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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Hip Linkchain

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Hip Linkchain. Enjoy!

^{Hip Linkchain - Cold Chills}

"The war industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy."

-- Chris Hedges

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News and Opinion

Extraordinary!

Judge restricts White House communications with social media companies

A US federal judge on Tuesday restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content, according to a court filing.

The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who alleged that US government officials went too far in efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, or upend elections.

The ruling said US government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech” under the free speech clause of the first amendment to the US constitution.

The order also mentioned by name officials, including the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in its restrictions.

HUGE: Biden Admin CANNOT Pressure Twitter, Facebook To CENSOR Speech, Judge RULES

Biden embraces evil.

'Totally Indefensible': Biden Nominates Death Squad Backer Elliott Abrams to Diplomacy Panel

President Joe Biden on Monday quietly nominated Elliott Abrams to serve on a bipartisan diplomacy commission, a move that human rights advocates condemned as outrageous given the longtime Republican official's past as a defender of Latin American death squads and cheerleader for murderous U.S. foreign policy interventions.

"A totally indefensible decision from Biden," MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan wrote on Twitter, pointing to Abrams' guilty plea stemming from the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal and his broader record in Latin America.

Most recently, Abrams served as the Trump administration's special envoy to Iran and Venezuela. During a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) grilled Abrams on his role in the Reagan administration's policy in El Salvador, whose U.S.-backed military carried out the largest massacre in modern Latin American history in 1981 in and around the village of El Mozote.

Omar noted during the 2019 hearing that Abrams "later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a 'fabulous achievement.'"

After recounting the appalling details of the El Mozote killings—in which around 140 children were murdered—Omar asked Abrams, "Do you think that massacre was a 'fabulous achievement' that happened under our watch?"

"That is a ridiculous question, and I will not respond to it," Abrams fumed in response. "I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question.”

Abrams attempted to downplay the El Mozote massacre shortly after it occurred, telling the U.S. Senate that news reports of the gruesome killings were "not credible" and were being misused by anti-government forces.

In response to news of the Biden administration's decision to nominate Abrams to the State Department's Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote that Abrams' "most notorious public diplomacy is downplaying the 1981 El Mozote massacre of 1,000 people by U.S.-trained-and-equipped Salvadoran military units."

Raymond Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent in El Salvador, wrote for The Atlantic in 2019 that "the Reagan administration, with Abrams as point man, routinely defended the Salvadoran government in the face of evidence that its regular army, and allied right-wing death squads, were operating with impunity, killing peasants, students, union leaders, and anyone considered anti-government or pro-guerrilla."

"Abrams went so far as to defend one of the death squads' most notorious leaders, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who was responsible for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass, in March 1980," Bonner added.

The Biden White House predictably failed to mention the sordid details of Abrams' record in its nomination announcement, offering a sterilized biography that lists off the notorious figure's previous government roles: Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, Human Rights, and Latin America under Ronald Reagan, a senior director of the National Security Council under George W. Bush, and special representative for Iran and special representative for Venezuela under Donald Trump, among others.

According to its website, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is tasked with "appraising U.S. government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities."

Abrams must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the commission.

Slate journalist Alex Sammon denounced Biden's nomination of Abrams for the position as "obscene" and "unconscionable."

"Elliott Abrams, enemy of human rights, apologist for mass murder, should have no place within spitting distance of any Democratic administration in any capacity," Sammon argued.

Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because The US Empire Is Just That Evil

CNN reports that President Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according to the US State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute attention” to the US government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the US Agency for Global Media.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used to just mean “warmonger”, but Abrams is actually a proper PNAC neoconservative ideologue with deep ties to the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent US imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where Trump’s foreign policy was at its most murderous), Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration. CNN — notoriously reluctant to criticize both US foreign policy and Democratic presidential administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.

Biden is nominating Elliott Abrams, a war criminal evil enough that even *CNN* points out his role in leading the Iran-Contra operation and supporting US-backed genocidal massacres in Latin America https://t.co/anhCOJsU4g

— Calla (@CallaWalsh) July 4, 2023

In an article titled “Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee to Public Diplomacy Commission,” CNN’s Jack Forrest writes the following:

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991 guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that earned him two misdemeanor counts, two years probation and 100 hours of community service — though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 — the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and “lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings — stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility.

When you’re so gross that even CNN is disgusted by you, you’re a special kind of gross.

As Forrest noted, this would be the fourth presidential administration that Abrams has been a part of, despite being a confessed crook and despite pushing for bloodshed at every opportunity in some of the US empire’s most notorious criminal actions. Abrams is such a cold-hearted killer that he openly admitted during a 1985 conference that the purpose of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua was “to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” and has promoted US military violence against Iraq, Syria and Iran with remarkable forcefulness throughout his career. The fact that someone so tyrannical, so corrupt and so unscrupulous keeps getting appointed to positions involved with US foreign policy tells you everything you need to know about the nature of US foreign policy.

It’s actually a damning indictment of our entire civilization that swamp monsters like Elliott Abrams remain esteemed members of society instead of reviled outcasts who can’t safely show their faces in public. They should be driven from every town they try to enter and unable to secure even entry-level jobs working for minimum wage, but instead they’re employed as high-profile pundits, think tankers and political officials providing expertise on some of the most consequential matters in the world.

To paraphrase a quote often attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be well-rewarded in a profoundly sick society. Because our society is so profoundly sick, one of the fastest ways to fortune and esteem is to be as gross as Elliott Abrams. That’s how messed up you have to be inside to rise to prominence within the US power structure: willing to say and do whatever needs to be said and done in order to secure the continued dominance of a global empire that is sustained by human blood.

Rumours Attack Zaporozhzhye NPP, Ukr Bakhmut Attack Repelled, West Cools F16s; Rus Economy Grows

Russia Says Ukrainian Drone Attacks on Moscow ‘Not Possible’ Without US Support

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow and other areas inside Russia would not be possible without support from the US and NATO.

The comments came after the Russian military said it downed five drones that attacked Moscow on Tuesday morning. No casualties were reported in the attack.

“These attacks would not be possible without the help provided to the Kyiv regime by the US and its NATO allies,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. The ministry added that the US and NATO were “training drone operators and providing the necessary intelligence to commit such crimes.”

Russian Nuclear Official Claims Ukraine Is Planning Imminent Attack on Nuclear Plant

An advisor to the director of Russia’s Rosenergoatom nuclear power engineering company claimed Tuesday that Ukraine is planning an imminent attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) while Ukraine is accusing Russian forces of plotting to blow up the facility.

The ZNPP is in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast and has been controlled by Russian forces since March 2022. It has been the scene of fighting throughout the war as Ukraine launched failed attacks on the plant to recapture the facility last fall. At the time, Ukraine blamed shelling on the Russian-controlled plant on Russian forces.

Rosenergoatom advisor Renat Karchaa claimed Ukraine is planning to use a dirty bomb against the ZNPP, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. “In the nighttime on July 5, Ukrainian troops will try to attack the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant with the use of high-precision long-range weapons and kamikaze drone,” he said, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

“They plan to airdrop bombs stuffed with radioactive waste that were removed from the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant to a military airfield in Ukraine. The standby bombing plan provides for the use of a Tochka-U high-precision rocket with a warhead stuffed with radioactive waste,” Karchaa added.

Russian Jamming Reducing Accuracy of US Guided Weapons in Ukraine: Experts

Russian jamming in Ukraine has become so effective that even US-made guided weapons sent to Kyiv may no longer hit targets accurately, according to several British military analysts.

A recent analysis by the UK’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) notes that while Moscow’s electronic warriors could not stop the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), their improved jamming skills are taking a toll on the weapon’s accuracy.

This reportedly happens despite multiple anti-jamming upgrades on the JDAMs. ... Apart from the JDAMs, the jamming could also be affecting the performance of the US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. ...

RUSI stated that Moscow has now employed approximately one major EW system per 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of frontage. Such extended coverage has reportedly contributed to a Ukrainian drone loss rate of 10,000 per month.

Under Fire: Report from Jenin Refugee Camp on Israel's Largest West Bank Attack in 20 Years

'Catastrophic': Israeli Forces Unleash Humanitarian Disaster in Jenin

Thousands of people who live in Jenin in the occupied West Bank are reportedly fleeing the poverty-stricken refugee camp as Israeli military forces Tuesday continued to batter the city's water, power, and healthcare infrastructure.

Muhammad Abu Talal, a resident of the camp, toldMiddle East Eye on Tuesday—a day after a large-scale assault by the IDF left at least 10 Palestinians dead and scores more wounded—that the refugee camp's "streets are all dug up and uprooted" by bulldozers used by the Israeli forces.

The bulldozers, said Abu Talal, "have left nothing as it is here, they turned our streets into crumbs."

Citing a witness on the ground, MEE reports that "residential buildings were so severely damaged that Israeli soldiers made large holes in the walls of the houses for snipers to position themselves and shoot through" and local hospitals "were exposed to direct fire from Israeli soldiers with heavy weapons, which damaged many of their facilities."

In a Tuesday update on the situation in Jenin, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said ongoing military activities, including bombings, have "caused a complete power outage across the camp's neighborhoods as well as cutting off water supplies and internet services, exacerbating the humanitarian situation and isolating the camp from the outside world."

"Moreover," the group said, "ambulances were denied access to evacuate the wounded due to the tight siege imposed on the camp and the intensive deployment of Israeli military vehicles."

In a statement on Tuesday, Jovana Arsenijevic, operations coordinator in Jenin for Médecins Sans Frontières, reported that "Israeli forces fired tear gas several times inside the Khalil Suleiman hospital," making the delivery of urgently needed treatment impossible in some portions of the facility.

"This is unacceptable," said Arsenijevic. "The emergency room is not usable right now—it's completely filled with smoke, as is the rest of the hospital. People who need treatment can't be treated in the ER, and we have to treat the wounded in the main hall on the floor. Our teams have treated 125 patients since the start of this raid."

City officials said the Israeli military had destroyed the main water lines, leaving the entire camp without access to running water.

Mayor Nidal Obeidi of Jenin city said Tuesday that the Israeli military assault on the refugee camp has resulted in total devastation for the people there.

"The humanitarian situation in Jenin is catastrophic," al-Obeidi told reporters. "What's happening is like an earthquake. It reminds us of the days of Nakba."

Israeli forces begin withdrawal from Jenin as rockets fired from Gaza

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired five rockets toward Israel, the military said in the early hours of Wednesday, as its forces began to withdraw from the Palestinian city of Jenin after carrying out one of their biggest military operations in the occupied West Bank for years.

The rockets from Gaza were intercepted and there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Witnesses reported seeing convoys of Israeli military vehicles leaving Jenin after dark in what appeared to signal an end to the operation that began early on Monday.

Twelve Palestinians, at least five of them fighters, were killed in the operation, which the Israeli army said was aimed at destroying militant infrastructure and weapons in the Jenin refugee camp. As the army began the withdraw, it announced that an Israeli soldier had been killed by live fire in Jenin. Dozens of people, including civilians, were injured over the course of the raid, according to medics.

On Tuesday, Palestinian health minister Mai al-Kaila accused the army of shooting at Palestinians in a courtyard of the Jenin public hospital. “Israel’s aggression reached its climax this afternoon when citizens were shot at directly in the courtyard of Jenin hospital wounding three, two of them seriously,” the minister told reporters, adding that forces had also stormed the Ibn Sina hospital.

"Inflection Point": Uprising over French Teen's Killing in Traffic Stop & Pattern of Racist Policing

France riots: prosecutors investigate death of man hit by projectile in Marseille

French prosecutors have opened an investigation into the death of a 27-year old man who was hit by a projectile at the time of the riots on Saturday, the Marseille prosecutor’s office has said. The man died on Saturday night while Marseille was engulfed in riots and pillaging, but prosecutors said it was not possible to determine where the man was when he was shot or whether the victim had taken part in the riots.

Prosecutors on Tuesday said the likely cause of the death in Marseille was a violent shock to the chest from a “flash-ball” projectile as used by riot police, but did not specify who fired or owned the gun. The impact led to cardiac arrest and sudden death.

Almost a week of rioting across France was sparked by the shooting of a teenager of North African descent during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb. The biggest flashpoint on Saturday was in Marseille, where police fired teargas and fought street battles with youths around the city centre late into the night.

Flash-ball guns are designed to be non-lethal riot control weapons that do not penetrate the skin, but their use by police in France is disputed as the projectiles have led to the loss of eyes, head injuries and other trauma.

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North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling

The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. “We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on.

North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws.

Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID.

Moore v Harper originated in state court as a partisan gerrymandering case, and as part of that litigation state courts put temporary maps in place for the 2022 elections. In a statement about the supreme court decision, Moore confirmed that the legislature will draw new maps. “We will continue to move forward with the redistricting process later this year,” Moore said. North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.

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Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests

Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests.

Farming techniques that improve long-term fertility and yields can also help to store more carbon in soils but are often ignored in favour of intensive techniques using large amounts of artificial fertiliser, much of it wasted, that can increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Using better farming techniques to store 1% more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data. That amount is not far off the 32 gigatonnes gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.

The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief scientist at the UN environment programme and former executive director of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon in the top 30cm of agricultural soils would be feasible in many regions where soils are currently degraded.

McGlade now leads a commercial organisation that sells soil data to farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data, satellite images and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual fields. “Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”

Monday was hottest day for global average temperature on record, as climate crisis bites

This Monday, 3 July 2023, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F), as heatwaves sizzled around the world.

The southern US has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks amid extreme weather, probably driven by the human-caused climate crisis, experts said. In parts of China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F), with, in the Middle East, thousands suffering from unusually scorching heat during the hajj religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures, as glacier melt accelerates and the sun intensifies.

Climate-heating El Niño has arrived and threatens lives, declares UN

The arrival of a climate-heating El Niño event has been declared by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with officials warning that preparation for extreme weather events is vital to save lives and livelihoods.

The last major El Niño was in 2016, which remains the hottest year on record. The new El Niño comes on top of the increasing global heating driven by human-caused carbon emissions, an effect the WMO called a “double whammy”. This can supercharge extreme weather, and temperature records are already being broken on land and at sea across the globe.

The WMO said there was now a 90% probability of the El Niño event continuing to the end of 2023 at a moderate strength or higher. The chance of a strong and even hotter El Niño at the year’s end was put at 56% by US authorities in an estimate in early June.

Natural variations in winds and ocean temperatures in the Pacific drive the irregular switches between El Niño and its cooler opposite La Niña. It is the planet’s biggest natural climate phenomenon and affects billions of people.

El Niño usually brings more flooding in the south of the US, the south of South America, the Horn of Africa and central Asia, while severe heatwaves and droughts often strike eastern Australia, Indonesia, south Asia and Central America.

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Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.

Ask Who Benefits: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Ukraine Timeline Tells the Story

Punishing Sanctions

Of course Macron won’t tackle police violence – he knows his power depends on it

France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

Israel Cannot Rebut Apartheid

Leaked documents reveal Reuters helped overthrow Egyptian democracy

Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

‘We depend on our beautiful reefs’: Fukushima water release plan sparks concern across Pacific

Watch: CNN, MSNBC FREAK OUT Over Biden Admin’s LOSS of Social Media Censorship Powers

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A Little Night Music

Hip Linkchain ~ You Left Me With A Broken Heart

Hip Linkchain - I Had A Dream

Hip Linkchain - Confusion Blues

Jimmy Dawkins & Hip Linkchain - Little Red Rooster

Hip Linkchain ~ Change My Blues

Hip Linkchain ~ Call Muddy Waters

Hip Linkchain ~ Housecat Blues

Hip Linkchain - Millionaire`s Blues

Hip Linkchain - Hideaway

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