigating, the U.S. has actively covered up its war crimes. A tragic example is the 2019 massacre in the Syrian town of Baghuz, where a special U.S. military operations unit dropped massive bombs on a group of mainly women and children, killing about 70. The military not only failed to acknowledge the botched attack but even bulldozed the blast site to cover it up. Only after a New York Times exposé years later did the military even admit that the strike took place.

So it is ironic to hear President Biden call for President Putin to face a war crimes trial, when the United States covers up its own crimes, fails to hold its own senior officials accountable for war crimes and still rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2020, Donald Trump went so far as to impose U.S. sanctions on the most senior ICC prosecutors for investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.

The Rand study repeatedly claims that U.S. forces have "a deeply ingrained commitment to the law of war." But the destruction of Mosul, Raqqa and other cities and the history of U.S. disdain for the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and international courts tell a very different story.

We agree with the Rand report's conclusion that, "DoD's weak institutional learning for civilian harm issues meant that past lessons went unheeded, increasing the risks to civilians in Raqqa." However, we take issue with the study's failure to recognize that many of the glaring contradictions it documents are consequences of the fundamentally criminal nature of this entire operation, under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the existing laws of war.

We reject the whole premise of this study, that U.S. forces should continue to conduct urban bombardments that inevitably kill thousands of civilians, and must therefore learn from this experience so that they will kill and maim fewer civilians the next time they destroy a city like Raqqa or Mosul.

The ugly truth behind these U.S. massacres is that the impunity senior U.S. military and civilian officials have enjoyed for past war crimes encouraged them to believe they could get away with bombing cities in Iraq and Syria to rubble, inevitably killing tens of thousands of civilians.

They have so far been proven right, but U.S. contempt for international law and the failure of the global community to hold the United States to account are destroying the very "rules-based order" of international law that U.S. and Western leaders claim to cherish.

As we call urgently for a ceasefire, for peace and for accountability for war crimes in Ukraine, we should say "Never Again!" to the bombardment of cities and civilian areas, whether they are in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or anywhere else, and whether the aggressor is Russia, the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia.

And we should never forget that the supreme war crime is war itself, the crime of aggression, because, as the judges declared at Nuremberg, it "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." It is easy to point fingers at others, but we will not stop war until we force our own leaders to live up to the principle spelled out by Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson:

"If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

Why The West's Narrative On Russia-Ukraine ISN'T LANDING With The Rest Of The World: Dr. Parsi

New Reporting Details Corporate Media's War Industry Pundits

U.S. corporate media outlets are saturated with pundits—many of them ex-military or national security officials—who take to the airwaves to promote hawkish policies and actions in Ukraine and elsewhere without disclosing their own ties to the arms industry, according to a report published Tuesday.

Analyzing punditry across a range of outlets including CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News, Aditi Ramaswami and Andrew Perez at The Lever found that the networks failed to inform viewers that many of their expert guests who called for supplying Ukraine with more weapons to defend against Russia's invasion were currently employed by the weapons industry or its advocates.

"I think it's awesome you can be a consultant for a company that manufactures certain missiles and go on NBC or CNN and say how important it is that we get more of those missiles shipped out, with no one saying [by the way], this guy works for the missile company," Perez sardonically quipped in a tweet promoting the report. 

The revolving door between the national security, private, and media sectors has become a prominent feature of the military-industrial complex. Perez and Ramaswami note that the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that 20 of the 22 featured American guests appearing on corporate networks' Sunday politics programs in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year had ties to the arms industry or its boosters.

Unsurprisingly, many of these experts argued against ending the longest war in U.S. history. Few, if any, disclosed their conflicts of interest.

"This type of revolving-door behavior should be prohibited for military officials to serve in a private capacity representing military contractors," Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Lever. "If not prohibited, it should be disclosed to everyone so when they're going on television trying to affect [President Joe] Biden's policy on whatever war they have in mind, they ought to be straightforward."

However, as Perez and Ramaswami point out, "the Ukraine crisis and the potential for greater conflict have been a goldmine for defense contractors, sending stocks skyrocketing and prompting sharp increases in defense spending."

FAIR editor Jim Naureckas told The Lever that "the people who have the most interest in influencing the direction of the coverage are weapons-makers. They have the most direct financial stake in the way we cover issues of war and peace. Unfortunately, they are interested in more war and less peace."

Perez and Ramaswami write:

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, U.S. defense stocks in leading companies like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin have surged, and they are expected to continue rising in the coming months. And in the wake of Russia's invasion, President Biden signed into law a spending package that directs a record-breaking $782 billion towards defense—almost $30 billion above his initial request.

The bill signed by the president authorizes $6.5 billion in military aid for Eastern European countries, including $3.5 billion in new weapons for Ukraine. This is in addition to the $1 billion already spent on arming Ukrainian forces with weaponry such as Javelin anti-tank missiles made by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon's Stinger surface-to-air missiles.

Various former U.S. officials appearing on corporate media news programs have ties to these and other companies or groups representing their interests. Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, and White House chief of staff, regularly appears as a television guest expert. On CNN last week, he asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin only understands "force" and that "the United States has to provide whatever weapons are necessary to the Ukrainians, so that they can hit back, and hit back now."

Neither CNN nor Panetta disclosed that he is a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, a defense industry consulting company whose clients have reportedly included Raytheon.

Another Beacon Global Strategies employee appearing regularly on network and cable news programs is former Pentagon and CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash, who went on NBC's "Meet the Press" days after Putin's invasion and called for arming Ukrainian forces so they could "shoot Russian aircraft out of the sky, open up those tanks with can openers, like the Javelins, and kill Russians."

Beacon advisory board member and retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis has frequently appeared on MSNBC, where he once said the solution in Ukraine is to "flood the zone" with " troops, tanks, missile systems, warships, all the above, in order to send a signal to Vladimir Putin."

"What we ought to do is give the Ukrainians the ability to create a no-fly zone," he said. "More Stingers, more missiles that can go higher than Stingers."

FAIR's Naureckas told The Lever that "everyone involved is aware of the transaction that is going on. Journalists know this as well, but you can't admit it because that would spoil the grift if you said, 'Here's a person who's funded by the weapons industry to tell you about this crisis.'"

"It should be the reporter's instinct to explain the agenda of the people they are quoting," he added, "but because this is such an integral part of what is done in the journalism system, you can't give away the game."

Twitter CENSORING Ukraine War Coverage

Networks covered the war in Ukraine more than the US invasion of Iraq

The evening news programs of the three dominant U.S. television networks devoted more coverage to the war in Ukraine last month than in any other month during all wars, including those in which the U.S. military was directly engaged, since the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, according to the authoritative Tyndall Report. The only exception was the last war in which U.S. forces participated in Europe, the 1999 Kosovo campaign.

Combined, the three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — devoted 562 minutes to the first full month of the war in Ukraine. That was more time than in the first month of the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 (240 mins), its intervention in Somalia in 1992 (423 mins), and even the first month of its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 (306 minutes), according to a commentary published Thursday by Andrew Tyndall, who has monitored and coded the three networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988.

“Astonishingly, the two peak months of coverage of the [2003] Iraq war each saw less saturated coverage than last month in Ukraine (414 minutes in March of 2003 and 455 minutes in April),” he wrote. “…The only three months of war coverage in the last 35 years that have been more intensive than last month were Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 (1,208 minutes) and his subsequent removal in January and February 1991 (1,177 and 1,033 minutes respectively).” That was at a time, however, when the network evening news devoted about a third more time to foreign news than it has in recent years when international news coverage has fallen to all-time lows.

Last month’s coverage of Ukraine even eclipsed by a wide margin the three networks’ coverage of the chaotic end of Washington’s 20-year war in Afghanistan last summer. Last August, the month with the most intense coverage, the three networks devoted a total of 345 minutes (or only about 60 percent of last month’s total Ukraine coverage) to the war’s abrupt denouement. Once U.S. forces had fully withdrawn by August 31, network coverage of Afghanistan fell precipitously to a total of just 103 minutes between September 1 and the end of year, despite the desperation of the country’s humanitarian situation that followed (and persists).

While the major cable news networks often receive more public attention, the evening news shows of ABC, CBS, and NBC collectively remain the single most important source of international news in the United States.

Key Russian railway bridge destroyed in Belgorod near border with Ukraine

A key Russian railway bridge has been damaged in the border region with Ukraine in a potential act of sabotage – as Russia relies on its railroads to shift its attacking forces in preparation for a massive assault on eastern Ukraine.

Photographs from the bridge in Russia’s Belgorod region showed that a section of rail had been forced upward, possibly due to an explosion. The photographs, as well as news of the incident, were first published on Tuesday by the local Russian governor and local media.

“There are no casualties,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote in an online statement. “Only the railway track is destroyed … I will inform you about the reasons later.” ...

Ukraine has not confirmed if it stands behind the attack on the railway bridge, which commentators said would make sense as a cross-border raid meant to slow Russia’s shifting of heavy artillery and other military vehicles needed to prepare for an assault in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Russia relies heavily on rail to move its military equipment. The bridge sits just four miles from the border on a rail line that goes south into Ukraine and lies on a supply line between Russia and the territory it holds close to the city of Izyum near the Donbas.

Kim Iversen: Bucha Was A BRITISH 'Special Op’ & Ukraine Peace Talks Are DEAD, According To Putin

NATO Secretary-general calls for “transformation” of NATO into a fighting force against Russia and China

As the United States, the UK and other NATO powers surge weapons into Ukraine, the NATO alliance is being transformed into a fighting force capable of directly waging wars with Russia and China. Using the war between Russia and Ukraine as a pretext, NATO has already mobilized its 40,000-strong rapid response force against Russia. But this is only the beginning of a far broader transformation of the alliance in preparation for what US military planners have called “great-power conflict.” In an interview with the Telegraph, NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said this transformation aims “to move from tripwire deterrence to something which is more about deterrence by denial or defence. This is already in process. We have to ensure that we continue to be able, in a more dangerous world, to protect and defend all Nato allies.”

Stoltenberg made clear that while the immediate pretext for the “transformation” of NATO is the war in Ukraine, China is as much a target as Russia. “We are finalizing the work on the new strategic concept that will be agreed at the Nato summit in June…And there, I expect China to be an important part.” China, he claimed, is investing heavily in “new modern nuclear capabilities, long-range missiles that can reach all Nato territory…It is also of concern that we see that Russia and China are working more and more closely together.” ...

Meanwhile, the true extent of US and NATO involvement in the conflict is becoming clear. Georges Malbrunot, the senior international correspondent of Le Figaro, wrote on Twitter, “‘Elite SAS special forces units have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as have the American Deltas,’ confides a French intelligence source.” Malbrunot said that he recently traveled to Ukraine alongside two foreign fighters. He told a French news program, “I had the surprise, and so did they, to discover that to enter the Ukrainian army well, it’s the Americans who are in charge.” He said that the American footprint was “significant.”

Neocon regime change of Imran Khan puts world leaders on notice

US Suddenly Pretends To Care About Rights Abuses In India

The United States is suddenly very concerned about human rights violations in India, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling the press on Monday that “we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials.”

While it is true that India’s right-wing government is guilty of human rights abuses and has been for years, it is also true that the US State Department does not actually care about human rights abuses.

A leaked State Department memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.

“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote. “We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

And it begins...

India was a "natural ally" as long as it did what the US wanted. But the minute the regime doesn't get what it wants, it is monitoring a "rise" in human rights abuses in India.

They're so transparent it's almost funny... pic.twitter.com/1DUv6gK6jq

— Maitreya Bhakal (@MaitreyaBhakal) April 12, 2022

No, the US State Department does not care about human rights abuses. Blinken’s remarks are just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow.

In an article last week titled “India to Face Significant Cost If Aligned With Russia, U.S. Says,” Bloomberg reported the following:

President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser said the administration has warned India against aligning itself with Russia, and that U.S. officials have been “disappointed” with some of New Delhi’s reaction to the Ukraine invasion.

“There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and India’s decisions, in the context of the invasion,” the director of the White House National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told reporters at a breakfast Wednesday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

The U.S. has told India that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term,” he said.

This new tone is a significant shift from the jovial relations between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Trump administration, or even between Modi and the Biden administration as recently as last year. Just yesterday Biden made it clear in a call with Modi that it would be against India’s interests to increase its oil imports from Russia. Reuters reports that Biden “told Modi India’s position in the world would not be enhanced by relying on Russian energy sources,” according to US officials.

“The president conveyed very clearly that it is not in their interest to increase that,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said when asked about India’s imports of Russian oil.

We can expect to see more and more feigned concern about Indian human rights abuses from the US government if these increasingly unsubtle messages are disobeyed, with destructive acts of economic sabotage soon to follow.

The US empire is correct to be concerned about a potential future Indian pivot out of Washington’s sphere of influence. While it has succeeded thus far in weaponizing New Delhi in its grand chessboard maneuverings against China, the world’s two most populous nations uniting with the Russian nuclear superpower in the emerging bloc of nations who are rejecting absorption into the US-centralized power structure would be disastrous for the empire.

But the fact that the US sees it as its business who foreign nations choose to align with reveals its true dynamic on the world stage, and makes a mockery of the lip service this empire has been paying to the importance of respecting national sovereignty in its narrative management about Ukraine. The US is the single most tyrannical regime on earth, using whatever amount of violence, coercion and bullying are necessary in its efforts to bring the entire planet under its lasting control.

This empire truly believes it has a right to rule the world, and that no nation has a right to refuse it. The re-emergence of a true multipolar world is crashing headlong into an imperial doctrine that demands securing unipolar domination at all cost, and it’s getting very ugly very fast.

Ukraine announces arrest of Putin ally in ‘lightning-fast’ operation

Ukrainian security services have announced the arrest of Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine, the oligarch and opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk, in what they called a “lightning-fast and dangerous” operation.

The capture of Medvedchuk, who escaped house arrest on treason charges days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was first announced by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who posted a picture of the detainee on social media, dishevelled, in handcuffs and dressed in army fatigues with a Ukrainian flag patch. ...

Medvedchuk grew rich from Russian oil interests and his proximity to the Kremlin.

Putin is godfather to his youngest daughter, and Medvedchuk’s coalition, Opposition Platform – For Life, pursued a pro-Moscow agenda until he was charged with treason in May 2021, accused of selling military secrets to Russia and exploiting the natural resources of Crimea under Russian occupation. He denied wrongdoing and was under house arrest before fleeing during the first days of the invasion. ...

In January, the US put Medvedchuk and three other Moscow-backed Ukrainian politicians under sanctions, accusing them of involvement in a plot to set up a collaborator government in the wake of the Russian invasion. Zelenskiy also suspended Medvedchuk’s party – Ukraine’s largest opposition grouping – and several other smaller political parties tied to Moscow in March.

Ukraine snubs German president over past ‘close ties to Russia’

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has rejected a request by the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to visit Kyiv along with other European politicians on Wednesday.

Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and erstwhile ally of the ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, is on a state visit in Poland, where he is discussing the implications of the Russian war in Ukraine with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda.

According a report in the German newspaper Bild, Steinmeier had planned to travel to Kyiv with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland on Wednesday. However, his request for a meeting was rejected by Zelenskiy, with Bild citing the reason as the German Social Democrat’s previously close ties to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his history as an advocate of close Russian-German economic ties.

“We all here know Steinmeier’s close ties to Russia, which have also been marked by the Steinmeier formula,” an anonymous Ukrainian diplomat told Bild. “He is currently not welcome in Kyiv. We will see whether that will change one day.”

The “Steinmeier formula” was a proposal made by the then foreign minister in 2016 with the intention of breaking a deadlock in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia over peace in eastern Ukraine. The proposal, a simplified version of the Minsk agreements, called for elections in the separatist-held territories under Ukrainian legislation, supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The attempt failed after neither Moscow nor Kyiv implemented the Minsk agreement.

Quarter of a billion people now face extreme poverty, warns Oxfam

The rising price of food caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increased energy costs could push a quarter of a billion more people into extreme poverty, Oxfam has warned. The charity said these new challenges had piled on to the economic crises created by Covid, and called for urgent international action, including cancelling debt repayments for poorer countries.

“Without immediate radical action, we could be witnessing the most profound collapse of humanity into extreme poverty and suffering in memory,” said Oxfam’s international executive director, Gabriela Bucher.

Oxfam’s briefing, released on Tuesday ahead of World Bank and IMF spring meetings next week, said indebted governments could be forced to cut public spending to meet the rising cost of importing fuel and food.

Oxfam said cancelling debt repayments for this year and next could free up $30bn (£23bn) for dozens of the countries facing the biggest debts.

Prices Soar as Corporate Profiteers & Speculators Drive Inflation; It Hurts the Developing World

US inflation climbed to 8.5% in March, highest rate since 1981

Prices in the US climbed at their highest rates since 1981, rising 8.5% over the year to the end of March as the war in Ukraine drove up energy costs for Americans, the labor department announced on Tuesday. The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which measures the prices of a basket of goods and services – comes after the index rose by 7.9% in the year through February, the fastest pace of annual inflation in 40 years. ...

The price increases are broad – with the cost of rent, gas and food causing particular hardship for lower income Americans and represent a major blow to the Biden administration, already facing tough odds of retaining control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

Soaring gas prices were the main driver of the rise. The gasoline index rose 18.3% in March and accounted for over half of all the items’ monthly increase. Gas prices have begun to fall, in a sign that some economists have argued may suggest inflation has reached its peak.

The food index rose 1% in March compared with February, and is up 8.8% compared with the prior 12 months. Canned fruit and vegetable prices rose 3.8% from February to March, rice prices rose 3.2%, potatoes 3.2% and ground beef 2.1%.

200 Starbucks & Counting: Barista Jaz Brisack Says Union Busting Can't Stop Worker Solidarity

'Staggering' Analysis Finds Amazon's Injury Rate Rose 20% Last Year

As the United States' unionization movement elevates criticism of Amazon's labor conditions, an analysis published Tuesday exposed a 20% rise in injuries among company warehouse workers last year while a pandemic-related increase in online shopping led the e-commerce giant's profits to soar.

The report—entitled The Injury Machine: How Amazon's Production System Hurts Workers—was published by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a democratic coalition that includes the Communications Workers of America, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Service Employees International Union, and United Farmworkers of America.

"Amazon's earnings in the first 12 months of the pandemic exceeded the previous three years combined," the report states, noting the company's profits jumped from $21.3 billion in 2020 to $33.4 billion in 2021.

"While shareholders and executives reaped the benefits of the company's soaring stock price, Amazon's aggressive growth has come at a high cost for its workers," the document adds. "Amazon's high-pressure operations keep resulting in worker injuries in unprecedented numbers, and the situation is worsening."

Based on data Amazon submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, SOC found that "in 2021, there were 38,334 total recordable injuries—defined as those requiring medical treatment beyond first aid or requiring time off a worker's regular job—at Amazon facilities."

"The vast majority of these were serious: 34,001, or 89%, of the injuries were categorized as either light duty or lost time injuries—that is, injuries where workers were hurt so badly that they were either unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced to miss work entirely (lost time)," the report points out.

The analysis emphasizes that the Seattle-based company's "injury rate over the last five years has been consistently high—above 7.4 injuries per 100 full-time equivalent workers (FTEs) in all but one year. The injury rate in 2021, 7.9 injuries per 100 workers, is the second-highest rate in the past five years and a sharp increase from 2020." ...

Before stepping down as CEO in April 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—one of the richest people on the planet—wrote in a letter to shareholders that along with being "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company... we are going to be Earth's Best Employer and Earth's Safest Place to Work."

Citing that last pledge from Bezos' letter, the SOC document states that "in response to rising scrutiny of its safety record, Amazon has scrambled to launch a public relations campaign to attempt to convince the public it is taking safety seriously."

"The company claims to have invested millions of dollars in initiatives intended to promote safety. And Amazon declared in April 2021 that it aims to cut injury rates by 50% by 2025," the report says. "The SOC's analysis of Amazon's injury data for 2021 finds that the company has not only failed to make any progress on improving its injury rates, but has performed substantially worse than in the previous year, raising significant questions about Amazon management's commitment to preventing worker injuries."

New York lieutenant governor quits after arrest on bribery and fraud charges

New York’s lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, resigned on Tuesday in the wake of his arrest in a federal corruption investigation, the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said. ...

Benjamin, a Democrat and the No 2 politician in the state government, was accused in an indictment of participating in a scheme to obtain campaign contributions from a real estate developer in exchange for Benjamin’s agreement to use his influence as a state senator to get a $50,000 grant of state funds for a non-profit organization the developer controlled.

Facing charges including bribery, fraud, conspiracy and falsification of records, Benjamin pleaded not guilty on Tuesday at an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court in New York City.

He was released and bail was set at $250,000. The terms of his release call for his travel to be restricted and bar him from returning to the state capitol in Albany. He submitted his resignation to Hochul hours later.

Biden EPA Unveils 'First-Ever' Blueprint to Protect Endangered Species From Pesticides

Environmental campaigners on Tuesday cautiously embraced the Biden administration's historic new blueprint to guard endangered species from pesticides as a much-needed step forward while also calling for more concrete moves to protect wildlife, people, and the planet.

Welcoming the Environmental Protection Agency's "first-ever comprehensive workplan" on the topic, Center for Biological Diversity environmental health director Lori Ann Burd said in a statement that "I'm encouraged that the EPA has finally acknowledged the massive problem it created by refusing, for decades, to consider the impacts of chemical poisons on our most vulnerable plants and animals."

"The agency's refusal to consider how pesticides affect endangered species has pushed countless species closer to extinction," Burd continued. "I'm hopeful the EPA will back up its words with concrete actions to fix these historic wrongs and move quickly to implement real, on-the-ground protections to stop species from going extinct and finally protect our incredible wildlife and plants from pesticides."

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Tuesday that the plan "serves as the blueprint for how EPA will create an enduring path to meet its goals of protecting endangered species and providing all people with safe, affordable food and protection from pests."

"The workplan reflects EPA's collaboration with other federal agencies and commitment to listening to stakeholders about how they can work with the agency to solve this long-standing challenge," he added.

Top officials at the Department of Agriculture, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and White House Council on Environmental Quality echoed the administrator's enthusiasm for collaborating on the issue.

The EPA statement acknowledged the agency "has an opportunity and an obligation to improve how it meets its duties under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when it registers pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA)," noting that "for most of EPA's history, the agency has met these duties for less than 5% of its FIFRA decisions."

"This has resulted in over 20 ESA lawsuits against the agency, which have increased in frequency in recent years, creating uncertainty for farmers and other pesticide users, unnecessary expenses and inefficiencies for EPA, and delays in how EPA protects endangered species," the agency added. "EPA currently has over 50 pesticide ingredients, covering over 1,000 pesticide products, with court-enforceable deadlines to comply with the ESA or in pending litigation alleging ESA violations."

"Completing this work will take EPA past 2040, yet the work represents less than 5% of all the FIFRA decisions in the next decade for which ESA obligations exist," the statement explained. "This is an unsustainable and legally tenuous situation, in which EPA's schedule for meeting its ESA obligations has historically been determined through the courts. The workplan must provide a path for the agency to meet those obligations on its own, thus protecting endangered species while supporting responsible pesticide use."

Climate Campaigners Say Biden Ethanol Push Is 'As Silly as It Is Dangerous'

As U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced a suspension of seasonal regulations on ethanol blending—part of a bid to lower gas prices—climate campaigners criticized the White House for pursuing what they characterized as an economically impotent and environmentally harmful policy instead of advocating for more effective and popular solutions: a windfall profits tax on Big Oil and aggressive clean energy transition.

With inflation and corporate profits at their highest levels in decades—thanks in large part to price gouging at the pump and beyond—Biden "headed to corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday with a modest step aiming to trim gasoline prices by about a dime a gallon," the Associated Press reported. Nationwide, a gallon of gas currently costs about $4.10 on average.

AP noted that "most gasoline sold in the U.S. is blended with 10% ethanol, a biofuel that is currently cheaper than gas." Biden announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver allowing the continued sale of E15, a 15% ethanol blend typically prohibited between June 1 and September 15 due to concerns that it worsens air quality amid hotter summer temperatures.

In response, Food & Water Watch managing policy director Mitch Jones said in a statement that "Biden's assertion that the polluting, resource-wasting ethanol industry will somehow magically fix our nation's gas price crisis is as silly as it is dangerous."

Food & Water Watch argued that expanding the sale of E15, which Biden promoted at a biofuel company located west of Des Moines, is a victory only for "the corporate factory corn farming industry."

"The ethanol industry in Iowa is embroiled in a political melee over three proposed carbon capture pipelines which the industry claims would help mitigate the rampant pollution and environmental degradation caused by ethanol production and related mass-scale factory corn farming," the group noted. "Recent Food & Water Action polling found that a plurality of Iowa voters oppose the carbon pipelines proposed for the state, and 80% oppose using eminent domain to build them."

Jones emphasized that "only a tiny fraction of American gas stations currently have access to ethanol-heavy gas in the first place." This is not disputed by senior Biden administration officials. They estimate that just 2,300 gas stations out of more than 100,000 nationwide can currently provide the less expensive E15 blend, meaning that their projected savings of 10 cents per gallon would not reach millions of people outside certain areas in the Midwest and South.

Meanwhile, the Stop the Oil Profiteering (STOP) coalition—created last month to build support for a windfall profits tax on oil majors—stressed that Biden's plan doesn't address the root cause of soaring fuel prices and overlooks a more efficient method of curbing pain at the pump.

"The Biden administration is searching everywhere for a solution to high energy and gas prices—but the answer is right under their noses," Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media and STOP, said in a statement.

"A windfall profits tax is smart, fair, and popular, and Congress is already prepared to move it forward," said Henn.

Sunscreen chemicals accumulating in Mediterranean seagrass, finds study

Chemicals found in sunscreen lotions are accumulating in Mediterranean seagrass, a study has found. Scientists discovered ultraviolet filters in the stems of Posidonia oceanica, a seagrass species found on the coast of Mallorca and endemic to the Mediterranean Sea.

The researchers believe the contamination is the result of recreational activities and waste discharges in the tourist destination.

“This marine enclave is impacted by port activities, water discharge and tourism,” said Dr Silvia Díaz Cruz, co-author of the study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin. “Since the Mediterranean Sea is shallow, small and very enclosed, concentrations of UV-absorbing chemicals can reach high [levels].” ...

While the full impact of these chemicals on seagrass remains unknown, the researchers are concerned about potential harmful effects. “If we find that sunscreens affect the photosynthesis and productivity of seagrasses beyond accumulation, we will have a problem since these seagrasses play important ecological roles in the Mediterranean coasts,” said co-author Prof Nona Agawin. ...

Previous research has found that certain UV-filtering sunscreen chemicals can have damaging effects on fish, turtles and dolphins, including disrupting their reproductive systems and harming their development. Coral reefs are also affected and these chemicals have been prohibited in tourism destinations such as Hawaii, Florida and Palau. Similar legislation has yet to be introduced in Mediterranean countries.

Also of Interest

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

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A Little Night Music

Omar Shariff (aka Dave Alexander) - House Built By The Blues

Dave Alexander - Lonesome Train Blues

Omar Shariff - Just a Blues

Omar Sharriff (aka Dave Alexander Elam) - St. James Infirmary

Omar Shariff - San Francisco Can Be Such a Lonely Town

Omar Sharriff (aka Dave Alexander Elam) - The Hoodoo Man

L.C 'Good Rockin' Robinson & Omar Sharriff - She Got It From The Start

Omar Shariff - Blue Tumbleweed

Omar Shariff - Omar's Boogie