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"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech."

-- Noam Chomsky

News and Opinion

Biden DOJ Indicts Four Americans For “Weaponized” Free Speech

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has just charged four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for conspiring to act as agents of Russia by using speech and political action in ways the DOJ says “weaponized” the First Amendment rights of Americans.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

AFP reports that the conspiracy charges carry a sentence of up to ten years, with three of the four APSP members additionally charged with acting as unregistered agents of Russia which carries another five years.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen in the DOJ’s press release regarding the indictments, adding, “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

Looks like the United States has decided to dispense with those freedoms as well.

This fake and racist case flows from the Russiagate hysteria that convinced millions of Americans that Russia was paying dissident groups to destabilize the US political system

The FBI was unable to find anything real, so it went after the African People’s Socialist Party https://t.co/C1fUn2pyuW

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 19, 2023

The superseding indictment containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech and political activities in the United States which happen not to align with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you could possibly come up with.

For the record Omali Yeshitela, the founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and one of the four Americans named in the indictment, has adamantly denied ever having worked for Russia. Earlier this month before charges were brought against him, the Tampa Bay Times quoted him as saying, “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever. They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them.”

But it’s important to note that this should not matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not. The indictment alleges that the four Americans engaged in “agitprop” by “writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and disinformation,” but even if we pretend that’s both (A) a quantifiable claim and (B) a proven fact, propaganda and disinformation are both speech that the government is constitutionally forbidden from repressing.

It’s not reasonable for the government to just dismiss the First Amendment on the grounds that it is being “weaponized”. You can’t have your government dictating what speech is valid and what counts as “agitprop” and “disinformation”, because they’ll always define those terms in ways which benefit the government, thus giving more power to the powerful and taking power away from the people. You can’t have your government dictating what political groups are legitimate and which ones are tools of a foreign government, because you can always count on the powerful set such designations in ways which benefit themselves.

There’s also the brazen hypocrisy of it all. The US government is constantly engaging in foreign influence operations with outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up to help foment coups and color revolutions and advance US information interests overtly in ways the CIA used to do covertly.

As commentator Brian Berletic noted on Twitter, “The US through the National Endowment for Democracy has created armies of organizations carrying out malign influence operations around the world including here in Thailand. When the Thai government attempts to stop this activity, the US embassy shouts ‘free speech.’ Thailand’s government and others around the world could easily cite this move by the US Justice Department to target and uproot US-funded organizations doing exactly this and worse.”

So for the US government to now claim it’s legitimate to start throwing US citizens in prison for a decade because they published “propaganda” for another country is absurd, and more than a little scary. The most powerful government in the world needs more political dissent at home, not less, and here they are trying to turn it into a crime.

When they claim the members of the APSP published “propaganda” and promoted “dissention”, what they really mean is that they engaged in speech and political activism that the US government does not like. The spinmeisters will try to spin it, the legal mumbo-jumbo will try to obfuscate it, but that’s what’s happening. Don’t let them conceal this from you. They’re not worried about Russian propaganda, they’re worried you’ll stop listening to US propaganda.

FBI Actually Arrested Black Socialists Over Russiagate Garbage

Ukraine Leaks Punch Hole in War Propaganda

The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”

What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.

The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of the promising peace negotiations it blocked in April 2022.

We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake, in which the Biden administration capitulated to the warmongering, since-disgraced U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that current U.S. policy is compounding that mistake at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives and the destruction of even more of their country.

In most wars, while the warring parties strenuously suppress the reporting of civilian casualties for which they are responsible, professional militaries generally treat accurate reporting of their own military casualties as a basic responsibility. But in the virulent propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, all sides have treated military casualty figures as fair game, systematically exaggerating enemy casualties and understating their own.

Publicly available U.S. estimates have supported the idea that many more Russians are being killed than Ukrainians, deliberately skewing public perceptions to support the notion that Ukraine can somehow win the war, as long as we just keep sending more weapons.

The leaked documents provide internal U.S. military intelligence assessments of casualties on both sides. But different documents, and different copies of the documents circulating online, show conflicting numbers, so the propaganda war rages on despite the leak.

The most detailed assessment of attrition rates of troops says explicitly that U.S. military intelligence has “low confidence” in the attrition rates it cites. It attributes that partly to “potential bias” in Ukraine’s information sharing, and notes that casualty assessments “fluctuate according to the source.”

So, despite denials by the Pentagon, a document that shows a higher death toll on the Ukrainian side may be correct, since it has been widely reported that Russia has been firing several times thenumber of artillery shells as Ukraine, in a bloody war of attrition in which artillery appears to be the main instrument of death. Altogether, some of the documents estimate a total death toll on both sides approaching 100,000 and total casualties, killed and wounded, of up to 350,000.

Another document reveals that, after using up the stocks sent by NATO countries, Ukraine is running out of missiles for the S-300 and BUK systems that make up 89% of its air defenses. By May or June, Ukraine will therefore be vulnerable, for the first time, to the full strength of the Russian air force, which has until now been limited mainly to long-range missile strikes and drone attacks.

Recent Western arms shipments have been justified to the public by predictions that Ukraine will soon be able to launch new counter-offensives to take back territory from Russia. Twelve brigades, or up to 60,000 troops, were assembled to train on newly delivered Western tanks for this “spring offensive,” with three brigades in Ukraine and nine more in Poland, Romania and Slovenia.

But a leaked document from the end of February reveals that the nine brigades being equipped and trained abroad had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15% trained. Meanwhile, Ukraine faced a stark choice to either send reinforcements to Bakhmut or withdraw from the town entirely, and it chose to sacrifice some of its “spring offensive” forces to prevent the imminent fall of Bakhmut.

Ever since the U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbas in 2015, and while it has been training them in other countries since the Russian invasion, NATO has provided six-month training courses to bring Ukraine’s forces up to basic NATO standards. On this basis, it appears that many of the forces being assembled for the “spring offensive” would not be fully trained and equipped before July or August.

But another document says the offensive will begin around April 30th, meaning that many troops may be thrown into combat less than fully trained, by NATO standards, even as they have to contend with more severe shortages of ammunition and a whole new scale of Russian airstrikes. The incredibly bloody fighting that has already decimated Ukrainian forces will surely be even more brutal than before.

The leaked documents conclude that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial gains.

The documents also reveal serious deficiencies on the Russian side, deficiencies revealed by the failure of their winter offensive to take much ground. The fighting in Bakhmut has raged on for months, leaving thousands of fallen soldiers on both sides and a burned out city still not 100% controlled by Russia.

The inability of either side to decisively defeat the other in the ruins of Bakhmut and other front-line towns in Donbas is why one of the most important documents predicted that the war was locked in a “grinding campaign of attrition” and was “likely heading toward a stalemate.” Adding to the concerns about where this conflict is headed is the revelation in the leaked documents about the presence of 97 special forces from NATO countries, including from the U.K. and the U.S. This is in addition to previous reports about the presence of CIA personnel, trainers and Pentagon contractors, and the unexplained deployment of 20,000 troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Brigades near the border between Poland and Ukraine.

Worried about the ever-increasing direct U.S. military involvement, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has introduced a Privileged Resolution of Inquiry to force President Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military personnel inside Ukraine and precise U.S. plans to assist Ukraine militarily.

We can’t help wondering what President Biden’s plan could be, or if he even has one. But it turns out that we’re not alone. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a “total breakdown” between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. Hersh’s sources describe a pattern that echoes the use of fabricated and unvetted intelligence to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan are by-passing regular intelligence analysis and procedures and running the Ukraine War as their own private fiefdom. They reportedly smear all criticism of President Zelenskyy as “pro-Putin,” and leave U.S. intelligence agencies out in the cold trying to understand a policy that makes no sense to them.

What U.S. intelligence officials know, but the White House is doggedly ignoring, is that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, top Ukrainian officials running this endemically corrupt country are making fortunes skimming money from the over $100 billion in aid and weapons that America has sent them.

According to Hersh’s report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.

Hersh writes that, in January 2023, after the CIA heard from Ukrainian generals that they were angry with Zelenskyy for taking a larger share of the rake-off from these schemes than his generals, CIA Director William Burns went to Kyiv to meet with him. Burns allegedly told Zelenskyy he was taking too much of the “skim money,” and handed him a list of 35 generals and senior officials the CIA knew were involved in this corrupt scheme.

Zelenskyy fired about ten of those officials, but failed to alter his own behavior. Hersh’s sources tell him that the White House’s lack of interest in doing anything about these goings-on is a major factor in the breakdown of trust between the White House and the intelligence community.

First-hand reporting from inside Ukraine by New Cold War has described the same systematic pyramid of corruption as Hersh. A member of parliament, formerly in Zelenskyy’s party, told New Cold War that Zelenskyy and other officials skimmed 170 million euros from money that was supposed to pay for Bulgarian artillery shells.

The corruption reportedly extends to bribes to avoid conscription. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel was told by a military recruitment office that it could get the son of one of its writers released from the front line in Bakhmut and sent out of the country for $32,000. As has happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the wars the United States has been involved in for many decades, the longer the war goes on, the more the web of corruption, lies and distortions unravels.

The torpedoing of peace talks, the Nord Streamsabotage, the hiding of corruption, the politicization of casualty figures, and the suppressed history of broken promises and prescient warnings about the danger of NATO expansion are all examples of how our leaders have distorted the truth to shore up U.S. public support for perpetuating an unwinnable war that is killing a generation of young Ukrainians.

These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and the United States can amass wealth and power.

The only way this will stop is if more and more people get active in opposing those companies and individuals that profit from war–who Pope Francis calls the Merchants of Death–and boot out the politicians who do their bidding, before they make an even more fatal misstep and start a nuclear war.

Russia Advances on Key Bakhmut Road, Ukr Area Shrinks; West Splits on Negotiations, Zelensky Worried

U.S. Sends Troops To Taiwan!

Ukraine grain deal: ship inspections have resumed, says minister

Inspections of ships transporting Ukrainian grain have resumed under a UN-brokered agreement, the country’s deputy prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov has said. ...

As part of the UN deal, inspection teams from Russia, Ukraine, the UN and Turkey ensure ships carry only food and other agricultural products and no weapons. However, Russia has been accused by Ukraine of delaying inspections, leading to a halt in grain shipments.

A spokesperson for the Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) in Istanbul – which facilitates the shipment of grain – also confirmed that inspections were resuming. “Inspections teams are already at work,” Ismini Palla, of the JCC, said.

Kubrakov is in Turkey to discuss the status of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which was agreed by Russia and Ukraine last July to help alleviate a global food crisis. Moscow says it agreed to extend the deal only until 18 May. Kyiv and the UN say the deal has another 60 days to run after then, and are seeking an agreement to ensure it continues. ...

The agriculture minister, Mykola Solsky, said on Wednesday that Moscow was increasing difficulties for Ukraine at a time when three eastern European countries have banned imports of Ukrainian grain and food products. “Obviously, the Russians could not fail to take advantage of these nuances on the western border,” Solsky told reporters.

Macron seeks to defuse pensions crisis by visiting Eastern, Southern towns amid tensions

Banging saucepans will not move France forward, says Macron

Emmanuel Macron has said that banging saucepans at him will not move France forward, as about 100 protesters bashing pots were pushed back by police when the French president visited a factory in Alsace in an attempt to contain anger over raising the pension age from 62 to 64.

Members of the CGT and CFDT trade unions had gathered in front of the mayor’s office in the village of Muttersholtz on Wednesday, where Macron began a series of visits to rural France to try to calm tensions over his unpopular pensions changes. ...

The banging of pots and pans as a new form of protest started on Monday night during Macron’s televised address, as hundreds gathered outside town halls to drown out the president. The clattering of pots began at the suggestion of the NGO Attac, which campaigns on tax and social justice. This form of protest, which has a long history in the country, could follow Macron around rural France this week.

About 300 people also banged pots, pans and kitchenware and called for Macron’s resignation in Saint-Denis on Tuesday night when he attended a private event.

Unions have planned more protests as Macron makes further visits across the country this week. The scenes are reminiscent of the president’s travels around France during the gilets-jaunes anti-government protests of 2018-19 when Macron was frequently confronted by angry hecklers.

"A New Jane Crow": Abortion Advocates Brace for Supreme Court Ruling That Could Ban Mifepristone

US supreme court delays decision on abortion pill restrictions until Friday

The supreme court on Wednesday briefly extended an order keeping the abortion drug mifepristone widely available, as the justices weigh a lower court’s decision to impose restrictions that would sharply limit access to the most common method of ending pregnancies.

Justice Samuel Alito issued the order on Wednesday, in effect preserving the status quo until midnight on Friday. Alito provided no explanation for the extension delaying the court’s decision, which was initially expected by Wednesday night.

The brief order was the latest development in a legal showdown initiated by abortion opponents seeking to revoke a 23-year-old Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the pill.

Earlier this month, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal judge in Texas, declared that the FDA improperly approved the drug in 2000, effectively saying it should be pulled from the market even where abortion remains legal.

The Biden administration appealed to a federal court, where a divided three-judge panel said mifepristone could remain available but imposed several barriers to how the drug is accessed and administered.

Republicans REVEAL Demands In Debt Ceiling Fight

'Illegal Corporate Price-Fixing' Is Rampant in US Economy: Report

As working-class households continue to struggle amid a cost-of-living crisis driven largely by corporate profiteering, a new investigation shows that large companies operating in the United States have paid nearly $100 billion in fines and settlements since 2000 "to resolve allegations of covert price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices in violation of antitrust laws."

Conspiring Against Competition: Illegal Corporate Price-Fixing in the U.S. Economy, a report published Monday by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, is based on an analysis of government agency announcements and court records included in the nonprofit's Violation Tracker database.

"Capitalism is typically portrayed as a system of constant competition in which prices are determined by supply and demand. Producers of goods and services are said to constantly vie with one another in the quest for sales," says the report. "In truth, however, large companies often evade competition and instead collude with one another to control markets to their mutual benefit—and to the disadvantage of consumers, who end up paying higher prices. This is the world of price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices cooked up secretly by purportedly rival corporate executives."

"Illegal pricing conspiracies have occurred in a wide range of industries, affecting the cost of products ranging from everyday grocery items and auto parts to chemicals and electronic components," the report notes. "In industries such as financial services and pharmaceuticals, just about every major corporation (or a subsidiary) has been a defendant in one or more cases. Banks, credit card companies, and investment firms dominate the top tier, accounting for 9 of the 10 most penalized corporations by total dollars."

Matt Taibbi THREATENED With PRISON TIME Over Twitter Files Testimony By Liberal Lawmaker

White nationalists who carried torches in Charlottesville in 2017 indicted

Nearly six years after a gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville erupted in violent clashes with counter-protesters, a grand jury in Virginia indicted multiple people on felony charges for carrying flaming torches with the intent to intimidate.

The Albemarle county commonwealth’s attorney said in a news release that the indictments relate to events on 11 August 2017, when white nationalists carrying torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. ...

On Tuesday, the commonwealth’s attorney, James Hingeley, did not say how many people had been indicted.

According to court records, three indictments have been unsealed. They are against William Zachary Smith, of Nacona, Texas; Tyler Bradley Dykes, of Bluffton, South Carolina; and Dallas Medina, of Ravenna, Ohio.

Each is charged with a single count of burning an object with the intent of intimidating a person or group of people. The charge carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison.

Family of Tyre Nichols sues city of Memphis and police over deadly beating

The family of Tyre Nichols, a Black Tennessee man who died after been beaten by five police officers, has sued the city of Memphis, individual officers and emergency medical personnel involved in his case.

Lawyers for Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in federal court in Memphis.

The $550m civil suit is in response to the death of Nichols, who attorneys representing the Nichols’s family say was tortured at the hands of Memphis police department officers.

“This landmark lawsuit is not only to get the justice for Tyre Nichols in the civil courts, but it is also a message that is being sent to cities all across America who have these police oppression units that have been given the license by city leaders to go and terrorize Black and brown communities,” said attorney Ben Crump during a Wednesday press briefing outside the circuit court clerk’s office in Memphis.

The 132-page lawsuit includes 25 counts against the city of Memphis and police department including “deliberate indifference to serious medical need” and allegations of excessive force, ABC News reported.

Top Trump adviser to be interviewed by special counsel prosecutors

Donald Trump’s senior adviser and legal counsel Boris Epshteyn is scheduled to be interviewed on Thursday by special counsel prosecutors investigating the former president’s retention of classified-marked documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.

The investigation Epshteyn is being asked to talk about – potentially both – remains unclear, according to a person familiar with the matter who confirmed the meeting on the condition of anonymity. His lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

But the interview, which was requested by special counsel prosecutors, marks a moment of potential peril for Trump given Epshteyn has been one of his closest advisers in recent years, with more knowledge about the former president’s legal entanglements than perhaps anyone else.

Throughout the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Epshteyn has simultaneously been a member of Trump’s inner circle as a senior adviser on the 2024 campaign, and a member of the Trump legal team as the project-manager-esque person leading the civil and criminal lawyers as the in-house counsel.

The dual roles mean Epshteyn is considered to have the most insight into decisions taken by Trump and others as the investigation has progressed – the sort of behind-the-scenes knowledge most prized by prosecutors in high-profile criminal cases.

RFK Jr STUNS With Strong Poll After Announcement

Why elephants, otters and whales are nature’s secret weapons against climate breakdown

What do elephants, otters and whales have in common? They all increase the amount of carbon that can be stored in their ecosystems. Elephants disperse seeds and trample low vegetation, enabling taller trees to grow. Sea otters eat sea urchins, allowing kelp to flourish. Whales feed at depth and release nutrients as they breathe and rest at the surface, stimulating phytoplankton production.

It isn’t just these three. We are beginning to learn that many species have complex effects on their environments that change the amount of carbon stored by their surrounding ecosystems – ultimately affecting climate change. When the population of wildebeest in the Serengeti plummeted due to disease, they no longer grazed as much, and the uneaten grass caused more frequent and more intense fires. Bringing back the numbers of wildebeest through disease management has meant fewer and smaller fires. And the Serengeti has gone from releasing carbon back to storing it.

These are examples contained in a stunning new paper just published in Nature. It makes the case that animals cause ecosystems to be more effective in storing carbon, through their eating, moving, trampling, digging, defecating and building. Looking across a range of different studies, it concludes that wild animals account for only 0.3% of the carbon in the total global biomass, but can cause anywhere between 15% and 250% difference in how much carbon is stored in a given ecosystem.

We already knew that so-called “nature-based solutions” need to be part of any effective strategy to tackle climate breakdown. Reducing emissions is not going to be enough – we need to use the immense power of nature to remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it up. But this new research carries important lessons for how we pursue these nature-based solutions.

First, nature works. Specifically, the complex mechanisms that nature has developed are startlingly effective in ways we do not yet fully understand – and we destroy them at our peril. It may well be sensible to try to develop new technologies to capture carbon, but it is definitely not sensible to ignore the proven ways of doing so that nature already gives us. We would do well to be a little less enamoured of our own ingenuity, and a little more respectful of nature’s.

Volcanic microbe eats CO2 ‘astonishingly quickly’, say scientists

A microbe discovered in a volcanic hot spring gobbles up carbon dioxide “astonishingly quickly”, according to the scientists who found it.

The researchers hope to utilise microbes that have naturally evolved to absorb CO2 as an efficient way of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Ending the burning of fossil fuels is critical in ending the climate crisis, but most scientists agree CO2 will also need to be sucked from the air to limit future damage.

The new microbe, a cyanobacteria, was discovered in September in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano, where the water contains high levels of CO2. The researchers said the bug turned CO2 into biomass faster than any other known cyanobacteria.

In February the team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, US, where levels of CO2 are even higher. Those results are now being analysed. The researchers said all their data on microbes would be published and made available to other scientists as a database that pairs DNA sequences with banked samples of the bacteria.

Judge says Ontario’s weak climate plans increase risk of death for the young

A judge has warned that Ontario’s weak climate plans will “increase the risk of death” for Canada’s young people – but dismissed a lawsuit brought by a group worried that government inaction on global heating threatens their futures.

Justice Marie-Andrée Vermette of Ontario superior court issued a decision on Tuesday that found that while both young people and Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change, government failures to react were not a breach of their rights. ...

In her judgment, Vermette found the youth “make a compelling case that climate change and the existential threat that it poses to human life” are clear and that the province’s climate plan “falls severely short” of what’s needed to address climate change. But she was skeptical that weaknesses in Ontario’s climate plan violated section 7 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the right to life, liberty and security.

Vermette also dismissed the idea that Ontario’s plan violated section 15 of the charter, which recognizes the right to equality under the law without discrimination. While she agreed climate change disproportionately affects certain groups, the province was not obliged to fix this inequality through its climate targets.

The dismissal is a blow to attempts by young people to hold governments to account, and is the latest lawsuit of its kind to fail.

Also of Interest

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

Craig Murray: Snowden & Teixeira

Chinese "Police Stations" and War Propaganda

The United States Of Gerontocrats

The Presidential Campaign of Convict 9653

French publisher arrested in London was ‘asked about support for Macron’

An anti-obscenity law from 1873 was discarded for decades. Now the anti-abortion movement wants it back

The Water Crisis in Jackson, Mississippi

Dem Rep TRASHES Colleagues For LYING About Feinstein

Fox News Shells Out $787 Million Settlement Over Dominion Lawsuit

Hunter Biden BOMBSHELL: IRS WHISTLEBLOWER Claims Biden DOJ Is Mishandling Probe

Buzzfeed News SHUTTING DOWN; Online Liberal Media Is DISINTEGRATING: Glenn Greenwald

Q & A: BRICS rising as neocons destroy the west

A Little Night Music

Albert Collins - The Freeze (1958)

Albert Collins - Thaw Out

Albert Collins ~ Get Your Business Straight

Albert Collins - Get To Gettin'

Albert Collins - My Woman Has A Black Cat Bone

Albert Collins - Backstroke

Albert Collins - A Good Fool is Hard to Find

Albert Collins and The Icebreakers - Ice Pick

Albert Collins - Lights Are On But Nobody's Home

Albert Collins - If You Love Me Like You Say

Albert Collins - Avalanche